As a franchise designed to one-up Mario Kart with its own innovative design studio, ModNation Racers has had a bit of a rough time. Not only is it competing against one of the most cherished videogame franchises of all time, but it’s also receiving mixed messages from the publisher and as a response a mixed reception from the audience. And with the recently announced karting spin-off for LittleBigPlanet, ModNation Racers will surely become a redundant exercise.
Phil writes, "The kart racer: a sub-genre in the racing game genre that generally features video game mascots and colorful cartoon characters competing in speedy races against one another for the sole goal of crossing the finish line in first place. No doubt Super Mario Kart made this sub-genre popular and put it on the map, but for every well-done Mario-branded racer, there are countless others that fall through the cracks. For this purpose SPC brings back The Tuesday 10s to list ten underrated and under-appreciated kart racers from a wide swath of developers and franchises."
I agree with ModNation Racers. I did have a good time with what I did get to play at a friends some time ago. Nickelodeon Racers though? If it’s anything like the original, that’s a hard pass…
Don't agree with Mario Kart tour as it's not underappreciated. It's just literally not great. Everyone has tried it.
On the other hand ModNation, Mikey's Speedway USA, CTR, and LBPK I agree with. Though CTR with the rereleases recently hasn't been all that underappreciated and that with Diddy Kong Racing are my all time favourite ones. I think sonic transformed is very under appreciated though.
Outside of CTR ModNation is the most underappreciated because the game was amazing and don't think it even sold a million. But the community was always pretty cool. Creating was never hard. But it could be as complex as you wanted it to be so it was for everyone. I'm still praying Sony makes a ModNation Racers sequel for PS5 as the only issue the game had imo was load times and not being 60fps
I hope they do as well, I had the game on ps3 but never spend a good amount of time with it which I kind of regret, would love to give it another go.
There's a little known kart game called Bears Can't Drift that had a bunch of potential, was fun to play, but low sales that left the dev to simply abandon the project before fixing technical issues with the game.
They really did have a good game on their hands, but they gave up before it could reach full potential.
I remember just only playing the demo of a game called speed punks that game was fun
Mario Kart has always reigned supreme when it comes to the best kart racers out there to play, but there are still a few other racers that are must-plays.
VGChartz's Adam Cartwright: "The racing genre has always felt like a perfect fit on handhelds, thanks to offering bite-sized sessions and being able to hide technical flaws behind blistering speeds and enclosed environments. It provides a large amount of variety too, from immersive sims to light-hearted kart racers (and my personal favourite, drift-heavy arcade racers!), meaning there’s usually something for everyone to enjoy.
Anticipation was high that the Vita would follow in the PSP’s footsteps as a handheld offering an unrivalled selection of racers, from muddy WRC titles to the clean racing lines of Gran Turismo. Beyond the initial months things didn’t quite pan out like this, but there’s still a nice spread of games available to cater to anyone’s tastes – and thanks to the addition of backwards-compatibility with PSP and PS1, the Vita ends up with possibly the largest selection of any console in the last 10 years, even if it's not all running natively on the hardware."
