My experience with Super Mario Kart is, strangely for how many copies it sold, limited almost purely to emulation. My cousin had a copy of the game, and I played it with him once, but by the next time I came back to his house he had replaced his SNES with an N64, and Super Mario Kart with Mario Kart 64, so my exposure was almost nonexistent during the period in which people actually had SNESs in their homes. I've never found a cartridge of the game out in the wild, so my first acquisition of an officially licensed copy of the game was with my SNES Classic. I'm trying to work through several of the games on the delightful little box and really enjoyed F-Zero, so I decided to move onto Super Mario Kart next.
This is a tough review for me. I've always enjoyed Mario Kart 64 as my favorite of the Mario Kart series, although Mario Kart 8 certainly gave that classic a run for its money. So I'm going to try to review this game through the eyes of someone playing it in 2017 but also reviewing it next to its peers, and in light of its importance in gaming history.
There can really be no doubt that Super Mario Kart is a titanic milestone in gaming history. The most important accomplishments of this game is in laying the groundwork for future and beloved Kart racing games, of which the Mario Kart series and Diddy Kong Racing are my absolute favorites, and establishing the Mario universe as not being limited to platforming games, opening the door for a dizzying array of truly excellent spinoff titles including the Mario sports games, the Mario Party series, and all of the different Mario RPGs.
So Super Mario Kart is important, and that must be commended and reflected in the review. But is it a good game? It certainly has some excellent elements to it! The visual presentation here is quite delightful, with a bright and popping color palette at play, nice animations for the racers, and beautifully designed and programmed courses. It's not quite as good as the presentation in F-Zero, but having the ability to have two players explains this, and that's really the meat of the game. For example, a casualty of having two players is that while playing in single player mode, you can only see half the screen, with the map displayed on the other half.
The sound is also excellent, with catch track after catchy track, and sound effects that will be familiar to anyone who's ever slipped on a banana, activated a star, or grabbed an item out of a box. It's amazing just how much this game established for the series, and how closely each subsequent iteration has adhered to the original.
The controls are very good. They are responsive, and each racer controls a bit differently, making controlling each racer a completely new experience.
The game has plenty to do, with 4 separate cups with 5 tracks each for a total of 20. You can race each of these, and if you can get first place in the first 3 cups, you will unlock the last cup. The game really thrives in the two player mode, however, and really opens up the eyes to the potential of what could have been there in F-Zero. Both racing against your friends and doing the battle mode against them make the game a ton of fun, and give it nearly infinite replay value, similar to all of the subsequent iterations of Mario Kart.
There were some elements of the game that chafed a bit, however. Super Mario Kart struggles with the same AI issues as F-Zero, in that it's nearly impossible to get a substantial lead over the second place person due to the limitations of being able to place all eight racers on the map in real time. It's slightly better than F-Zero in this regard, but it was definitely noticeable that while people get in your way all the time while you are trying to catch up, the AI rarely mess with each other, giving them a clear path to catch up to you once you hit a wall or go off the road slightly.
The courses were also a bit lacking in originality a lot of the time. It seemed that the game had only about 7 themes, and each course was based on one of these themes. There are the grass courses, the mud courses, the haunted courses, the Bowser Castle courses, the ice courses, the beach courses, and the one of a kind Rainbow Road. This meant that there were a lot of rehashed concepts for the courses, which was kind of disappointing, but is almost certainly due to the limited cartridge space. Compared to a game like Mario Kart 64, however, with its huge array of variety between courses, Super Mario Kart feels very repetitive and boring after a while, given that you're splitting 20 courses between these 7 themes, necessitating a great deal of reused assets. Only when you introduce two players does the game receive a new jolt of life, but this does make sense given the focus the developers put on the two player aspect of the game.
All in all, Super Mario Kart is both good and important, although it is definitely more important than it is good. It's definitely worth a play if you've never played it before, but don't be surprised if you, like me, find yourself being impressed at how much has stayed the same in the Mario Kart universe from 1992 to the present, but also find yourself wanting to power up your Wii U or Switch and play Mario Kart 8 instead. I'll give Super Mario Kart a 9.0/10.
I'm still finishing up the percussive game I referenced earlier, and after that I'm going to circle back around and finish The Legend of Dragoon, which I reviewed months ago but never actually finished. So it may be a few weeks before a new console edition of What I'm Playing, but I am going to finish up my handheld game over the weekend in all likelihood. I'll also be debuting a brand new series here next week, so stay tuned!
-TRO
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