thanks for joining me today, post-getting good at Ring Racers montage. i don't have a video of it but just know i did it, and as a result i am now good at Ring Racers. i've studied all the advanced techniques and can handle any situation this game throws my way. for example, can't get through a shortcut gate that requires you to be boosting? just sit on the floor and wait for someone else to ram into you at 200mph. alternatively, simply blow yourself up over it

i completed the first page of cups and unlocked Vicious difficulty, and i think i'm gonna have to study the Advanceder Techniques section of the manual for this. lots of sections of these courses that don't have shortcut gates and when that happens i have no idea what to do. but now it's more like the speed of the SRB2K i remember, and even if i'm doing poorly I'm at least hooting and hollering most of the time as my kart goes insane

at some point i noticed how many spaces for unlockable characters there were on the selection screen, and contrasted that with how many characters i wasn't unlocking. they have the Mystic Melody from Sonic Adventure 2 up in here turns out, and it's even more esoteric and with way more content locked behind it. first off just unlocking the ability requires finding a well-hidden secret in a single one of the 200+ stages, and then there's seeking out the equally-hidden mini-ruins and having to awkwardly position my camera backwards to get it to trigger

this stage and song are based on the game WakuWaku Sonic Funny Festival!! ~Lovely Hog~ i believe

unlocked my new main. i have to make a confession – i used a "chao key" which are like the hammers in Smash that fake-complete any challenge, except i can earn them infinitely (i didn't use it on this one; i would never lie to Whisper). thankfully it marks it as fake-complete so i can real-complete it later on. though i have to make another confession – i will probably be using more "chao keys", because each course has a collectible that unlocks a new character color, and out of the 100+ i've played on so far i've gotten maybe 6

i also need to apologize. zephieheads know my disdain for easy fanservice, cheap meta humor, pop culture references etc. so it pains me to admit that when i see a stage taken straight from another game, it gets a bigger reaction out of me than something wholly original. bonus points if it attempts to recreate the original stage's layout 1:1 making it an even lazier endeavor. i know you poured your heart and soul into building a unique aesthetic and mechanics for your level but this guy recreated the part in Speed Highway where you run down the skyscraper so

really thought funny kart racers would across the board be a safe genre to play while high but i guess i'm going to hell

unlocked my actual new main. having a much better time than the other game i played where i have to shoot these guys. the characters all have pretty substantially different speed/weight levels but i've never taken the time to figure out what i like best. i'd play online on SRB2K and between each race everyone would be messing with their settings and discussing the optimal driftage etc. and i would sit there quietly thinking I like tails :) if he's small then i'm small

i have been making an effort to unlock more stuff now, at least the stuff that comes from cool little secrets and not "race really well a lot". there's a whole Hidden Palace course unlockable by falling down a specific small pit on the third lap of Mystic Cave. it's interesting that this is a game made in a time where there are no real secrets due to the internet, and so a lot of very substantial pieces of content are hidden behind things i would never ever find forever it not for a list of secrets wiki page. a few challenges even just say "input a password, find it somewhere or whatever"

terrified to learn S-rank is a thing as i have not at all been getting them. but then again i always have to sacrifice my entire rank to get the emerald at the end because there's a huge penalty for using up lives and the special stages use the same life pool. it sucks i hate it!! because i suck and am hate at it. there's one more bonus cup left to unlock by getting the emerald on the last cup and i can't do it man, even after i realized i could practice it endlessly in time attack it's not happening

so now i've played almost everything the base game has to offer and boy are my wheels tired! i took a look at the custom course scene for the first time and as it turns out here's a game i'll probably be playing forever. i would need to play each cup a couple more times to have a good idea of how much course quality varies, but i can remember at least a couple where i thought i was having an actively unfun time. mostly when they'd try to recreate some gameplay mechanic from a Sonic game that didn't translate well, nor was even fun in the Sonic game to begin with

can you believe it.. the day has finally come. the day that the ultimate kart racing video game, Dr. Robotnik's Ring Racers, continues being available to download for free on your computer. the computer you already have, even. welcome to the this level

today i went and knocked out all 100 collectible spray cans so now i can be whatever birdcolor i choose. they weren't that difficult to get after all, i just never found it worth trying because i was too busy racing and not wanting to lose due to a failed attempt to drive into a spray can. i underestimated the power of going into a race alone, enabling only the items that aid me in traversal, and just chilling out exploring courses for a couple hours. ran into a guy

that got me enough challenge completion progress that i started to want to get 100% without using chao keys, until i saw how many time trial medals i would also need. what this screen doesn't show is the super secret platinum medals for beating the crazyfast staff ghosts, which i don't know if count towards the total. if they don't then i might chip away at it whenever i'm bored, and if they do count that's dr. robotnik's ring racers everybody!

my level of confidence in my skill is "still hasn't played online". i tried to today but there were a cool zero people playing for some whatever i don't know reason. there's also another few gamemodes i haven't unlocked yet because of how much sass these emerald stages have been giving me: another difficulty level, mirror mode, and most stressful thing i've experienced in life mode where this game's version of the blue shell that's outrunnable if i'm good enough is forever chasing me

game's so much fun. usually when i'm playing i am thinking about mostly this. i just felt there weren't enough gush paragraphs here is all, this game is very good and i will continue playing it for the foreseeable future. i want everyone to play it, and specifically i want them to play it with me. official zephie dot net ring racers server?? there were a hundred completely empty public servers when i checked today what's one more