Lots and Lots of Kirby

Riding on stars and chewing bubblegum. And we're all out of gum.

Nintendo's home office in Japan opened up their official homepage today for Kirby's Air Ride, the long-delayed yet long-anticipated racing game that finally saw its playable debut at the 2003 Electronic Entertainment Expo a little while back. The game will hit Japanese GameCubes on July 11, with a U.S. release expected not much later.

As anyone who's been paying attention to Nintendo's lineup knows, Kirby differentiates itself from the rest of the GC's upcoming racing lineup primarily via its one-button control. Everything you need to do on the track is done via the control stick and A button?you automatically accelerate, A is used instead to brake around curves, building up your Dash Meter to bust out of the turn once you've changed direction. The A button also controls enemy sucking and ability copying, so hopefully your controller is in very good order.

Kirby's Air Ride is divided into three modes, all of which can be picked through in the screens below. Air Ride is the one you're likely most familiar with?you and three of your friends race around a handful of fantastically-themed courses. Overhead Ride is a simpler version?the entire course in this mode is shown on screen at once from an overhead perspective, not entirely unlike Atari's old Super Sprint arcade game, and up to four players race to the end while attacking each other with items that appear on the track. Finally, City Trial is a combination of race and deathmatch?you start by exploring a vast city for power-ups and new machines, fighting off opponents struggling for the same stuff. When time runs out, you and the arsenal of power-ups you've picked up are whisked off to the racing stadium for a sort of final confrontation.

We'll have more info on this title as it comes, so stay tuned. In the meantime, though, take a look at Nintendo's Japanese Kirby page?there's a 9.3MB movie for you to watch.

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