Guide Dang It / Racing

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• Crash Team Racing features a set of in-game cheat codes which can speed up the unlock process. These are, of course, not indicated in the game at all. While the majority of the items are unlockable through other (proper) means, the character Penta Penguin can only be unlocked through one of the codes.^note L1+R1, Down, Right, Triangle, Down, Left, Triangle, Up. This carries on in the remake, Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled, though by then, It Was His Sled.
• There are keys that unlock the bonus mini-games in each of the first four worlds of Diddy Kong Racing. The first one's out in the open, but the other three are in such ridiculous places that you pretty much have to look in a guide to find them (one word: drawbridge). To make matters worse, you have to beat all four mini-games in order to face the final boss! Gah!
• In the SNES F-Zero, there's one long jump on the White Land II course that you're pretty much guaranteed not to make unless you hold the down button on the D-pad to give your machine extra lift. But the manual only says that the D-pad is for steering, so you wouldn't think that down would do anything.
  • Pretty much every sprite-based F-Zero suffers from a related issue - when your craft hits the ground after a jump, it bounces and loses speed, something that AI doesn't suffer from. Unless you press down on the D-pad as you land, which will make for a smoother touchdown. Pretty much the only hint for this in the entire series is a demo reel in GP Legend that uses the technique, but you have to be paying close attention and then consider what might actually control the pitch.
• Games which have a checklist of objectives, like Kirby Air Ride, often do not tell you what the objectives are before you complete them. This leads to a few of the objectives becoming Guide Dang Its. In KAR's case, how would anyone guess to win a race on a certain track without touching the walls even once? Well, the game does reveal a few of the uncleared objectives when you start to clear them, but for most of them, they'll be completed without you knowing what they are or that you've completed them.
• Mario Kart:
  • Each character in Mario Kart DS affects the karts' weight rating differently, which isn't made apparent.
  • Mario Kart 7 repeats this not just for the characters, but for certain kart parts. Some parts can affect your mini-turbo duration, speed underwater, etc, but you wouldn't know by just looking at them.
    • 7 also neglected to inform you that holding the circle pad (or tilting the system, if you're using motion controls) forward or backwards would affect the amount of lift you get in midair. While the mechanic was pretty intuitive and easy to discover for gliding, there's one instance where you'd be completely blindsided: in Wario Shipyard^note Wario's Galleon for PAL regions, you have to cross a bottomless pit using the current flowing up from a large pipe. Unlike gliding sections, the effect is so subtle that you probably won't realize it's still there; if you're in the habit of holding the circle pad forward because it feels natural, you won't get enough lift to clear the pit, and you'll have no clue why.
  • In Mario Kart: Super Circuit, unlocking the tracks from Super Mario Kart isn't extremely hard to do, but figuring out how to do it without a guide is. It requires beating every cup on an engine class in first place (one engine class at a time, if preferred) and then going back through each cup again afterward and getting at least 100 coins, though when getting the coins getting in first fortunately isn't a requirement.
  • Mario Kart 8 Deluxe inexplicably hides LAN play functionality behind a code. (Go to the main menu, hold in L & R, then push in the left stick.) This isn't explained anywhere in-game, but instead buried in the "Customer Support" page on Nintendo's website.
• Tokyo Xtreme Racer has the trope as a series-defining trait starting with 2. That game introduced Wanderers, a type of opponent unaffiliated from any team and with very specific requirements to be faced (or bother showing up to begin with). Problem is, the games do not tell you explicitly what those requirements are, and some of them include things the average player might not be aware of they can do. It got worse in the Drift sub-series, where every opponent has one or more requirements that have to be met before they show up at the PA, including specific weather conditions. And no, those games also do not tell you what exactly you need to do. Import Tuner Challenge mercifully Averts the trope for the first time, since every opponent's profile, including Wanderers, contains information on when and where they'll show up, alongside any additional requirements.