Talk:Car (obstacle)

Merge Car (obstacle), Truck, and Bus to "Vehicle (obstacle)"

This talk page section contains an unresolved talk page proposal. Please try to help and resolve the issue by voting or leaving a comment.

Current time: Thursday, September 19, 2024, 19:11 GMT

This page, truck, and bus are all about a similar generic type of obstacle that is almost always encountered together, in "street" themed stages, and function exactly the same other than the dimensions of their hitboxes. It would be more efficient to cover them all in one page and list the types that appear under each game all at once than split it into three (particularly since the "truck" page covers both tractor-trailer semi trucks and small pickup trucks already); most of the game pages only list them as "vehicles" anyway. Note that this proposal does not cover the Wiggler Wagon, Bob-omb Car, or the Mii drivers from Coconut Mall, as the former two have a specialized Mario-themed design and function while the latter is generally treated as a separate type of obstacle. I want to have the identifier there since while we don't specifically have a "vehicle" page, it can refer to other things, such as playable karts/bikes/etc and the Diddy Kong Racing rides.

Proposer: Doc von Schmeltwick (talk)
Deadline: September 6, 2024, 23:59 GMT

Support

1. Doc von Schmeltwick (talk) - Per
2. Super Mario RPG (talk) - The vehicles are the same types of obstacles, with complete cosmetic and minor functional alterations, derived from their generic counterparts.
3. Ahemtoday (talk) Yeah, in a gameplay sense, nothing separates cars and trucks any more than the various cars are separate from each other, so I've never really gotten the split. Actually, I was even planning on proposing this very merge a while back, but I forgot until now. My choice of merged title was gonna be "traffic", though.

Oppose

1. Ray Trace (talk) The separate names (rather than being lumped as "Traffic"), audio, and visual differences between the obstacles are enough to warrant separate pages (we cover subjects like Keese, Raving Piranha Plant, Deku Baba into their own articles despite acting very similar to their base counterparts). In Mario Kart Wii, trucks have different properties aside from hitbox than cars (they block Mega characters). In Mario Kart 8 and Mario Kart 64, buses, trucks, and cars have varying hitboxes that are more than sufficient enough information to be designated as entirely separate objects.
2. ThePowerPlayer (talk) First of all, the existence of the Mushroom-shaped car, which is the only one of these vehicles to produce a Mushroom upon contact, is enough evidence to warrant the car article being split. Second of all, not only do both the truck and bus have many unique variants (such as both cargo trucks with glider ramps and surfboard trucks in the Mario Kart 8 version of Toad's Turnpike, the trucks carrying Piranha Plants in Mario Kart Tour, and the double-decker buses from London Loop), but their articles feature many other details like sponsors and how their real-world counterparts are reflected in their in-game design, which would only become muddled if the articles were merged. Finally, even if a merge would make sense, a better name for the merged article would be "Traffic", fitting the definition of that word since the cars, trucks, and buses have been shown exclusively travelling along roads and highways, unlike the karts driven by players, which will freely race on public safety hazards.

Comments

@Ray Those alternates don't appear in the same stages as each other, though, nor are they generic subjects. Doc von Schmeltwick (talk) 17:10, August 23, 2024 (EDT)

It doesn't matter if they are shared in one track or many. They're still separate objects with different names and gameplay properties. Ray Trace^(T|C) 17:12, August 23, 2024 (EDT)