YMMV / Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart

Both iterations

• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • If most of the game's custom characters being gravitated towards such stat spread is any indication, most players prefer racers that lean into either being balanced or being fast and/or lightweight, picking characters with Speed in-between 5 and 9 and Weight in-between 1 and 6. It helps that these racers are prime examples of Skill Gate Characters from being able to move at good speeds unlike Tails and the Chao trio without sacrificing too much in their ability to steer well without needing to drift, especially Blaze, Sonic, and Flicky.
  • With his high speed and decent drift spark rate, Metal Sonic is by far the most popular character to use in Record Attack. Many of the popular track choices for Record Attack will have a Metal Sonic run as the world record, or at least within the top 3. Omega is also a popular choice, unless his weakened handling is too detrimental to be of use.
  • Thanks to Memetic Mutation brought on by the popularity of SRB2Kart compilations, you can expect almost any fully stocked room to be populated by at least a handful of Amys and Creams, with a lot of them parroting Amy's now-infamous "I pity you". It helps that both characters are lightweight, making them easy to control for newcomers (Amy is as light as Sonic and Tails while Cream is as light as Flicky, to give you an idea), and that they are well-balanced regarding acceleration and top speed (even if Cream slightly tends towards the former).
• Genius Programming: Both iterations are standalone mods for a 3D platformer, which in turn is a standalone mod for a first-person-shooter which maps were programmed on a 2D map before being rendered into 3D. That says a lot about how flexible the Doom engine truly is, despite being three decades old.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • Eggman, Chaos, and Gamma tend to get the short end of the stick due to their gameplay style, which relies around bullying lighter racers and abusing their fast drift spark rates to get huge speeds on turns (unlike Metal Sonic, Vector, and Omega who are also heavy but naturally fast as well). This makes them harder to master compared to the likes of Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles and gives them a disadvantage on tracks with lots of straightaways and not a lot of turns.
  • Eventually, Flicky would turn into this in the community by being near impossible to use in crowded servers without a sheer amount of luck thanks to the over-exaggerated Glass Cannon playstyle reliant on never taking hits and avoiding contact with other drivers. Compared to other fast lightweights in Sonic and Blaze that have some extra acceleration and weight to give them a slight saving grace, Flicky has a trickier time bulldozing through packs of racers and recovering from taking hits.
• More Popular Spin-Off: While Sonic Robo Blast 2 itself is not obscure by any means, this game manages to stand on its own feet with a thriving community. In fact, according to the developers, interest surrounding the game caused the SRB2 forums to break its "Most Users" record twice over.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • At its core, SRB2Kart is primarily a successor to the first three Mario Kart installments: Super Mario Kart, Mario Kart 64, and Mario Kart: Super Circuit, though it takes a number of cues from later installments as well.
  • SRB2Kart's encouragement of the creation and use of custom characters and tracks can also bring to mind ModNation Racers, another kart racer that allows (well, allowed) designing and sharing characters and tracks.
• Surprise Difficulty: Record Attack in SRB2 Kart might seem simple, but some of the silver medals can be pretty tough to earn. And then you usually have to shave about another 20 seconds for the gold medal. And then there's the Time Trials in Ring Racers, which adds in Platinum Medals on par with the fastest of the staff.

Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart

• Abridged Arena Array:
  • Whenever Daytona Speedway appears on the voting window, you can bet that most if not all of the server's players will choose it, regardless of what the other map options are. Its simplistic layout and opportunities for shortcuts, combined with the iconic background music of "Let's Go Away", have made it a smash hit within the community.
  • Hill Top Zone and Blue Mountain Zone are also definite favourites in the community, with Megablock Castle Zone, Petroleum Refinery Zone, Midnight Channel and Ancient Tomb Zone trailing not too far behind. The Challenge Gamer part of the community also greatly prefer Toxic Palace Zone, Volcanic Valley Zone, and Eggman's Nightclub Zone (the latter not only having bangin' music, but also being this game's answer to Rainbow Road.)
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart is no stranger to this trope. A few standout examples include:
  • Whoever comes in last in a race or doesn't cross the finish line in time after the top half finishes will explode, F-Zero style. You're unlikely to expect it the first time playing this game blind.
