Favorite racer character?

[firefyte]

#8633

What’s everybody’s favorite character?

I’m partial to the shark or tiger.

[fastwinstondoom]

#8643

Haven’t gotten around to playing it yet but back in the day it was Shark and Tiger all the way down for me! We’ll see if my taste has evolved over the last 25+ years…

[TigerQuoll]

#8646

I couldn’t really remember which character I used to play until the moment I booted the game up again last night. Immediately I remembered that it was the shark all the way, and that’s not about to change.

All the rest of the characters just seem like the most generic, lazy animal mascots I can imagine. How, in the peak era of cool animal mascots, did all of them end up so boring?
They really need to be just a little bit more edgy.

And there needs to be a sloth. I would play as a sloth. (Not pushing my luck with my namesakes animal!)

[watchful]

#8650

Do the different characters have different driving stats?

[nevice]

#8651

I’ve been playing as the raccoon so far.

Not sure if they have different stats, actually. There’s nothing about stats in the FAQ that DJ_HiP linked to, so I’m guessing the stats are all the same?

[voxel]

#8652

Stats are identical or so close to identical as to not matter. But the animations and ‘cutscenes’ are unique to each character, including the player-triggered taunts, very important!

[Martli]

#8656

Always Yoshi, oh wait, wrong game. I kinda like the moose guy.

[Wesbat]

#8659

I have been racing with all of them but leaning towards the Hefelump. I like how each has their own sound and win animation.

[jadi]

#8661

Shark. Its fun to see a shark driving a kart (so for me a moose driving a kart is more normal)

[Martli]

#8665

Played it with my 3 year old son and he is also a shark fan. I kinda wish they’d made it so that each character had a special ability, like if the shark was faster under the water or something.

[TigerQuoll]

#8710

I did a few little tests last night, inspired by the descriptions on the character selection screen, for example “Killer wheels”, “turbo squawk”, “old reliable” etc.
The wording and the fact that they are there at all made me wonder if there ARE some slight differences between characters. Things like maybe the shark nudges other racers harder when he bumps into them, or the pelican gets a slightly better boost on the turbo powerup or something.
So I went into two player mode and did a bunch of controlled experiments, carefully lining different characters up and hitting accelerate or brake or turn at the same time.

Anyway, long story short I couldn’t find any noticeable differences. Though, to be fair, they were not completely comprehensive tests – I didn’t try every character against every other in every situation, so maybe there was something I missed.
The other possibility is that, to make it more fair, they nerfed all the bonuses for two player mode, and the different stats or abilities only come through on single player.
If I were truly obsessive about this I would try to find out how to edit the demo files, and change the characters to see if they become unsynced. But… I don’t really care THAT much!

[yozy]

#8712

Shark all the way! Wacky Wheels might be the reason for my shark movie obsession.