Kirby Air Ride is a 2003 racing video game starring Kirby, developed by HAL Laboratory and published by Nintendo for the GameCube. Kirby Air Ride has the players and computer-controlled racers ride on Air Ride Machines. The game supports up to four players, and was the first GameCube title to support LAN play using broadband adapters and up to four GameCube systems. It was the final Kirby game directed by series creator Masahiro Sakurai. The game had a convoluted development cycle, starting as one of the first wave of Nintendo 64 games before undergoing numerous revisions to the basic concept and being cancelled for a time. Upon its eventual release for the GameCube it saw a mixed reception from critics, who criticized its simplicity, but was a commercial success, selling over 1.2 million copies worldwide. Gameplay Kirby Air Ride is played primarily through use of a vehicle, many of which are taken from the previous Kirby games, such as the Warpstar. Players take control of Kirby or any of his multicolored counterparts to compete in races or other minigames. The simple controls are a defining feature of Kirby Air Ride. Unlike most racers, no input is necessary for the craft to move forward. Other than the use of the Control Stick to steer, the A button performs all the other actions in the game, including braking, charging up for a boost, sucking in nearby enemies and thereafter using the powers absorbed from them. Gliding is also a definitive feature of the game, as the player can control the crafts' altitude when they go airborne. Each of the three modes of the game has a "checklist" associated with it. These are 12x10 grids which contain 120 squares, all of which are initially blank. Each square has a hidden goal contained inside it, and certain goals also have unlockable content attached to them, such as alternate machines, new items and courses, new characters, and music tracks for the sound test. When a goal is completed, the squares fill to reveal completed goals. In practice, this system of discovering unknown goals is balanced out by several goals which are relatively easy to obtain, such as "finish a race three times" or "race on every course," and various other goals which only require the accrual of play time; these, in turn, make it easier to find out what other, more specific goals are, since