f13.net forums - Kart Rider

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July 21, 2025, 12:53:05 AM

we're back, baby

Kart Rider is finally available in English, however, not playable from many territories outside the US, because the world is significantly less flat than some books would have you believe. You can check it out here: http://kart.nexon.net/

For those who don't know, it's basically a Korean item shop/microtransaction racing game in the spirit of Mario Kart and other console kart racers that never managed to take off in Korea due to Koreans not playing consoles. To put it mildly, the game is huge popularity wise over there. Here's a quote from KBS Global, a Korean news source in English:

Quote

The online racing game Kart Rider has become the biggest hit product in Korea after the personal homepage service Cyworld. The membership of this easy-to-play game surpassed 10 million users in no time at all. It is no exaggeration to say that Koreans are all into Kart Rider these days (a “kart” is a small racing car).

Since reaching a total of 10 million members during the last Lunar New Year holidays, the game has seen its membership grow by 40,000 daily, becoming an unrivaled hit product. In other words, one in every four Koreans plays this game. The number of users who were playing the game at the moment when its ranking was measured exceeded 230,000, breaking the record of time required to surpass 200,000 users set by another online game, Lineage, which reached 250,000 members seven years after its debut. Nexon, the distributor of Kart Rider, reaps over 5 billion won in profits from this game alone every month.

I logged about 4 hours tonight with some friends, it's got a pretty good system of quick games, entertaining waiting screens (typing things like "o_o" ">.<" "<3" or most entertainingly, "gtfo" result in your character doing some cutesy shit. Basically its more fun to spam than "gogogogogo"). Other than that it has a pretty cool quest system for getting initiated into the game that will give you money and points for learning how to join games, create your own games, and place well in races. Still though, after all those hours I'm less than half way to level 2 - damn Koreans.

You should edit the title in "Kart Rider - North American Beta". Rest of the world isn't allowed in your club.

It's official, I hate the planet.

It isn't?
Did I make a mistake by registering as european? I had no trouble registering. Will I have to jump through hoops to try this?

Happy!

I've always wanted to play this. When I was watching streaming Korean television waiting for the Starcraft 2 news to come up, they were covering some competition for this game. It looked fun.

It doesn't matter where you register from. They are blocking IPs when you connect to the gameserver. I heard some can still play. I can't.

Ack sorry about that Falconeer. I thought that *might* be the case but I didn't exactly read the entire agreement. Grr... Speaking of the Regionalization thread, this game has got to be the worst about that shit. My Korean friend, who is a Korean national, born in Korea, has a KSSN, fucking CITIZEN of Korea (in the US on a student visa), couldn't even get me an account o play on their servers.

Oh well, once again sorry Falconeer. Changed the thread title.

yup. I can confirm that. Can't get on the servers.

*while using Firefox*

Please use Internet Explorer

Due to technical reasons, nexon.net can only be accessed through Internet Explorer.

Weak...

It's a Korean ActiveX thing -- the entire country has standardized on IE and ActiveX as their way of creating Internet applications.

This is true, amazingly enough. My company is trying to work with a Korean bank and we ran into this, all their security, instead of using https, uses an ActiveX control. For real.

Quote from: Margalis on May 29, 2007, 08:04:03 PM

This is true, amazingly enough. My company is trying to work with a Korean bank and we ran into this, all their security, instead of using https, uses an ActiveX control. For real.

Can you actually call it "security" in that case?

I believe "security" is exactly what to call it, especially if you make the little finger-quote motions at the same time.

Quote from: Chimpy on May 29, 2007, 08:08:51 PM

Quote from: Margalis on May 29, 2007, 08:04:03 PM

This is true, amazingly enough. My company is trying to work with a Korean bank and we ran into this, all their security, instead of using https, uses an ActiveX control. For real.

Can you actually call it "security" in that case?

It's not really their fault. There were no International browsers capable of 128-bit or greater SSL (thanks to US export restrictions and the like) when Korea started to develop their Internet banking applications so they basically rolled their own way of securing connections using ActiveX.

I'd been hearing about this, in fact I even watched some drifting tutorials on youtube the other week. Its supposed to be quite fun, sounds like the second coming of Gunbound to me. Something that you will get bored of but certainly has a place as a game.

re: ActiveX

Isn't that going to somehow cause some problems w/ Vista? I sort of remember not reading a topic about that issue somewhere.

Quote from: Hoax on May 30, 2007, 01:16:49 PM

re: ActiveX

Isn't that going to somehow cause some problems w/ Vista? I sort of remember not reading a topic about that issue somewhere.

It causes problems with IE 7 and therefore by extention Vista. Hence the Korean government's statement telling people not to upgrade to IE 7/Vista until companies can get their Web apps working on IE 7.

Heh funny you mention IE. So the Nexon login system doesn't like Firefox, but I gimped my IE6 somehow such that nothing loads all the way. Woe is me :)

Didn't anyone find it odd that you had to fill out ethnicity for this?

SO I've been playing this for maybe an hour now. The way the game's laid out (other than the racing part) is very similar to Gunbound, with player ranks, a shop, different gametypes and the ability to join other games or make your own. The racing's very straightforward but has a hidden layer of complexity with the drifting and boosting that's shown in some of the videos on youtube. The weapons take a bit of figuring out because the icons aren't immediately understandable but right now I'd say the game's a good thing to have fun wasting time on.

That describes just about every one of these types of games :)

Well a lot of them just plain suck from a fun standpoint, in my experience.