 One of the most exciting announcements from the February 2022 Nintendo Direct was the announcement of the Booster Pass coming to Mario Kart 8 Deluxe which will double the number of tracks in the game by adding 48 tracks from past games across six waves. During the pandemic, I have been thoroughly enjoying playing Mario Kart 8 Deluxe with family and friends. While it is my favorite Mario Kart game by far, these 48 new tracks are incredibly welcome as I logged 71 hours into the Wii U version and I’ve crossed 260 hours with the Switch version. With the first eight tracks announced alongside the pass, trying to figure what should be the remaining forty is the immediate question. Even just accounting for the first seven games since I never enjoyed playing Mario Kart Tour, the mobile game, I found it impossible to come up with a balanced full list because I really haven’t revisited any of the Mario Kart games beyond Super Mario Kart and Mario Kart 64 via their virtual console versions. After sitting on the Booster Pass news for a few days it became obvious it was finally time to revisit every game in the Mario Kart series. The plan was simple. I would play on whatever the highest first available difficulty was for each game and claim the gold trophy in each original cup. Since I didn’t have a convenient save for Super Mario Kart, it ended up being the only game I raced in 100cc, whereas the others I ended up racing on the highest difficulty, 150cc. I planned just to do the original tracks in each game, though the moment I hit Mario Kart DS I did end up playing through all of the retro cups from then on anyway since I was having such a great time. Not counting the retro cups, I raced on 120 unique tracks over the course of five days! It was a very satisfying experience to be reacquainted with all of these games I grew up with and to see how the series evolved from game to game. I also had fun sharing my Mario Kart journey over Twitter which may just be my longest thread I’ve made there even edging out some of my lengthy RPG threads as I reviewed not just the games, but nearly every course as well. Since tweets and threads end up getting lost very quickly, I wanted to expand my thoughts and share them more permanently here on my blog. So here we are and here we go!  Super Mario Kart (SNES, I played on Nintendo Switch Online and raced as Yoshi) I’ve been playing the Mario Kart series all of my life and I started with the very first game, Super Mario Kart for the Super Nintendo. Even from the start, Nintendo nailed the core of the franchise even though some of the details from what we see over the course of the series differ. There are four cups in Super Mario Kart, but unlike every other game there are five tracks in each course that you must complete five laps on compared to the now standard four tracks and three laps. There are eight racers to choose from, Mario, Luigi, Peach, Bowser, Yoshi, Toad, Donkey Kong Jr., and Koopa Troopa. Driving over question blocks on the ground gives you random items influenced by your position, including shells to throw at opponents, mushrooms to boost your speed, and bananas you can lay as traps on the ground that will cause opponents to spin out. While they would disappear from the series for a while, the very first Mario Kart game also featured coins to pick up that boost your speed that were often laid out on the course in unique, creative layouts. The twenty courses here are divided into unique themes rather than the all unique courses of future games with the exception being the final course, Rainbow Road. Strangely then by modern Mario Kart standards, there are four Mario Circuits for example labeled simply Mario Circuit 1, Mario Circuit 2, Mario Circuit 3, and Mario Circuit 4. While sadly not a part of my replay series as I played the games alone, battle mode which pulls from these same themes first appeared in the original game though it was limited to being just a one-on-one battle. I have fond memories of playing Super Mario Kart with my Mom and brother. My Mom doesn’t play a lot of video games, but we’ve enjoyed playing all of the Mario Karts throughout the years and have enjoyed playing a tremendous amount of Mario Kart 8 especially together throughout the pandemic. One of our favorite Mario Kart memories was of me telling her when I was very young to “stay out of the mud, Mom!” on the two Choco Island courses. As I revisited the game today, I was still impressed just how snappy the controls are even though drifting in particular is tough to take advantage of. There is a big focus on your lap times in Super Mario Kart that has vanished from the series today. It makes sense it would be such a big focus here given each course is five laps long and the difficulty is fairly strict. While there may only be a few themes, most of the courses have distinct ideas within them, such as jumping across the river from the broken bridge in Donut Plains 3, navigating the mud lake in Choco Island 2, and jumping over the track in Mario Circuit 2. Despite the chaos caused by items, there really is a core elegance to the game best exemplified in Rainbow Road. There aren’t a ton of obstacles on the final track, but the narrow road lacking guard rails keeps you incredibly focused on making precise movements to take tight corners and dodge rainbow thwomps. Super Mario Kart is thankfully widely available at the moment as anyone with a Nintendo Switch Online membership has access to the game via the Super Nintendo app. You’ll be in for some whiplash if you haven’t experienced it prior, but I really think it’s awesome to check out and see the humble origins of the series.  