  • The random, screaming Toads that you can run over in Arid Sands. They never respawn.
  • The "battal BOWL", a battle arena heavily based on Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff.
• Breather Level:
  • 3 Color Drive is a smooth, nearly-flat track with no hazards to worry about, making for a less chaotic race than usual. But here's the catch: This level is found in the notoriously difficult Map Hell cup, which features plenty of tracks that have hazards and tricky turns.^note According to Word of God, the reason 3 Color Drive is in the Map Hell cup is because the stage is actually unfinished.
  • Amusingly enough, Red Barrage Area, the penultimate track of the sixth cup, is this in Record Attack. Since the gold medal time is less than three seconds faster than the silver medal time, racing well enough to gain the silver medal will more than likely net you both medals in one fell swoop.
  • Compared to the rest of the tracks in the Nintendo Hard Egg Cup, Virtual Highway is fairly straightforward, with much less hazards and tricky turns to worry about.
• Broken Base: The "SPB Tag" mechanic added into 1.0.2, which forces a Self-Propelled Bomb to whoever is in second place if the first-place racer even has the slightest lead gap ahead of the rest of the pack. Most players enjoy the feature as it serves as a useful Comeback Mechanic, while others think the mechanic is unnecessary or activates too early, necessitating Do Well, But Not Perfect so the first place racer stays within sight of the racer(s) right behind them.
• Creator's Pet: SMK Vanilla Lake 2 is a level example - the Kart Krew absolutely loves the level despite its scrappy status in the community for featuring slippery terrain, ice blocks, and a large amount of offroad. For Ring Racers, there are plans to make a Sonic-based successor to it, alongside the rest of the base game's Super Mario Kart tracks.
• Fan Nickname: "Meme Rectangle" for KKR Ganbare Dochu 2, see The Scrappy below for details. Special mention goes to its "Meme Bridge" as well, infamous for being a huge chokepoint at the start of races, and very easy to trap as well. This nickname is so widely known by the community that the unofficial Time Attack leaderboards for the game refer to this map as such as well.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • This game was in development long before the announcement of an official Sonic-Universe racing game.
  • Additionally, the game was released at least a good full week before Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled was announced at the Video Game Awards 2018.
• Misaimed Fandom: Map Hell eventually became this through custom level packs.
  • The category was intended as a way to get Brutal Bonus Levels like Crystal Abyss Zone, "Classic" versions of levels, and unfinished levels sparingly in multiplayer, that otherwise would or could not be in the game because of difficulty or their outdated or incomplete status, plus to provide a bit of a history lesson of Kart's more humble origins as SRB2 Riders and KartZ. However, various modders eventually repurposed the category as a way to justify really out there track designs and gimmicks, specially "donut" levels^note incredibly short tracks with more than 10 laps where racers often drift about 90% of the time, similar to Baby Park and tracks that would belong better if they were designed for Battle mode. If such track packs are being hosted, expect at least one player online inside a server to deliberately try to get entire servers to vote random to force one, sometimes failing (which ends up in them berating non-Random-voting players for preferring to play well-balanced levels), sometimes winning (which sometimes ends up with the server playing a "Classic" track or aforementioned Brutal Bonus Levels instead of the "meme" tracks provided by custom track packs), to the complaints of people in such a server who simply wish to play a kart racer. Expect insults being hurl, votekicking (if the server supports it), and collective groaning from either side whenever this happens in a public server, specially more casually-oriented ones.
  • The developers seem to agree, which is why Version 1.4 of the game removed forcing such levels through having everyone in the server vote Random, while keeping the ~1% chance to get a Hell Map on a successful Random vote, as well as eliminating the category entirely for Ring Racers.
• Nausea Fuel: Kodachrome Void's walls and floors are made up of pulsating black and white patterns, making for an extremely disorienting experience. It ended up being toned down in 1.0.2 to a grey and black gradient, and was retooled a second time to remove the pulsating gradients all-together.
