This is awesome!
But yeah, I somehow (by random chance in the course design, I assume) ended up with a track that didn't even have any powerups at all, but the opponent ships were still shooting at me, so they obviously don't need to pick up the powerups. I also noticed that an opponent ship can pick up three powerups in a row instead of just two like we can. Probably they can pick up as many as they pass over, but three is all I've seen for sure.
I also agree that the difficulty needs to be increased quite a lot. The game does start to give a good challenge around the 15th track, but since there's no save feature, every time you play, you have to play through 14 boring tracks before you get to that. Maybe having one or two track with no challenge is okay, but not fourteen.
It would also be good if the game kept track of your lap times and total time for each track so that there was some encouragement to beat your own best times. If it were possible to record a ghost lap of your best time and save that as a separate file that could be traded with other players, that would be...well...just peachy.
One thing I don't get, though, is how the acceleration works. Sometimes it seems like you're not picking up speed at all and you're just sort of puttering along the track with no sense of speed (the fact that your ship actually makes a puttering sound as its sound effect doesn't help either), but other times you seem to be moving along at a good speed. It's almost as if there's constant acceleration since it's usually on the first and second lap that the sense of speed is so poor and by the fourth lap, things feel better. A better sense of speed would really make the game a lot more fun.
I played a track (again by random chance, I assume) where there was no weapon powerups, only boost powerups--and quite a lot of them--so with pretty much constant boosting, the game finally felt like it was moving at full speed. If it always felt like that, it would be a hell of a lot of fun.
But really, this *IS* awesome. But that's what I've come to expect from your releases, Tassu.
Really nice graphics (sure, there's polygon tearing, but even the commercial racing games on the DS have a lot of that unfortunately), they're colorful and always interesting. The random track generator seems quite good though it would be nice if we could create our own levels with an in-game level editor (and again, save them as separate files and trade online). Best of all, the Motion Card the control is absolutely great; the game doesn't play well at all with the dpad, but with a Motion Card it just feels perfect. It's definitely the best Motion Card game released yet. One of the best homebrews released yet, in fact.
I just hope you don't abandon it like you seem to have done your previous games that all showed so much promise as well, because with a few improvements this would easily be one of the best racing games on the DS, homebrew or commercial.
...word is bondage...
