Been playing this game since it came out. Playing with my kids now and we "created/discovered" a new angle on the game: comeback play, which I think could be a new category of game play?

To even out the game, when the Lakitu countdown completes, my kids go ahead, but I stay back, up to 30 seconds for some courses/character combinations. My goal is to comeback and win despite the time deficit.

Which made me wonder if this could be competitive as a game style. Players would try to hold back as long as they can and still come back against the CPU and win. It offers a diverse challenge space:

1. Character/vehicle choice.
2. Item manipulation from the roulette. Timing is important, do you “force” the item to register quickly or let it happen?
3. Speed item utilization. Getting a golden (crowny, heh) mushroom on Wario's Gold Mine or Rainbow Road presents a significant challenge.
4. Item avoidance, CPU will use items on each other and you have to avoid them while trying to complete the comeback.
5. Position management. Popping up the ranks too early will decrease the chance of a speed item appearing.

Comebacks are super fun to watch. Playing against the CPU also introduces some (possible) randomness because they will drop items.

Leader boards would be ordered by who can hold back the longest on a given course/vehicle/character combination. Example: 63 seconds on 150cc rainbow road funky kong flame runner.

Has this already been discussed/discovered/implemented? Is there a fundamental problem with this idea? I doubt this is a new idea given the amount of time played. Thoughts?

I've never heard of anything like this as a speedrunning category before, but I have heard of it and do it with my siblings.

I would say this is a good idea for a category extension, only that holding back just seems kinda counter-intuitive and eventually the game might just lock us into a specific time frame due to the CPUs just being too far ahead to fail.

It might still get added as an extension idrk these are just my thoughts.

Thanks for this feedback, boneking. You're right, it's not necessarily speedrunning as such, but maybe speedrunning adjacent.