Why Mario Kart 7 is as mundane as building your own kart
Mario Kart 7 (2011)
Mario Kart 7 (2011)
When you’re at that tender young age, the age where you have far more ambition and imagination than common sense, you and your pals quickly and readily agree to wildly lofty projects.
We had all played a bit of Mario Kart. And we’d all seen other, richer kids on our street, receiving go-karts of their own at Christmas, nippy little pedal jobs that could go as fast as your little legs could rotate the pedals. We thought we’d have a bit of that action for ourselves. So three of us decided one day that we were going to build our own go-kart. How hard could it be?
Well, aren’t those always the words that precede doom. Ours really was a meagre effort of a go-kart, though I struggle to pick out the reason. It might be because we were all about 10 years old and had absolutely no woodworking or carpentry experience between us, not to mention no knowledge in engineering and aerodynamics.
It might have also been that we clearly lacked the strength to use any of the tools we’d secretly pilfered from one of our dad’s toolboxes, including a proper sawtooth blade - I swear I was using that thing for about 30 minutes, and in the end I only made what looked like woodrot in the big piece of timber on my “workbench” (the grass verge in front of my house).
I can’t say I was pulling my weight during this ill-fated project either. I have, to this day, absolutely no ability to build, craft or do anything with my hands really, except handing over money to real men who are far more qualified than me. I thought we might have been rescued by such a real man when a family friend, an actual adult, noticed what we were doing.
Rather than ask us why on earth we were playing with Stanley blades, hacksaws and hatchets, he proceeded to take the saw from me and use it properly. This meant he was able to cut through some of those planks in a lot less time than the 12 hours it would have taken me. This was a proper man at work, sawing with one hand while smoking a cigarette.
We did eventually cobble some semblance of a go-kart together, although it really was more of a wooden board on old cartwheels, with an ill-advised rope-pulley system for steering. Still, even putting that craft together was one hell of an achievement. And while I’m always loath to give other people credit for their work, I have to give props to our stand-in saw man, who you’d hope never parented children himself given how liberal he was with rusty DIY tools.
Alas, our glory and pride was short-lived, because not one of our four wheels were the same size, and when we took the kart for its first test drive, the thing got ten feet before collapsing into a sad pile of dirty, slightly dampened wood. Thankfully it wasn’t going at high speed, but only because, again, we were 10 and we didn’t have much strength in our shoulders to give it a proper push.
I’m just awful glad I wasn’t the one sat in the driver's seat when the thing fell apart. That was another childhood dream dashed, or more of a childhood whim, and from that day forth we resolved to only play with karts in a virtual setting - and we’d spit on the rich kids any time they whizzed past on their properly made karts.
There’s the lesson then, don’t go trying to make your own go-kart, car, hovercraft or time machine - leave it to the Japanese, who will do it better, more fashionably and much smaller than you ever can. You start to wonder, then, just how much they crammed onto Mario Kart 7, the obligatory Mario Kart for Nintendo 3DS, although the perhaps surprising answer is: not that much.
Oh sure, there’s four cups of regular tracks, and four more cups of retro tracks that make for a decent 32 courses, and you’ve got some unlockable characters, but I don’t think this really cuts it.
It’s a good game, of course, don’t get me wrong, but it really has been obsoleted in every conceivable way by Mario Kart 8. This game introduced underwater driving and gliding through the air, but really the only reason you might want to play this again is for the different course selection. There’s some pretty decent new tracks, and the retro selection is quite excelelnt.
The other possible reason you might be interested in Mario Kart 7 is the new kart customisation, but this doesn’t interest me greatly. Too many bad memories of trying to build my own kart, you see. Also, I’m much happier being able to blame my comrades for their bad teamwork, as well as their bad aerodynamics. And their bad chassis. And their bad axles.
This game really found itself sandwiched between the bonkers Mario Kart Wii (not really my thing either) and the champagne Mario Kart 8. That makes Mario Kart 7 sort of like cheap spam, served between two slices of bread that came from the heavenly loaves Jesus gave to his disciples. An edible game, possibly quite tasty to the right audience, but not really much more than that.
Worse, it’s a game that plays everything safe, and there is no greater cardinal sin for a Mario Kart game than being too afraid to go off the rails. Or, like our doomed old go-kart, everything falling off the axles altogether. What makes Mario Kart 7 most uncompelling these days is its drab single-player offerings.
Of course, there may have been a time, back in the day, when you and some pals all got together with your 3DSes and engaged in a bit of local Download Play - even if only one of you had the Mario Kart 7 cartridge, the other gamers could join in and play every track. But you were far more likely to get this kind of play out of Mario Kart DS, which sold millions more. Not to mention that this game’s online mode, fun in its day, is now defunct.
So realistically you are left with single-player options, but that’s where Mario Kart 7 becomes very limited in a hurry. There is no Mission Mode like Mario Kart DS, and there’s not even a Vs. Mode where you can race against the CPU in one-off races - you have to do the Grand Prix mode to race competitively.
And you’ll be finishing a lot of Grands Prix if you want to get everything, because the unlock system is a bit hare-brained as well: you get random kart pieces every 50 coins, then 100 coins and then every 200 coins thereafter.
But since you can only bag a maximum of 40 coins per Grand Prix, and some of the unlocks require over 10,000 coins… you see where this is going. It becomes quite the exercise in mundanity. You might even have time to build your very own homemade go-kart before you unlock every part in Mario Kart 7. Best of luck to you if do try building one, because Lord knows me and my dumdum pals never managed it.
13 June 2025
A fun read. Nice work!