City Trial is terrific, if’s among the best multiplayer games on Gamecube. There’s a channel on Youtube, Kirby Air Ride Online, where people use it as an eSport.

The premise is, from 2 to 4 players (including possible CPU players) roam a big city space (but not too big) on fast vehicles for from 3 to 7 minutes. Throughout that space powerups are constantly appearing. Some are weapons or health refills, but the most common ones are Patches, each of which is a small but significant improvement in one of a vehicle’s stats. Players vie to collect these patches, and also to change their weak initial vehicle for a better one, which also can be found randomly around the city. Random events occur, which provide various opportunities and difficulties.

Players can attack each other by colliding, using “quick spins,” or those weapons. If a player’s vehicle runs out of health it’s destroyed, causing it to drop lots of its patches (around half) and leaving that player to find another vehicle. Patches cannot be collected without a vehicle, so the attacking player can quickly score a lot of powerups that way.

After time runs out, all the players are thrown into a randomly-selected event. Many are races, but some have you attacking enemies or each other for points. A few involve flying. One’s an outright boss battle. The winner of this event is the winner of the whole match. You’ve been collecting patches and selected your vehicle for this moment, but you don’t find out the event ahead of time. You might get a hint as to the event during the city portion, but the game is known to lie 10% of the time.

With all that randomness, City Trial can be very chaotic, and never plays the same way twice. Kirby Air Riders is unquestionably the Switch 2 game I’m most looking forward to!