YMMV / 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 Jeffl.
• 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.
• 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 class B, C, E or F characters (at least 5 top speed and no more than 6 weight). 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 Chao and 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).
• 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, they had plans to make a Sonic-based successor to it, alongside the rest of the base game's Super Mario Kart tracks: concerning this specific track, this resulted in Mega Ice Cap Zone.
• 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.
• Genius Programming: SRB2 Kart is a standalone mod 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.
• 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.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • Class G characters like 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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. The sequal takes even more cues from SMK with the includion of lives during the Grand Prix races, as well as from later games with the podium at the end of a GP cup.
  • 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

---