• The Scrappy: Most tracks ported from other Mascot Racer games tend to get a poor reputation for a number of reasons:
  • The majority of the ports, thanks to being easy to re-create and/or originating from Super SRB2 Kart Z (SRB2 Kart's predecessor built from an earlier version of Robo Blast 2, which had no support for slopped terrain), come from consoles that weren't able to provide much variety in layout and stuck to a single flat elevation. While some ports take creative liberties to alleviate this somewhat (with MKSC Sky Garden slanting one part of the track upward and SD2 Balloon Panic being a full-3D remake not restricted to the Pole Position-like gameplay style of the Drift series), the tracks otherwise feel bland when placed next to the more varied layouts of the original tracks. KKR Ganbare Dochu 2 became infamous for this, being a port of a very simple rectangular track containing some narrow roads that get cluttered quickly in multiplayer, earning it the title "Meme Rectangle 2" by the community).
  • Other ports are cramped or filled with obstacles that are hard to avoid. SMK Ghost Valley 2 and SMK Bowser Castle 3 are prime examples of this thanks to coming from much slower racing games, with MKDS Peach Gardens not too far behind.
  • Even with their wider roads, SD2 Balloon Panic and SMK Vanilla Lake 2 can easily send a player off-track, slowing them down in the process (Balloon Panic with its bouncy balloons, Vanilla Lake 2 with its icy road and the many ice blocks) and dragging out the race in the process.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • When the game first released, Battle Mode was not as well-liked by the community as Race mode was. Unlike modern Mario Kart titles which have a timer and multiple game modes to increase the variety and accommodate for big twelve-player battle sessions, the only available mode on offer is a simple survival-to-the-end mode, the same one used in earlier Mario Kart games (styled directly after Mario Kart 64 and Mario Kart: Super Circuit), which means no time limit either. While matches in those games contained only two to four players, SRB2Kart's can contain many more players—up to 16. Additionally, the resurrection mechanic (dubbed "Attack or Protect") can drag matches on for much longer as players fight for a chance of returning to the action while the currently active players attempt to defeat each other- which can take up to eight minutes tops on a server with lots of players. This led to Battle Mode getting an extensive retool in Ring Racers to increase the overall speed and pace of the mode and allow it to stand on its own alongside the Race mode.
  • The Race gamemode itself, despite being the main mode, is not immune to these either, to the point that there is a mod (named KartMP) that addresses them and that it's omnipresent in all non-vanilla servers. For example, falling off usually puts you very far away from where you went out of bounds, to the point that it can lose you the game outright or prevent you from catching up for entire laps. Orbinauts don't have a time limit (bouncing on surfaces causes them to lose speed instead), so if they don't hit anyone, they become almost permanent hazards in straights until they are eventually struck by a racer. The invulnerability period after being spun out is very short, barely 3 seconds, so it's possible to get dunked by items into off-road sections of a map constantly without any ability to defend yourself. It's impossible to pass by players who have 2x Jawz orbiting around them, as the orbiting time is infinite, and they'll deploy them on sight if you pass them, meaning you have to use items to either hit them and make them drop their orbiting defenses or destroy them slowly before you can go past them. Losing Drift Sparks when you bonk a wall is also a point of contention because sometimes you might lose them through no fault of your own, because someone bonked into you, and then made you bonk into a wall... The list goes on.
  • The WAD/pk3 download issues^note as in, the game frequently freezes when downloading large files and forces the player to try reconnecting from Sonic Robo Blast 2 are retained in this game, and it's arguably worse here because the game greatly encourages the use of mods (especially since there's currently no single-player mode outside of Record Attack). Several heavily modded servers have worked around this by setting up external download sources and providing links to them via the servers' names.
• Squick: One of the custom colors for racers is called "Vomit" as a result of a developer injoke and the unorthodox combination of pink, yellow, and greenish-blue contained within the color.
• That One Level: Even outside of Map Hell, some of the tracks in this game get a little insane.
  • Toxic Palace. Several ninety-degree turns, spiked balls everywhere, and the gold medal requires you to drive it pretty much perfectly.
  • Misty Maze in Record Attack is the perfect example of a Difficulty Spike. Whereas most gold medal times in the earlier tracks could be acquired just by taking the right shortcuts and not falling off course, this is the first track that relies more on a solid racing line in order to beat the best time. Not the hardest, but sure to give new players some trouble.
