Why Super Mario Kart is even more unfair than real-life karting
Super Mario Kart (1992)
Super Mario Kart (1992)
That Mario lad seems to get everywhere, doesn’t he? You’ve got to give him his dues, because for a portly fellow he doesn’t half play a lot of sports. I make that football, tennis, golf, basketball… when I picked up one of the NHL games for GameCube, I half-expected to see Mario’s fat head pop up alongside the realistic players, come out with a reused voice sample, and then score a gorgeous penalty.
But back in 1992, Mario was just a compliant chubby guy who jumped about the place and made peace gestures to the camera. Then suddenly, some nutter at Nintendo wanted to make a kart racer, and a Sensible Suit insisted that they front-end it with Mario characters. Hence, Super Mario Kart was born.
Mario was quite used to rough treatment by this time. After all, he had faced down Bowser a few times, ran the gauntlet with the Hammer Bros, had many a brush with Boo Buddies, swam with spiteful Bloopers, had his bum singed by lava… he even found himself getting chased down by the sun itself, in a particularly angry mood.
But what about the rest of his pals? Would they be ready for the rough stuff of karting? I ask this, because it’s a legitimate concern that I have experience with; I went go-karting myself recently, an activity I always enjoy. But by God, does it give your body a right battering or what?
In the first instance, the steering is crazy heavy. You’ll climb into the kart with the express intention of hitting every apex like it owed you money, of course. But you’ll have as much luck leading a rhino in interpretive dance. No power steering here, you’ll need to pit your arms and shoulders against the wheel and see which one gives in first. I love all that though, it’s part of the battle isn’t it?
Well, your kart hates you before you’ve even begun. You’ve now got to reckon yourself with the fact that you’re up against a number of other competitors who may be self-proclaimed professionals, or worse still, rank amateurs.
To say the least, it is a thrilling thing to throw your kart into a corner and just hope and pray that the person in front of you whom you’re about to overtake is a) not legally blind such that they have no idea that you’re there and b) in good enough control of their own vehicle that they don’t spin it sideways into your oncoming kart, giving you a guaranteed bout of whiplash and a big old bonk on the nose.
Even if you do crash, the fun doesn’t stop there. You’ll probably not have any kind of reverse gear available to you unless you’re in big boy machinery, so you’ll have to shamefully put your hands in the air and request help.
A yellow flag is then thrown, warning all drivers on the track that there’s an incident somewhere and people are exposed on the live racing track, so could you please slow down and not mutilate the help with your furious driving.
Well, like a bull is seemingly drawn to the colour red, you’d better believe that this yellow flag will cause the rest of the field to start charging beyond top speed. This is completely against the rules of course, and crashes at a frightening speed can easily result, but the main contender is temporarily out of the race – and the rest will be damned if they’re gonna let this opportunity pass them by.
And if you’re driving out there and a yellow flag is raised for some other luckless sap, then slow down at your peril because if you show this terrible weakness then you’re only going to be overtaken, and there ain’t nothing you can do about it. I’ll say this, though: deliberate crashing and willful ignorance of yellow flags is one thing. You can contend with that, and you’ll still come out on top if you’re good enough. Be lightweight enough, and sabotage the other karts before the race starts, and you’ve pretty much guaranteed yourself success.
But I’ve never seen a real-life karter activate Invincibility Stars at will, throw infinite numbers of fireballs or Poison Mushrooms or bananas after you, or just simply jump over any hazard that they decided they didn’t want to drive into at that point in time. In Super Mario Kart, you’ll have all of that in your face, with severely rubberbanded AI to boot.
The whole thing certainly looks a bit dated now, as you drive around a Monopoly board landscape with only one half of the screen to work with. But it had rear view mirrors, and multiplayer, which was exciting. No sarcasm here, that’s genuinely pretty good stuff, since F-Zero didn’t have either of those things.
The Battle mode was just ter-rif-fic as well, where you and a pal had to track each other down around particularly well made arenas and pummel each other with whatever weapons you could find. After that, the both of you could go do a co-op Grand Prix, or just race each other for neighbourhood supremacy.
Back to the single player. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe might look like an entirely different universe to the SNES original, but the fact is that all of the juice served up in the latest game on Switch could mostly be found in Super Mario Kart as well.
You’ve got a selection of characters, four cups (with five tracks each), the essential items, multiplayer options, esoteric wild music, all backed by a good sensation of speed, especially when you take Bowser to the 150cc events and run the race pretty much sideways. It’s all there in Super Mario Kart, right from day one.
There are some annoyances in this game that were ironed out as the series progressed, however. For one thing, the items available in each race are actually limited – once you grab an item box, or more accurately once you run an item strip over, it becomes used up for the entire race.
You’ll need to change your racing line on each lap as a result, making it all the more likely that you’ll run into one of Yoshi’s stray eggs, ruining your race and leading to much weeping and gnashing of teeth.
When you do get an item, it’s probably not going to benefit you very much. No Crazy Eights or Golden Mushrooms here – you’ll most likely get another two useless coins, a banana that you can’t fire very well and has no use defensively, or a green shell that’ll just plonk back off the wall and hit you instead.
Better than that is the programming of the red shells, designed to home in on the racer in front of you. Well, what tends to happen is that the bloody thing launches from your kart and immediately veers off course into the walls. Useless. You might get a mushroom though, and that’ll help you take shortcuts through the painfully flat tracks, though it might just as quickly launch you into a dancing fireball à la Bowser instead.
Finally, the difficulty. If you can take the chequered flag at the Donut Plains 3 track on 150cc speed, then I’m telling you, you can do anything. You are possibly more machine than human. A win there is worth two anywhere else, and if you drop into the water there even once, I’d say you’re already finished. For all its physical challenges, at least real-life karting doesn’t tend to bring you on underwater dips.
Your character of choice also has a huge bearing on how you play, what kind of turns you can get away with or who you can try to bully off the track, that sort of thing. And it was a supreme achievement back in the day to get your chosen hero onto that top step on the podium, to claim the golden Mario head trophy at the end of the 150cc Special Cup.
The whole tournament comes to a thrilling climax at the infamous Rainbow Road. No walls to be found anywhere, for heaven’s sake. One false move and you’re off, and your race is over. Now why can’t we have that sort of ruthlessness towards pilchard drivers at the real life karting track?
5 January 2024