Finally played some Mario Kart 8 Deluxe online for the first time ever

Haven't done online gaming for a very long time, but I got that free 2 weeks of Switch Online for Mario Day, and I wanted to be a part of that million laps deal or whatever. So I finally bit the bullet and decided to catch up to my fellow karters ten years too late.

Got my ass kicked for the most part. One of the many reasons I've grown to hate 150cc is that you really can't gain any ground once you fall back into the back half unless you get really lucky (this was true even when racing against CPUs). The one Mirror match I got was particularly brutal, I'm way too used to running these tracks a certain way. Apparently 200cc won't start appearing until I've grinded 3,000 points minimum, so that's gonna be a fucking slog (though apparently there's a tourney mode where you're pretty much guaranteed 200cc, will have to check that out tonight).

Still, I managed to get 1st place a few times, in spite of my longtime habit of choking at the finish line when things get intense. Rainbow Road 8 and Rainbow Road 3DS were particularly satisfying wins. The harder the course, the better I did on average; I'm betting people largely avoid the tougher tracks in the hope of logging an easy win (I was downright mortified that the majority of the lobby willingly chose Toad Circuit 3DS at one point). I'd like to think that the 50,000+ pointers I was racing against were left wondering how this noob with barely over 1,000 points managed to win, but that's probably just my ego talking.

And it's gonna take me a loooong time to get used to the apparent latency thing where a hit registers but it still looks like your opponent is trucking along at full speed. I swear at one point the person I hit ahead of me was still zooming along unhindered over five seconds after they took the hit, which really fucked with me.