  • Being locked from the start, the Egg Cup in general is difficult, but it's most noticeable with Kodachrome Void (narrow corridors, awkward turns, and, in earlier versions, a disorienting aesthetic if you dare play it on Encore Mode) and Eggman's Nightclub (lots of tight turns, easy-to-miss shortcuts, and another gold medal time that offers next to no room for error).
  • CK Cloud Tops 2's gold medal is absolutely brutal. You have to defeat a blue Knuckles ghost that drives the course absolutely perfectly and uses the shortcut following the U-turn after the jump all three times to get the track's gold medal.
  • Crimson Core is extremely unforgiving to inexperienced players, featuring many pitfalls, spike balls in the way, some slippery terrain here and there, and lots of blind and sharp turns. Thankfully, there isn't a Record Attack medal to earn on this level, since there are no staff ghosts to race against.
  • SMK Vanilla Lake 2, already treated as The Scrappy by the community (see that trope's examples to know why), becomes downright infuriating in Record Attack, where the gold medal ghost perfectly squeezes through the barricade of ice blocks near the start (keep in mind that the ground is slippery). If you hit one of the blocks when trying to slip past them, you may as well restart.
• That One Sidequest: As mentioned above, getting all of the gold medals is a tedious affair. At least part of the difficulty comes from the fact that the times for the medals are based off of staff ghosts, although it's very clear that some staff members were better at the game than others. This results in some Schizophrenic Difficulty; whereas some gold medal times can be accomplished just by racing relatively well, others require you to drive a near-flawless racing line, cut almost every corner, and use Sneakers at the right time to even come close to beating the target time.

Dr. Robotnik's Ring Racers

• Arc Fatigue: Ring Racers' Forced Tutorial on release was slammed by many people online for being needlessly long, clocking in at around 40 minutes at least. This wouldn't be as much of an issue if it didn't waste the players' time by recapping basic mechanics already known from other racers including SRB2K as well as talking about niche mechanics that are heavily situational at best, and the fact that you are required to do this to access the main game doesn't help matters. The sheer amount of mechanics the tutorial frontloads also makes it overwhelming for some players to digest. There is a way to skip the tutorial, but it requires doubling back into a tunnel behind you and completing a race with hard CPUs at 4th place or higher, or being able to put in gaster as a password. Thankfully, the very first patch only made the first two levels of the tutorial (Controls and Rings) mandatory, but also made the tutorial challenge race more visible at every step of the tutorial, as well as made the actual challenge much more in line with normal difficulty, and completing it unlocks online play, addons and time attack all in one go, while also making it easier to add in the password to skip the tutorial.
• Broken Base: Ring Racers is proving to be this by itself.
  • As while many appreciate the introduction of new mechanics and items (rings, the Bubble and Flame Shield, tethering, etc.), the new damage system has been a huge point of controversy, namely the introduction of fighting game-styled hitstun and a new "Tumble" damage type that sends your character flying as they bounce across the map. One side considers the new damage system to be hilarious and a fresh change of pace, adding to the chaos and fun of an already wacky game, while others utterly despise the new system, stating that the hitstun is a sudden interruption of the game flow for spectacle that only ends up prolonging damage, and that Tumble may completely ruin a struggling player's chance of winning, while also encouraging losing players to grief instead of making the effort to win.
  • Related to the rebalance of the damage system is the overhaul of the respawning system. Rather than simply popping the character back on the track with a chance to get a Drop Dash, the new respawn system physically carries the player back to the track before spitting them out, with them retaining the damage state they had when they fell if applicable. Aside from being a bit slow and respawn points being unfairly far back or broken in certain cases (both of which have already been addressed by the community in various mods and tweaks), there wasn't that much outcry for an overhaul to respawning and as it is, it has been shown in testing to be almost hilariously broken in a worst case scenario with characters who were tossed into the pit while in Tumble being plopped back down in the perfect spot to be whaled on again or left to helplessly bounce back into a pit due to the physics of Tumble not playing nice with slanted ground. The respawn is also shown to be a bit too generous in some cases where it actually carries the player a bit farther forward into the track rather than setting them back near where they fell in the vein of something like a Bullet Bill. That being said, a lot of people do appreciate that it physically shows you where you're going to be dropped off rather than just picking a spot seemingly at random and being done in a more snappy manner so that players can get back into the race immediately instead of having to sit through lengthy Death Throws and wait to be dropped back onto the track.
