That Bomb-omb Challenge is awesome, but it seems that the way you submit an entry is via Twitter. I don't have a Twitter account, and I'm certainly not gonna sign up just for this.
A friend of mine is home for a couple of weeks on vacation from the Army. For the past year he was stationed in Kuwait. Naturally, he's been missing out on everything console gaming. So when he showed up at my house for a surprise visit, I was telling him about the Wii U and that Mario Kart 8 just came out. Last night he came over and we played MK8 for hours.
This was the first time I really got to play local multiplayer with MK8. I tried it out briefly once before, and was not at all happy with the vertically split screen with no option for horizontal split. I think I only played one cup and then shut it off. But last night, we played through every cup. I put it on 100cc for him to warm up, then switched to 150cc after he started to get 1rst a few times.
He was agreeing that the vertically split screen is annoying. Here's the thing: It's annoying for me, yes. But at least I've played all the tracks a number of times and I now know most of the turns from memory. For him, he was playing the tracks for the first time. The limit view due to the vertically split screen meant that he couldn't see turns coming up, and didn't know how long a turn would last (when to come out of a power slide and whatnot). For the both of us, it also means that if you're in a turn you can't see an obstacle, like a banana peel, coming up around a turn. It's so very annoying. WHY did they have to do this?
I didn't let that ruin my good time, though. We still had a BLAST playing. Lots of laughs, mostly when one of us screwed over the other.
About halfway through our session, I got the idea to turn a third controller on so that the screen would split four ways thus giving us a wider view. Even though the portion of screen would be smaller, it would still be wider. The third controller would be unmanned, but I figured after 11 racers finish that the unmanned player would auto finish. Well, that's not the case. The race just doesn't finish. So this idea doesn't work. Also, I kinda remember reading this before, when the screen is split four ways the framerate goes down. It's actually pretty choppy. I was able to get use to it, but it's pretty bad. At least the wider view made it more playable. But yeah, the whole thing just sucks. They really dropped the ball here. It's my one and only major complaint with the game.
We finished all 8 cups and then went on to mirror mode, where I still have 2 or 3 trophies I need to win. But unfortunately, it got late fast and we had to call it a night. I'm hoping I can get him over one more time for a solid MK8 session before he has to go back.
The other thing that was awesome was getting double coins. My coin count is over 1000 so it takes 100 coins to unlock things now. And since you can only get a MAX of 40 per cup, it's been taking a while. With two players, we were able to get things unlocked left and right. I could only imagine how fast it would go with 3 or 4 players!
We briefly tried Battle Mode. We both said, "Uh... What the fuck is this?" Then shut it off. Are there no battle ARENAS? You battle on fucking TRACKS? Is that really the way the game is? What the hell is up with that?
