Wii’s Mario Kart
April 30th, 2008 scarterb
I have to admit that I wasn’t really much of a “gamer” growing up. However, I was into Nintendo 64 at one point. I was a big Mario fan and Mario Kart was one of my favorite games. Watching the trailer for the new Mario Kart for Wii, I felt a big nostalgic and thought I’d blog about it. What makes Mario Kart so appealing? First, it combines all the familiar characters we knew as children, including Mario, Luigi, Peach, Princess, Bowzer, etc. The game is also appealing because of its use of space. The game allows players to choose from numerous environments to race in. (My personal favorites were Yoshi Mountain and Rainbow Road.) In this way, the game plays on the human desire to explore unfamiliar spaces. You get some sort of pleasure in exploring and uncovering secret routes and short cuts. Well, at least I do anyway. I also think the progressive gameplay is an intriguing element. The player gets to choose his or her own path to the finish line. The various elements in the game, such as the wild card each player can receive, enhance the gaming experience. If you obtain a lightning bolt, you can zap all other players. While they shrink in size, you remain the same and zoom past them. These elements can sometimes raise the difficulty level, making it that much more satisfying when you finish the race first. Another reason I like Mario Kart is because it was a family game. It brings people together. My cousins and I always played Mario Kart together. I think the game entertained our competitive spirits, a thing that a lot of games do. Fighting games and racing games are just among the many games that allow people to exercise their competitiveness. If the new Mario Kart plays on any of the same aspects that first made me gravitate towards the game, I think I’ll have to buy my very own Wii.
Entry Filed under: Game Log
2 Comments
1. mstarkey | May 1st, 2008 at 1:27 pm
Mario Kart was also my first real experience with videogames. Having never had a system growing up, and a complete lack of interest in videogames, provided me a very sheltered gaming experience when coming to college. For many people college experiences opens up new doors, and for me one of those was videogames. Being locked up in President’s Park for my freshman year, especially when the weather was poor, I sat in a dorm room and watched friends play Mario Kart and Super Smash Brothers for countless hours. The button mashing skills I employed when playing Super Smash Bros. was fun for a bit, but the advanced skill levels of all my friends discouraged me from playing. The simplicity of Mario Kart is what I enjoyed about the game, the controls are easy and the objective is winning a race. Besides the shortcuts and the items that were mentioned before in scarterbs blog, there is little strategy needed. The battle aspect of the game is fun too, but the trickery of my friends also made the game less desirable then regular Mario Kart. The first time I played battle, I was instructed to be Toad, not knowing that Toad is the initial target my friends aim at destroying. Within a few seconds of the game I was promptly eliminated, permanently tainting my feelings about Mario Kart battle. It would be interesting to see how the new Mario Kart for the Wii capitalizes on the nostalgia felt by old 64 players in combination with the advanced technology used in the Wii system. The use of the old characters and the basic racing game structure of the original Mario Kart will remain the same, but how will the new features of the Mario Kart for the Wii affect the overall game play?
2. scify_rd | May 1st, 2008 at 2:43 pm
Mario Kart on the 64 was one of the first games that I played competitively, along with Star Fox 64. I had been playing games for some time before that—I was deeply in love with the Sonic series of games back on the Sega Genesis (the day I got Sonic and Knuckles and started plugging the older Sonic games into it was one of my happiest days earlier on), I had played a few of the Super Mario Bros. games on the SNES, and I had played a few of the coin-op games in restaurants and the like. But Mario Kart 64 was the first game that I really played competitively against another person that was there with me at the time (as opposed to simply competing for a spot on the high score board). I lost track of how many hours, how many days, my friends and I would sneak into someone’s house and play Mario Kart or Starfox, either trying to complete the “story” modes (the series of races in Mario Kart, or the actual story series of missions) or simply fighting against each other in the two-player mode head-on-head modes. Somehow, two-on-two battles constantly repeated across the same couple of stages never really got boring. Mario Kart was an easy enough game that there were never really issues of one of us being much more skilled than the other, and thus holding a clear advantage, so the outcome of a match was never really decided ahead of time. So we always had fun, and we always presented each other with a challenge.