Curmudgeon Gamer
03 May 2007
Virtual Console Adventures: The MK64 Bug
One of the things my local circle of gaming friends and I love is Mario Kart 64.
For my money SNES Mario Kart is a little better, but it's limited to two players. For multiplayer Mario Kart action, nothing matches the N64 version. Its battle mode provides a level of strategy unseen in what has become, in later installments of the series, a throwaway mode. Its race mode is also fairly awesome, despite some worrying design choices. It is a game that has kept us occupied for over a decade.
Last night, we were playing a few Mario Kart rounds on the Wii's Virtual Console, and we encountered a surprising flaw in the emulation. In one race on Moo Moo Farm, the game played at an obviously much higher speed than normal. I'm not talking about it just seeming faster through the Wii's increased framerate, it actually was a much faster race. The starting lights, instead of the measured "one... two... three", went by in less than a second, and during the race our velocities were likewise increased.
It was entertaining to play, once, but it wasn't accurate. We were lucky we were on Moo Moo Farm, a fairly laid-back course, and not, for example, Bowser's track. If we had been in a Grand Prix, a "real" game instead of a quick race, the playthrough would likely have been ruined.
Interestingly, the music and sound effects were not accelerated. One of us used a Star powerup during the game, and the invincibility music only had enough time to loop twice before the effect ran out. The next race, speeds returned to normal, and remained there until we stopped for the night.
We're not sure what circumstances triggered the speed-up. The story is that some people who have purchased Mario Kart 64 were later offered a mysterious update for it in the Wii Shop Channel. Nintendo is notoriously tight-lipped about what goes into these updates, and I hear that sometimes, like with Star Fox 64, they actually seem more like downgrades, rolling back some of Virtual Console's already-meager framerate improvements. If SF64 runs off the same emulator it is not unreasonable to assume that it will also suffer from speed spikes once in a while.
I'll probably check online for an update to see if it addresses the problem, but will it? It occurs so infrequently that we'll really never know if the flaw has been fixed or not unless it happens again. Nintendo has taken pains to keep the mechanics of Virtual Console hidden from the player, ostensibly for usability's sake, but there is a limit to what can be explained away in the name of simplicity, and it seems in this case that Nintendo is more trying to hide the details of Virtual Console's flaws by not talking about them.
But that is really a crappy way to treat one's customers. We deserve to know what the benefits and drawbacks to updating are before pressing the fatal button. C'mon Nintendo, give us some credit here.
For my money SNES Mario Kart is a little better, but it's limited to two players. For multiplayer Mario Kart action, nothing matches the N64 version. Its battle mode provides a level of strategy unseen in what has become, in later installments of the series, a throwaway mode. Its race mode is also fairly awesome, despite some worrying design choices. It is a game that has kept us occupied for over a decade.
Last night, we were playing a few Mario Kart rounds on the Wii's Virtual Console, and we encountered a surprising flaw in the emulation. In one race on Moo Moo Farm, the game played at an obviously much higher speed than normal. I'm not talking about it just seeming faster through the Wii's increased framerate, it actually was a much faster race. The starting lights, instead of the measured "one... two... three", went by in less than a second, and during the race our velocities were likewise increased.
It was entertaining to play, once, but it wasn't accurate. We were lucky we were on Moo Moo Farm, a fairly laid-back course, and not, for example, Bowser's track. If we had been in a Grand Prix, a "real" game instead of a quick race, the playthrough would likely have been ruined.
Interestingly, the music and sound effects were not accelerated. One of us used a Star powerup during the game, and the invincibility music only had enough time to loop twice before the effect ran out. The next race, speeds returned to normal, and remained there until we stopped for the night.
We're not sure what circumstances triggered the speed-up. The story is that some people who have purchased Mario Kart 64 were later offered a mysterious update for it in the Wii Shop Channel. Nintendo is notoriously tight-lipped about what goes into these updates, and I hear that sometimes, like with Star Fox 64, they actually seem more like downgrades, rolling back some of Virtual Console's already-meager framerate improvements. If SF64 runs off the same emulator it is not unreasonable to assume that it will also suffer from speed spikes once in a while.
I'll probably check online for an update to see if it addresses the problem, but will it? It occurs so infrequently that we'll really never know if the flaw has been fixed or not unless it happens again. Nintendo has taken pains to keep the mechanics of Virtual Console hidden from the player, ostensibly for usability's sake, but there is a limit to what can be explained away in the name of simplicity, and it seems in this case that Nintendo is more trying to hide the details of Virtual Console's flaws by not talking about them.
But that is really a crappy way to treat one's customers. We deserve to know what the benefits and drawbacks to updating are before pressing the fatal button. C'mon Nintendo, give us some credit here.
Labels: bugs, classic, emulation, mariokart, mariokart64, nintendo, pr, virtualconsole, wii
--JohnH at 10:57
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