Mario Kart 8 Deluxe

[BowserBasher]

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• Fixed an issue where a Mii’s head would get extremely large or small when playing the highlight reel.

Wait! I want that put back in. I want big head mode in Mario Kart now. 

[BowserBasher]

Right Here We Go.

This past week in the Mario Kart NE Online GetTogether thread, @Glen-i decided on the following theme, longest tracks, nice, sounds good, however this was his reasoning for the picks,

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The tracks here are the 12 longest tracks in MK8 Deluxe. How did I deterimine that? I looked at all 96 Staff Ghost times, and ordered them myself.
You're welcome.

In case anyone is interested...

   Longest Staff Ghost Times (Hide contents)

Wii Rainbow Road - 2:49:574
Wii Maple Treeway - 2:36:581
DS Waluigi Pinball - 2:36:450
GCN DK Mountain - 2:35:917
Toad Harbour - 2:29:282
GCN Dry Dry Desert - 2:26:614
Rainbow Road - 2:25:267
3DS Alpine Pass - 2:24:730
N64 Yoshi Valley - 2:23:688
Wii DK's Snowboard Cross - 2:22:680
Wii Wario's Gold Mine - 2:22:119
Bowser's Castle - 2:21:980

See you next week.

OK, should be fun, then I thought, hold on, that's no way to pick the tracks, as I said in the thread there was no scientific basis for those times. My reasoning was as such. These times are based off of the staff getting the quickest times possible and just picking the slowest. Now that all sounds good but then I thought, that's just not going to represent the longest tracks due to a number of factors. 

• Shortcuts - Surely if you are doing those times as staff ghosts you are going to be using shortcuts, so then that's going to make any track that a shortcut has been used on shorter, thus you are not getting a representative time of the full track.
• Mushrooms - Each lap you have three mushrooms to use to boost your vehicle, mainly on shortcuts, but sometimes just to go faster. Again using these will negate any representative times.
• Mini Turbos - Some tracks are more twisty than others, have longer corners and are just better for the mini turbo, especially getting the top one. As such, again these make you quicker and if a track has more opportunities for these, then you are going to get faster times depending on the track.
• Character/Kart Selection - So each staff ghost uses the character that's best suited for that track, and the kart is usually suited to the character or track (I've never really looked at that), either way, every character and kart piece affects the speed and handling of the kart. As such, again each time if going to be different one kart may be faster than another or better turning. Bike are very different to karts and can have different times too.
• Different Routes - We all know that some tracks have multiple routes, that are not shortcuts, where you can either take a shorter route but miss out on boost pads or coins, or take the longer route for those. So are they both the same distance? Obviously not, so again, different routes mean different times.
• Boost Pads - Many tracks have boost pads, you go faster, less time to complete course. If a track has many boost pads and another has no boost pads, then you are more likely to be slower on one than the other.

With all that in mind, I suggested that he do the following; time trial every track with the same character and kart, no boost pads, no shortcuts, no mushroom, take the longest or at least the middle of the track as much as possible to keep things uniform and give a better indication of distance travelled. He said NO, so I thought I'd go look on the internet to see if there was an answer to this, I mean the internet knows all right? Well all I could find was fastest ghost reversed (like the staff ghosts) and people just saying how Long Rainbow Road was on the N64. No help at all and no really answers. So I just said fine I'll do it myself.

 

Right, so faced with this daunting task I had to decide on the best way to do it to get as fair a time as possible. I set the following rules based on the previous factors.

• Shortcuts - None at all, nope, not allowed.
• Mushrooms - Nope, not allowed.
• Mini Turbos - Nope, again just turn normally. It soon became apparent on some tracks that this would have to be slightly revised. To mini boost, you hop into a turn, well it seems that just turning normally for more than a few seconds will start that mini boost. So I have to either accept the boost and let off the accelerator for a brief moment after it, or try to stop turning and start turning again.
• Character/Kart - Easily done. Mario in the Pipe Frame with standard wheels and glider.
• Different Routes - This was the hardest to keep uniform, so best way was to drive on the centre line of the track as much as possible. In the event of multiple routes, I had to see which was the slowest/longest and take that one. I wasn't hard to sort them as playing for so long we all just take the shortest route now. there were only a few tracks I had to test for routes.
• Boost Pads - Where at all possible just avoid them. It does mean that some tracks have boosts that can't be avoided, these are mainly just before a jump, so I could't do anything about that. On ones I could, I just drove around them.

