Banjo-Pilot (2005)

Banjo pilot is kind of interesting as a game. It makes me wonder how you'd design a kart style flying game well. I think on a fundamental level they're kind of fucked. In a racing game you generally have to just scan the horizon for upcoming obstacles but in flying games you have to mind almost the entire screen. And the increased range of movement means the courses have to be dense with shit to interact with otherwise players never are forced to compete for track space or need to maneuver around environmental hazards. But there's very few ways to contextualize environmental hazards in a flying game. Its not like the ground where anything in existence could occupy that space. In the air you can do like clouds or other flying shit but those don't necessarily have a relationship with the course aesthetic so it can feel like they're just piling arbitrary garbage up. Especially since the range of ways you can dodge anything incentivizes you to place more obstacles to compensate. So then the course would just look like a bunch of garbage littering the air. In a ground racer you can put terrain with different traction and elevation and it's all significant without being visually overwhelming or contradictory