Mario Kart 64 (N64, I played on my Wii Virtual Console copy and raced as Wario) Time and place, Mario Kart 64 is perhaps my favorite Mario Kart game and cemented my love for the series. I have fond memories growing up with Mario Kart 64 not just of playing the game with my Mom and brother, but also playing the game with my cousins in Virginia when I went to visit them over Summer breaks. The series transitioned wonderfully into 3D with Mario Kart 64 as you can now play with up to four people for the first time in splitscreen. The sixteen, all new tracks are legendary in the series as they are all exceptionally designed and offer exciting ideas and obstacles not really repeated amongst them. There is a lot of wonder to be had in Mario Kart 64 that’s actually rewarded since you can drive to Princess Peach’s Castle for example from Super Mario 64 in Royal Raceway or follow the train into the mountain in Kalimari Desert. As an early N64 game there are a lot of glitches easily possible to experience yourself if you’ve heard about them such as the ability to jump through a cave wall in DK Jungle Parkway to skip laps. While again sadly not a focus of this replay, Mario Kart 64 has the best battle mode in the series by far. Each arena feels incredibly inspired and lends itself to unique strategies, including the series standout, Block Fort. Once again there are eight characters available to choose from, though Donkey Kong Jr. has been replaced with regular Donkey Kong and Koopa Troopa with now series stalwart Wario. Each of the racers now brims with personality thanks to newly added voice clips (Wario’s laugh is so good!) and more pronounced, but still hidden statistical differences. As I revisited Mario Kart 64 the excellent track design and overall vision hasn’t faded. Throwing shells at your rivals still feels more satisfying here than in future games thanks to the reliable physics and dramatic impact racers suffer when hit. Speaking of shells, you can have three circling you at once now and the dreaded blue shell is introduced! The biggest surprise I had revisiting Mario Kart 64 on 150cc is just how absurd the rubberbanding AI is. If you are unfamiliar, basically as you pull away from the computer opponents through good driving and item use, to keep the race competitive the AI will then burst forward as if releasing a rubber band to overtake you. The problem with MK64 is that the rubberbanding is out of control as you are constantly fending off your two closest rivals. It makes every race an exciting nailbiter, but it’s just too much. While you can’t restart a race in a grand prix, you can thankfully abuse the fact that you can restart a race an infinite amount of times if you place 5th or worse which is handy during last minute upsets. This is of course far less of an issue if you are playing with friends or family, but it is a bummer the AI is the way it is. Overall, I still had a blast revisiting Mario Kart 64. It is still available until March 2023 to purchase on Wii U or you can enjoy it as part of the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pass if you want to relive it yourself.  Mario Kart Super Circuit (GBA, I played on my 3DS ambassador version and raced as Yoshi) Mario Kart Super Circuit was historically my least favorite Mario Kart game. It is the only return of the series to 2D and it looks sharp and colorful. There are five original cups that offer a total of twenty new courses and all twenty courses from the original Super Mario Kart are unlockable. This was by far the biggest Mario Kart until the DLC for the original Mario Kart 8 gradually raised its total number of courses from 32 to 48. The problem with Mario Kart Super Circuit is that it is absurdly hard before you even factor in the random elements that are inherent to Mario Kart. Super Circuit introduced a grading system to Mario Kart. No longer is it just enough to get the gold trophy, with the grading system in its harshest form you must also do as well as possible. Coins appear again in this installment and serve three purposes: boosting your top speed, increasing your grade, and are necessary to unlock the Super Nintendo courses. I’m a completionist at heart, especially for my favorite game series, so back in the day I especially struggled repeatedly trying to conquer Super Circuit’s mighty challenge. I know I persevered to at least unlock all of the retro courses, but I know I didn’t get the best rankings on every challenge before quitting in frustration. Revisiting Super Circuit today was a far more pleasant experience because the goal I had set for my series replay was to just get gold trophies in every original cup on the highest difficulty so I could ignore the grading system. I cruised through the first four cups with relatively little resistance, but that final cup is still obscenely tough. The first course in the cup, Lakeside Park, is the toughest course in the