 

So I set of with the task of being a Sunday driver on 96 courses of Mario Kart. Shouldn't be too bad, won't take me that long. Over two hours later and I had only just done most of the base tracks. So that was being done over a couple sessions. Generally there were no issues with tracks and the restrictions put on myself. The main one was mini boosts so I had to get through those tracks as best as I could without making the kart skid. Boost pads were easily avoided and hitting full course ones wasn't as bad as I had thought. 

A couple of moments that really stood out. It's hard to get out of the hopping into a skid habit. Mushroom Gorge, the second corner (or technically third) is never taken cause we all just use the bouncy mushrooms. However the longer route has a boost pad right before the corner. I tried to break as soon as I was over the pad, but you can't break whilst you are boosting from one. So on that occasion I felt the best way to do it was to hop into a skid just before the pad, then break for a moment as soon as the boost has run out. Gliding sections, I don't know if it's faster or not, but I decided to just land as quickly as I could and carry on on wheels. Oh, those little things that spin you and give you a boost on anti-gravity sections, avoid. I had decided that I was doing boost starts, as I am consistent with them, and if I went too early I could just restart. I don't think they had any effect on times. Oh and no tricking off of jumps, they give you a small boost after all.

So after a couple of long driving sessions, I started putting them all into a spreadsheet so I could just mess around with it changing the order. Just for fun, I tried setting a colour to the cup  cell as I wanted to see if certain cups would still group together. With them all in I sorted by time, descending order and out came this; (spoiler tags for the many images)

Spoiler

Surprisingly, the top four tracks that Glen had originally put at the top were still the longest, just with two swapped around. After that it started to change quite a bit. there were a few surprises in there but older tracks higher up. You'd think that being on older consoles with less space, they would be lower on the list, but I guess the remake of the track was make longer. However there was no surprise in the shortest track, Yes, good old Baby Park, everyone's favourite track, comes last. Even having the most laps it is not enough to make up for the short laps, being 8 seconds slower then the next slowest track. Which itself has always been a tragedy. Rainbow Road on the N64 has always been a marathon of a track. I can't remember what the time used to be but I'm sure it was over 5 minutes. It's now been relegated to being a one lapper and comes in at a measly 1 minute 37 seconds. Which is really short.

So after all that, I told Glen he was wrong and he better change the tracks. I think just for the effort I put in he did. 

I'm sure that if someone ran this test they may come up with some of the tracks that are all within a second of each other to come out in some slightly different order, due to the ms of the timings. I could have ran a few time trials and did averages, but even I know that would be insane. But I think the top 10 longest are fairly safe as there is a good enough of a difference between 10 and 11. Same for the bottom 10.

Anyway this was actually a really fun experiment and unless Nintendo ever released an official list of track lengths, I'm going to take this as the best we have in terms of length of tracks on Mario Kart 8.

@darksnowman, @Dcubed, @S.C.G, @Ike, @lostmario

(just mentioning the regulars for Thursday nights that may have liked to see this.

 

[darksnowman]

Thanks for providing this write-up.  Looks like you made sure to do it as accurately as possible based on what you say about boosting, gliding, Mushroom Gorge. Waluigi Pinball sure feels like a long track and I agree it's a pity Rainbow Road 64 has been reduced to a one-lapper—also liked it better when it was more of an endurance race.

Now, mind doing it again and cross-referencing these results against your total distance driven (in your profile) after each race?  

[BowserBasher]

5 hours ago, darksnowman said:

Now, mind doing it again and cross-referencing these results against your total distance driven (in your profile) after each race?

Ooh I didn’t think of that. If I’m ever bored I’ll see if that gives a good idea of distance.