HAL Laboratory’s 2003 racing game puts Kirby on Air Ride Machines, from the Warp Star to the Wheelie Bike, and plays with a stick and a single button. It has three modes: Air Ride on full 3D courses, Top Ride on small tracks seen from above, and City Trial, where you power up a machine around a city before a final Stadium event. If you own the game, Nagori lets you play it on iPhone and iPad.
What you need
- An iPhone 12 or newer, or an iPad with an A14 chip or newer, with iOS 17.6 or later.
- Nagori from the App Store. Your first game is free.
- A disc image of your copy of Kirby Air Ride:
.iso,.gcm,.rvz,.cisoor.gcz, or a.zipor.rarcontaining it. The game fits on a single disc.
No BIOS file is needed.
How to play Kirby Air Ride on iPhone
- Install Nagori from the App Store.
- Copy your Kirby Air Ride disc image to the Files app, in iCloud Drive or On My iPhone.
- Open Nagori, tap + and select the file. Add GameCube games from inside Nagori: the Files app’s Open in menu doesn’t hand formats like
.rvzand.gcmto Nagori. - Find Kirby Air Ride on the GameCube shelf and press Play.
- Switch to a touch layout with a stick. The default Standard layout has none, and every machine steers with one. Pause, open Settings → Touch Layout and choose Stick Focus for the biggest stick. With a controller connected, you can skip this step.
Controls: one stick, one button
Kirby moves forward without you pressing anything. Steer with the control stick, hold A to brake and charge a boost, and let go to shoot ahead. Hold A next to an enemy to inhale it, and some enemies give Kirby a Copy Ability. Shake the stick left and right for a spin attack.
That suits a touchscreen well. A does almost everything, so open Edit Layout in the pause menu, make it bigger and drag it under your right thumb. Shrink the buttons you only need in menus.
With a controller, A is the bottom face button, B the left one, X the right one and Y the top one. Z is on the right shoulder button, and L and R are the triggers. Press the left stick to open Nagori’s pause menu.
Saves: memory card and save states
Kirby Air Ride keeps each mode’s checklist and everything it unlocks on the memory card. That card works in Nagori as it did on the console. It stays inside the app, though: it isn’t in the Files app, isn’t part of Export Saves and doesn’t sync to iCloud.
Nagori adds two things on top:
- Quit any time. Leave the app mid-race and Continue puts you back exactly where you were.
- Save states. On the start line of a checklist goal you keep missing, pause and choose Save, then Load to retry without the menus. Nagori keeps your last four per game.
Treat the memory card as your main save: a save state may not load after some Nagori updates.
City Trial on your own
For a few minutes you roam a city collecting power-ups that raise your machine’s speed, boost and other stats, swap into better machines you find, and hunt for the three parts of a legendary machine, the Dragoon or the Hydra. Then the Stadium decides who wins, with events such as a Drag Race or Kirby Melee.
Make a save state as the Stadium event starts, and you can replay it with the machine you built instead of starting the city over.
One player only
Kirby Air Ride was built for up to four players on a split screen, plus LAN play between several GameCubes. Nagori plays GameCube games with one player, so neither is available, and the controller doesn’t rumble. Air Ride, Top Ride and City Trial can all be played alone against computer riders.
Best settings
Open the pause menu and go to Settings → Quality. GameCube games work an iPhone hard, and this setting trades frame rate for heat:
- Low keeps the device coolest, at a lower frame rate.
- Medium, the default, is the place to start.
- High gives the smoothest motion and is meant for the newest iPhones and iPads.
Races are fast and City Trial is busy, so try High on a recent device and step down if it gets hot. Nagori shows GameCube games at their original resolution, and Full Screen stretches the picture to fill the display.