series, not necessarily because of its turns which are tough to optimize, but due to its tricky coin and item box layouts and the fireballs that rain down from the sky with minimal warning from the nearby volcano, not to mention the other racers are at their most aggressive. Broken Pier and Rainbow Road in particular really speak to how technically demanding Super Circuit is. If you have a good handle on it, Broken Pier actually becomes the easiest course in the cup as you can take advantage of all the shortcuts in a way the AI would never do. For better or worse, the Mario Kart series has moved away from trying to cut down on your lap times as much as possible. While I’m glad there will never be another game as tough as Super Circuit, I was happy to revisit this game more prepared and less pressured to enjoy its uncompromising vision.  Mario Kart Double Dash (GameCube, my racing team was Yoshi and King Boo) Mario Kart Double Dash is both the transition to the more modern Mario Kart games and also the black sheep of the series. I had mixed feelings from my original time with the game as I wasn’t sold on its signature element, racing as a team of two drivers. It’s an interesting idea for sure especially if you play as a group since one player controls the driving and the other has to deploy their items strategically. Due to how complex the core mechanic is, hopping and holding items behind you like bananas for defense aren’t present here. Drifting however finally becomes a regular, useful mechanic in turning. You have to slide the stick left and right to build up your mini turbo boost which adds more skill to the mechanic. Like Super Circuit with its punishing difficulty before it, I also rejected Double Dash’s vision for the series at the time because I just wanted to race as one driver on standard karts which are both absent here. I also wasn’t a fan of Double Dash’s unique power items for each character since they added even more chaos to an already chaotic game. Revisiting Double Dash today though knowing it wasn’t the future of Mario Kart, I really began to appreciate what it did offer. First, I was really impressed by how good Double Dash looks still. I know I had it running via HD component cables on my Wii so it looked better than it did back in the day, but Nintendo really poured a lot of detail into Double Dash’s courses and lovingly crafted the character animation. While it is frustrating it slows down your Kart, my favorite detail is when the character in charge of items has fallen off and is struggling to get back up. It really sells just how frantic Double Dash’s chaotic races are. It is weird that getting hit by items is generally such a minor setback, but you get hit so often without the ability for proper defense it makes sense. While we are sadly back to sixteen tracks total, there are a lot of great tracks here including Peach Beach, Sherbet Land, Yoshi Circuit, and DK Mountain. Like Mario Kart 64 there are interesting areas to poke around on the tracks to find secrets like warp pipes and there are things you can do just because they’d be fun like driving along the top of the bridge in Mushroom Bridge. While originally one of my least favorite Mario Kart games, I really think Nintendo should bring Double Dash back with online play as it is a unique experience that stands distinctly apart from Mario Kart 8.  Mario Kart DS (I raced as ROB) Mario Kart DS is another of my favorite Mario Kart games. Its vision of the series is essentially what we have today and smart, subtle decisions offer massive quality of life boosts. While the online mode, which I don’t believe is still active, was certainly the star attraction, the addition of drafting is a game changer for Mario Kart. By trailing behind someone, you’ll notice little wind streaks start to form around your racer and if you maintain it long enough, you’ll burst forward. This is a far more elegant solution than rubberbanding to overtake players (which is still present) considering there is of course a risk element since you are setting yourself up to get blasted by a shell or a banana from whoever is in front of you. I also did not revisit the mission mode for this replay, but it’s still the gold standard for single player content in Mario Kart as it offered tons of tough, varied challenges to overcome and perfect. I really hope it will return someday. While not a terribly important feature, I also miss being able to craft your own pixel art emblem that shows up next to your name and on your karts. I loved crafting a Crono from Chrono Trigger avatar which I still use today (see below). While emblems understandably shouldn’t be widely seen online due to nefarious people out there crafting inappropriate ones, I do think they should bring it back for racing with friends as it is cooler than just seeing their Miis today.  