Pokemon Already Made A Kart Racer, But It Was Awful
Pokemon has loads of spin-off games. We collectively forgot about most of the Wii ones. To those who didn’t desperately want to forget My Pokemon Ranch, sorry if I just reminded you of those horrific 3D sprites. Some spin-offs are great, don’t get me wrong. New Pokemon Snap is better than most recent main series Pokemon games. I’d kill for an official emulation of the Pokemon TCG Game Boy game. But some people are never happy.
“They should make a Pokemon version of Mario Kart,” is one of the requests/yells/cries for help (delete as appropriate) that I hear most often. And I get it. A little Bulbasaur zooming round a Cinnabar Island-themed map? Yes please. Gengar in a spooky car zooming through barriers and levitating across shortcuts? Sign me up. Eevee evolving into Jolteon halfway around a track to get a speed boost and zapping nearby racers with a bolt of electrifying energy? The possibilities are endless - and all of them are great. The problem is, Nintendo already tried this, and it was kind of bad.
Related: A Brief History Of Eating Pokemon
‘Kind of bad,’ is me being generous, folks. Pokemon Team Turbo released on PC in 2005, but it looks like it’s 10 years older than that and feels worse than 1992’s Super Mario Kart. It doesn’t help that the top-down racer only has six excruciatingly simple courses that aren’t Pokemon themed in any way. You don’t even drive cars, every Pokemon sprite just sits in a different-coloured Poke Ball as they go around the three or four corners of a track. There are a couple of speed boosts to collect, but other than that, Pokemon Team Turbo is one of the worst racing games ever made.
“But it was released in 2005,” I hear you shout. “Cut it some slack!” Shadow of the Colossus released in
Read more on thegamer.com
