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Honko
Robin Who??
Robin Usher is a Mario Kart player and staff member. He is originally from California, but spent most of his life in Japan before returning to California two years ago to study computer science in university.
Kart Career
Robin has been a member of the kart community since 2003, when he joined the Mario Kart 64 Player's Page. It was the first video game he ever played competitively, and so at first he moved slowly from the bottom of the charts. However, after a couple years of playing he eventually made a breakthrough and went quickly from Semi-Pro to Elite B in 2005, and then Elite B to King B in 2007. Robin's favorite course is Rainbow Road, where he also has his best ranked time, a Legend C flap. He has played every year of his 5 year career so far, usually during the Summer and Fall months, and has no plans to ever retire from MK64 as it is his favorite game in the whole wide world.
Robin's second Mario Kart was Super Mario Kart. He enjoys SMK a lot and usually lists it in his 10 favorite games, but he has never gotten deeply into time trials there. He last played in January '08, when he received an MVK award on the Non-NBT site but then stopped playing just barely before entering the top 100. Robin's favorite course in SMK is also Rainbow Road, although he falls off at least 10 times every time he plays it in GP mode.
Robin was an active Mario Kart Wii player during the early days of the site. He had some good success in the first couple weeks, holding many North American regional records (especially on the N64 retro courses) and briefly obtaining double SRs on Mushroom Gorge when the shortcut was first discovered, but he stopped playing time trials after two months and has since fallen out of the top 100. Robin was also a leader of the "MK64 Stars" clan that dominated the Wifi scene for those first few months, where he raced under the nickname Honekko. The clan eventually retired and Robin has mostly stopped playing MKWii.
Robin is also a member of the Mario Kart Super Circuit, Mario Kart: Double Dash!!, and Mario Kart DS pages, making him one of a very small number of players to be ranked on all 6 sites. However, the vast majority of Robin's karting time has been spent on MK64, and so he is not very high ranked on these other games. Perhaps when he someday "maxes out" in MK64 he will consider putting serious effort into climbing the ranks of another Mario Kart.
Staff Member
Much more than his karting abilities, Robin is known for the various contributions he has made to the community as a staff member. In 2004, Robin joined the staff of the MK64 site by implementing an idea to have rivalries to compare more than two people at once. Rivalries were eventually added to all the kart sites and are a widely used feature. Robin continued updating the MK64 rivalries manually for many years until recently when William Lacey created an automated version for the new MK64 site.
Although the rivalries were Robin's original claim to fame, he has always been eager to help out the MK64 site wherever he is needed, which has led him to take on a wide variety of jobs over the years. Currently, he updates POW awards and the excel timesheet that the charts are calculated from. Robin also decided to help out with the MKWii site and has updated times submissions there since the site began.
Robin has used his knowledge of Japanese to help the community in other ways as well. He translated the Join pages for MKDD, MKDS, and MKWii into Japanese and has helped contact and recruit Japanese players for all the sites.
Community
Robin is an active poster and a moderator on the message board with well over 2000 posts. He has organized several alternative challenge tournaments on the MK64 board in the past couple years, and ran the All-MK Team Tournament that included members from each kart game. Robin is also an active and well-known member of the IRC channel, where he is known by many names including Honekko, Honko, Binro, and NoNick4. He created an IRC trivia bot with questions about the kart community. Robin organized the Karter Contest 2k8 and reached the 3rd round in the contest before being eliminated by Florent Lecoanet.
External Links
- Robin's SMK profile
- Robin's MK64 profile
- Robin's MKSC profile
- Robin's MKDD profile
- Robin's MKDS profile
- Robin's MKWii profile