Perhaps the biggest change in structure for the series is that Mario Kart DS established the number and divide of courses for the series for the next three games. In Mario Kart DS, there are eight cups, four with all new courses and four with retro courses for a total of 32 tracks. This is a very solid number of tracks that importantly you often won’t exhaust in one sitting and it is always so cool seeing the NES and GBA courses brought into 3D for the first time. Some of my favorite courses include Delfino Square, Desert Hills, Tick Tock Clock, and Airship Fortress. I like that these tracks and others broke away from the more classic themes explored in prior Mario Kart games like the standard grass, ice, and desert levels and instead leaned more heavily into Mario’s past adventures or had unique premises like Waluigi Pinball which takes place inside a pinball machine. I was having so much fun playing Mario Kart DS again that I also played through the retro cups and I knew I would then as well for Mario Kart Wii and Mario Kart 7 for my series replay.  Mario Kart Wii (I raced as Rosalina) Mario Kart Wii is my second favorite Mario Kart behind Mario Kart 8. I put a lot of time into Mario Kart Wii mastering every cup, playing locally with my friends and Mom, and also playing online. The number of racers participating in each race was bumped in Mario Kart Wii from 8 to 12 which makes every race even more wild. What I really appreciate though with this change, is that the online mode introduced the ability for two friends on the same couch and system to play splitscreen online together to take on the world. While guests didn’t get the same individual progression as the main player, just being able to play together was more than enough. Mechanically there isn’t too much difference between the Wii and DS versions however Mario Kart Wii did introduce half pipe segments to certain tracks that you could race up to get a burst of speed and introduced tricks that gave you boosts of speed off even seemingly tiny bumps in the road. There are of course new items here as is tradition. My favorite, which sadly remains exclusive to Mario Kart Wii, is the Thunder Cloud that first gives you a boost of speed, but will zap you with lightning if you don’t bump into someone to pass it off in time. There’s an awesome risk and reward dynamic as you try to maximize how much it can help without getting punished that is unique to the item. I had a lot of fun revisiting Mario Kart Wii because it feels almost entirely in line with how the modern games control. Drifting in particular gets rid of the stick inputs to charge turbo boosts which is how Mario Kart controls today. The track design of Mario Kart Wii is excellent and includes some of my favorite tracks in the series including Koopa Cape, Rainbow Road Wii, and Grumble Volcano. Koopa Cape is my number one most wanted track to return in the Booster Pass. All the turns are exciting and the underwater section with the water pushing you forward as you dodge lightning rivals the excitement of the two F-Zero courses in Mario Kart 8. My one big complaint of the game is because there are so many power items, including the POW block exclusive to Wii, you really can just get wailed on from so many directions all at once. Thankfully it didn’t happen too frequently in this replay, but it did still happen once or twice when I’d get hit by the blue shell, lightning, red shells, a blooper, and a POW block all back to back. It’s absurd. Still even the nonsense can’t detract too much from what Mario Kart Wii excels at which made it very fun to revisit.  Mario Kart 7 (3DS, I raced as Rosalina) The final game of my Mario Kart replay journey was Mario Kart 7, the direct predecessor of Mario Kart 8. While greatly overshadowed by Mario Kart 8, Mario Kart 7 is still an awesome game that laid the final foundation for Mario Kart 8 to perfect. The biggest changes are the addition of underwater and hang glider segments, the true return of coins which finally mitigates rubber banding AI, and finally the ability to feather the brake while accelerating which isn’t terribly important here, but is foundational for making Mario Kart 8’s 200cc mode work properly. Really the only things missing here from 8 are the antigravity segments, the double item storage from Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, and of course the unique items of Mario Kart 8 like the Super Horn. While not a game changer, Mario Kart 7 does of course have one unique feature over 8, its stereoscopic 3D effect which looks fantastic. The biggest jumps like the ones off Rock Rock Mountain and Maka Wuhu and particle effects like the falling cherry blossoms on Mario Kart 7’s Mario Circuit look spectacular in 3D. Speaking of courses, there’s a lot of excellent courses in Mario Kart 7. In addition to the three I mentioned I’d love to see Daisy Hills, Wario Shipyard, Rosalina’s Ice World, and Bowser’s Castle return in future games since they already chose four other great Mario Kart 7 courses for Mario Kart 8 already. I think if Mario Kart 7 had been on a home console and not so quickly replaced it would be more fondly remembered, but it is an excellent game well worth revisiting and I had a ton of fun doing so.  I had a blast revisiting all seven Mario Karts prior to Mario Kart 8. It was a lot of fun to track the progression of the series and revisit all 120 unique tracks between the seven games. I hope you enjoyed reading my latest blog. I’ll be back pretty soon with another blog, so I hope you look forward to it! Be sure to share your fond Mario Kart memories with me on my Twitter @JustinMikos. Until next time! Comments are closed.
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