  • The overhaul of the start of a race has also come under heavy scrutiny. Rather than having a traditional 3, 2, 1, GO, it instead does something similar to Sonic Riders where all the racers are free to move around, bump each other around and position themselves wherever they want on the starting grid for a few moments before the race begins. People in favor of it like how it amps up the chaos and wackiness and acts as a nice callback to one of Sonic's actual racing titles while those who aren't in favor of it see it as needlessly complicating and dragging out the start of the race and opening the door to even more excessive griefing before the race has even begun.
  • The whole idea of locking a lot of its content behind an achievement system has led to mixed feelings amongst players. Whilst plenty of players enjoy this system, feeling that it increases the playability and longevity of the game in general (which attributes to players being rewarded characters, color palettes and companions for beating certain requirements), others haven't enjoyed how some key content that they came for, such as online play and mod support, are also locked behind this system and require grinding through the Grand Prix cups to unlock. Fortunately, it's possible to unlock the latter two early on via inputting "Wi-Fi Warrior" and "McDonalds" / "mustard gas" respectively into the password system. The first patch also made the unlock system more forgiving as well as made it much easier to unlock online, addons and time attack just by completing the tutorial challenge, which in itself is much easier.
• Fridge Brilliance: The Extra Cup is initially set up to be the game's final Grand Prix cup, though it's shown otherwise once you've cleared it. This ultimately makes more sense upon looking at the courses in said cup; the last track in the Extra Cup is Launch Base Zone, the final level from the first half of Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles, and with the unlocked cups, Death Egg Zone becomes the final track of the Egg Cup, that being the second half of the collection before the next 14 cups are unlocked.
• Nightmare Fuel: The process of erasing data can become this if a player isn't expecting it. To start with, the background loses all color until you leave the screen, and whatever main menu music was playing is replaced with the intense "Last Stand!" theme to hammer in how critical a decision the player's about to make. The info text above even makes it pretty clear, no matter what you're selecting, that whatever you erase cannot be recovered at all.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: Kart is a standard mascot racer game with an item roulette and drifting. Ring Racers is significantly less approachable and even insists to players that they must first learn the rules on a long tutorial and clear a Grand Prix cup to access Online mode. The game is centered around resource management, with rings being constantly collected and spent to move fast enough to drive up slopes. At zero rings, players become slow and vulnerable but can charge up a parrying slash against incoming racers. There are even skills like fast-falling, air tricks and both a Spin Dash and a manual teleporter for use in emergencies.
• Tear Jerker: A fairly subtle moment crops up should the player pick the black spray can in the Tutorial, where a mere mention of the ARK has Robotnik drop any of his usual quips and just give a straight-to-the-point response while his dialogue image looks downbeat. Considering the implications that Ring Racers is an Alternate Timeline where Shadow stayed dead after Sonic Adventure 2, it's implied that the two geniuses are still recovering from the whole ordeal and that it remained a huge impact on them both. It may even have been part of the impetus for Ivo's Heel–Face Turn, considering the utter shock and disappointment of seeing his grandfather driven to madness and hate.
• That One Level:
  • Balloon Park features a sharp turn into a pair of moving walls with a small gap in the middle. It is one of the most annoying and chaotic parts of the game. If you're happy to have escaped it, the other half of the track is an ascent of zigzagging turns with bumpers that send you ways behind, and balloons which make you do figures that can either fasten you... or make you fall from the ascent, forcing you to do it all over again. As it wasn't enough, the track doesn't have 3, but 5 laps.
  • Flame Cup starts on the suspiciously easy Trap Tower before going on three snow and ice tracks following each other, and if the game was tough but fair before, it takes off the gloves here:
    • First, Diamond Dust starts on a slide where you must be frozen in ice at least once, and the second half of the track is a long ascent to the finish line where you must endure freezing at leasy a second time. However, the electric barriers and the bumpers coupled with the ice physics mae it way harder to progress, and while the ice physics are a serious handicap for players, CPUs can use it at full advantage to go even faster.
