Breaker of Reigns

When it comes to lists of games that break friendships / marriages, I'm pretty sure Mario Kart is going to be somewhere near the top. It sounds like a fairly simple premise - famous characters from the Mario franchise (now extended to other Nintendo games, as it features characters from Splatoon, Animal Crossing and The Legend of Zelda) racing each other in various vehicles.

Then you add the items - the greatest source of fun and frustration in the game. Mario Kart has an interesting mechanic where the items you get depend on where you are in the race. In the older games, this was based on which position you were in the race (i.e. 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.), but in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, this was changed to be based on how far away you are from the player in first. Taken from Super Mario Wiki:

MrFodder gets mad, because I seem to get really lucky with my items when I'm in second place, and when we played today, I managed to knock him with a red shell so that he fell off the stage, and when Lakitu picked him up, he was placed further behind than when he fell and dropped to 6th place. Ahahahahahaha. I'm of the opinion that if you wanted to play a pure racing game, you'd play something like Forza. My gloating was short-lived, as he beat me in the next few races.

I do agree that the randomness of items makes the game seem unfair at times. While it does help newer players feel like they still have a chance to win, losing a race because you were unlucky feels pretty crummy. I haven't played many "crazy hi-jinks racing games", but I think my favourite will always be Diddy Kong Racing, and I really like the way the game approached items. There were five different coloured balloons: red, blue, green, yellow and rainbow. Driving through a balloon would always give you the same item depending on the colour of the balloon, and driving through the same coloured balloon multiple times in a row would upgrade the item (assuming you hadn't already used it).

For instance, driving through a red balloon would give you a missile. If you held onto the missile and grabbed another red balloon, you'd upgrade the missile into a homing missile. Getting another red balloon would upgrade it to 10 missiles. The balloons would always appear in the same place on each course, so you could be strategic about picking up upgrades, and using your items.

Unfortunately, this does mean that experienced players have a huge advantage over new players, so it makes the game fairly newcomer unfriendly. That's probably why the Diddy Kong Racing series never continued. Well, that and the fact that Rare moved to Microsoft. :(

I think the best fun in Mario Kart comes from playing with lots of people. The excitement of hitting an AI player with a green shell isn't nearly as fun as hearing the person next to you  yell, "Where did that come from?" And the feeling of evil glee when you get a blue shell while knowing who is in first place is something you have to experience to understand.

Some people from work, who also have Nintendo Switches, suggested playing Mario Kart together during a lunch break, and I was super keen for the idea, but after playing a bit I'm starting to have second thoughts. It's all well and good for me to trash talk with MrFodder, but when it's my co-workers (even the ones that I get along really well with), I don't know if it would go down so well. Even worse when one of the people is my boss.

I don't know if it just started with the Shadow Fiend training, but I have a feeling I have a reputation for being incredibly competitive, and willing to do anything to win. Personally, I think it's not true, as I usually only care about whether or not I played my best, and not whether or not I won. Even my co-workers are starting to imply that I'm super competitive. I think the only thing some of them have seen me play is Dota 2, and I lost most of the games.

I wonder if it's the whole 4000-hours thing again. Maybe they see this as some kind of crazy tenacity, when in reality, it's just a sign that I have been playing for a long time (4000 hours over 5 years is 800 hours per year, which is 2.2 hours per day. Not that much, especially considering some of that is idle time). Actually, that's probably more time than I ever spent practising any other skill. Oh, not true. I had about a year of playtime logged in World of Warcraft, which is roughly 8760 hours. I'm glad nobody ever brings that up in the office...

If it weren't for the competitive aspect of the reputation, I wouldn't mind so much. I'm trying to work on being a lot more confident, and proud of my skills. Modesty has its place, but I don't think it's wrong to say that I'm good at something if I worked hard to get there. As long as I don't cross the line into becoming arrogant. I read a great line on reddit:

Confidence is knowing that you are right. Arrogance is thinking you are never wrong.

When I play mid in Dota 2, I think I do toe the line a bit, and I always feel terrible about it afterwards, but aside from that, I feel happier about being more confident in myself. (And this post took a huge tangent, oops! On a happier note: MrFodder and I survived the Mario Kart test. Mario Kart, Settlers of Catan, or really any game where you can screw other people over to win should be used as a relationship canary.)