Kudos Records Video (Total and Individual Event)

 

A stats video showing Kudos records from the various MSR saves I downloaded online.  I used the 'Merge Records' function within the game to combine their records with my own.  It shows records for total Kudos (held by NoName) and individual Event records.  All 250 event records are displayed.

As you can see, the best scores are obtained by exploiting Style Kudos.  While the developers always intended the game to be about "how you drive fast", the problem is that MSR's Style Kudos rewarded reckless power sliding/bad driving or driving up and down while powersliding ad infinitum.  Any penalties you may receive from hitting the walls/other cars are more than made up by the excess Style Kudos awarded. See my previous post https://msrdreamcast.blogspot.com/2023/07/bad-driving-more-kudos.html for more information.  

I believe these issues was fixed in PGR1 and PGR2 with their more intricate and redesigned Kudos systems.  While exploits still existed (spinning your car in a circle/skidding side to side), you still had to practice and be skillful to obtain the best results.  You do not need to be a skillful driver to get the highest Kudos scores on MSR.  However if I was able to 'patch' MSR's kudos system, I would cap the number of Style Kudos awarded unless you obtain a high Skill Kudos score and little/no penalties.  I would also have severe penalties if you drove backwards or hit the walls.   

When you view the individual Street Race event scores, you will notice that my records generally have a higher Skill Kudos award.  The only notable exception is the final Championship race on Chapter 25 (where no Skill Kudos get awarded at all).

I totalled up all the individual Kudos records for each event and came up with a potential Kudos total of around 541,600.  If you added Jokers to all the records that were obtained without one, the potential then becomes around 934,200.  So I can see how the 1 million+ Dreamarena record was obtained.  However I would never recommend trying to achieve this as you would have to play MSR in such a repetative and boring way that you'll end up hating the game very quicky.  It best to forget the excess Style Kudos records and just concentrate on Skill, minimal penalties and Style in that order.  You will enjoy the game much more!   

These player saves originate from the early 00s and I downloaded them from various sites including Blueswirl/Dream Explorer, GameFAQS and archive.org back in the early 2010s.  The other players shown are NoName, Shambl3r, Larry Lar, BabyGangsta, '2' & Cichy.  I have no info on these players other than one of the saves belonged to a 'John Peat' who posted an early MSR car guide on GameFAQS.  He also commented on the old Usenet group archived here: https://groups.google.com/g/uk.games.video.dreamcast and hosted his save on his now defunct website that can be accessed at: https://web.archive.org/web/20020607060911/http://www.fury161.com:80/msr/