    • Second, Blue Mountain Act 1, one of the favorite of the community, is way less fun in a Grand Prix setting. The track has three caverns where you must roll on ice, the third being the most tedious as it forces you to zigzag between barriers. As mentioned before, the CPUs will abuse the slippery ice physics, and even worse, the game often tends to give them an unlimited amount of rings. Even worse, while you can destroy fir trees while invincible or giant, snowmen can knock you down if you roll on them.
    • Third, Blue Mountain Act 2 is probably the worst, as it is not a three lap turn, but the equivalent of Merry Mountain and Mount Wario combined, as you have to ascend a mountain before descending to the other side. The second third of the track requires to ascend while crossing huge gaps at top speed to not fall down, and the last third has a descent and an ice corridor, and from the "final lap" sign to the finish line, the road is slippy in its entirety. As if it wasn't enough, this track also has the ridiculously tough snowmen.
  • Death Egg is so long a course that its three laps count as 12 sections on the HUD. There are conveyor belts that push you out to the side and out of platforms, with some sections demanding precise control to gain enough speed to jump over multiple gaps. One wacky section launches you upside-down into the ceiling and then makes you and the other racers briefly drive backwards while you can't see behind you! Each lap also has an unique hazard: the first starts with the racers dodging the projectiles circling Red Eye, and in the latter two the Giant Mech appears near the end. The first time he tries crushing the racers with his palms, and in the second he fires his Wave-Motion Gun across a long straight road.
• That One Sidequest: There is a wall of achievements which come in two sizes. While they can be unlocked using Chao Keys which are gained after completing enough races, the bigger achievements require not only all surrounding achievements (barring other Big achievements in v2.2 onwards) to be unlocked and require 10 Chao Keys to unlock.
  • Among those achievements are obtaining the Chaos and Super Emeralds, which can only be obtained from the Sealed Star Zones from the first 14 cups. But to even get the chance to get to a Sealed Star Zone, it is required to complete a specific GP with enough points from Rings, Lap Bonuses, Egg Prisons, GP Points and the final GP placement, while also not using too many continues - and then however many continues you have left is the number of chances you have to get the Emerald. Run out of chances during the Sealed Star stage, and you have to start all over again from the beginning of the GP just for another chance at the Emerald. You also can't access the Sealed Star Zones on the Relaxed (formally Easy) difficulty. Almost as if to rub salt in the wound, there's also a challenge to obtain all 14 emeralds AGAIN on the highest difficulty - although at the very least, the requirements to enter the Sealed Star Zones at that level are lessened from needing an A rank to only needing to finish the cup in first.
  • The shrines from Sonic Adventure 2 appear hidden on certain stages and each one will unlock a character or follower. They can be really well hidden already but it's not enough to simply find them. Just as they originally did, they require the Mystic Melody to be played next to them before they'll activate. How do you get it? Find it on a track... in the Egg Cup. The 14th cup in the game. The game neither tells you that the Mystic Melody exists, how to obtain it beyond "find a secret", nor how to even use it once you DO obtain it.
  • Accessing the game's Optional Boss takes more work than you'd expect. The boss itself is accessed via Espresso Lane, where you need a Spin Dash combined with a Power Sneaker to collect a Pogo Spring hidden behind a waterfall and use a Spin Dash to get on the bridge standing just past the starting line, which leads into a vertical tunnel that needs the Pogo Spring and a very-accurate down trick to reach the top. Even after that, you still need to hit five switches using all five bananas presented to you, and both special items do not respawn, so this requires near-perfect precision to hit all five switches and raise the platforms needed to reach the other side. If you mess up on any of these parts, you have to start all over again to access the area and boss fight. And even after that, the Blend Eye itself doesn't pull any punches, meaning you need to be careful to survive the encounter against it to avoid being ejected out of the level. It's even worse in Encore mode, where the cave with the switches is dark and the Mean Blend Eye is more aggressive.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The initial boot-up sequence and tutorial establish that Eggman and Tails have become friends, developing the Ring Racer together using the power of the High-Voltage Ring. However, this is the only context provided for the entire game, with the rest of it playing out like a standard-fare kart racer. It’s not explained how other characters have reacted to the partnership (besides Metal Sonic, who attacked Eggman before the game’s events), how Eggman earned Tails’ trust in the first place, or why the player collects the Emeralds in the Sealed Star stages.

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