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Comment by bil7 | Hacker News Reader

While I agree that their monetisation strategies are garbage, I think the Tour maps ported to Switch are quite good and novel. I prefer them to the rehashed SNES maps.

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I find them really badly telegraphed on where you need to turn. They have these transparent walls with arrows that are kind of non-obvious, and sometimes you have to turn at the wall itself, and sometimes the wall is further back from where the road ends and you need to actually turn. I've never had this issue with any other tracks in the game except for the Tour ones, but I'll constantly be driving along and just run into a wall because I didn't know I was supposed to turn.

It's even worse if you're playing split-screen multiplayer with 3 or 4 people and your screen is 1/4 of the TV that's on the other side of the room. It's probably not an issue in Tour where you've got a high-res screen right up close to your face, but it doesn't work on a home console.

Agreed. The tour tracks are awful on 200cc. Even when you're not confused about what direction you're supposed to be going, it's constant smashing into walls. You can feel how the tracks were not designed around how the karts are tuned in Mario Kart 8.

Moreover, the scale is all out of wack. The tour tracks make you feel like you've shrunk.

The contrast with the new levels included in the packs is very strong.

The looks don’t fit in with the rest of the game, at least the SNES tracks actually look really good because they completely remodelled them and kept just the layout of the original

Yeah remaking a SNES track would actually be more work than grabbing a map from Tour and doing a few tweaks to make it work in MK8. The SNES maps are actually interesting courses, like Donut Plains has an underwater bit, and the SNES Rainbow Road has thwomps that send shockwaves through the road. They're essentially brand new original courses aside from concept and general layout.

>I prefer them to the rehashed SNES maps.

Anything more reliable than Nintendo resorting to laziness and calling upon nostalgia?

The rehashed SNES maps are entirely new, they just have the same overhead layout as the SNES tracks. Saying they rely on nostalgia—yeah, that's true. Saying that it's laziness? No, it's no simpler than making a new track from scratch. Probably harder, given they have to make it work with the existing layout, despite the pace and physics being so different.

>No, it's no simpler than making a new track from scratch.

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