Mario Kart is back and this time, it’s in high definition – but is it worth shelling out for?
“The fate of a video game system is often influenced greatly by the introduction of a single title”. This quote from Satoru Iwata during an investors’ briefing in May made it clear that, while Nintendo acknowledged their issues with shifting the Wii U, they had far from given up on it.
Is the 8th entry in the Mario Kart series the game that can turn the consoles luck around? Nintendo would certainly like it to be, and by running a promotion along side its launch that gives buyers a free Wii U game, they are trying to make it as attractive a purchase as possible. Coupled with Mario Kart’s appeal – not only to hardcore gamers who grew up shaving seconds off lap times, but to the casual crowd who would fire the game up at house parties – and on paper it stands a good chance.
But promotions and marketing won’t count for anything if the game isn’t up to scratch. That’s why I’m happy to report that, for the most part, Mario Kart 8 is an absolute riot.
Let’s start with the graphics. In terms of technical specs, Nintendo’s console is far behind Sony’s and Microsoft’s, but that doesn’t stop it from churning out some gorgeous visuals here. It’s vibrant, the frame rate is fast and consistent, and the bold colour palettes and designs of the characters contrast surprisingly well against the HD textures of their environments.
The tracks and the worlds they inhabit are full of detail, and just like Super Mario 3D world before it, many of them are given an ethereal glow thanks to the use of various lighting effects. Nintendo have created some jaw-dropping graphics that had me simultaneously praising them for bringing their creations into HD, and cursing them for not taking a further leap with their hardware. This is how you imagined the games of the future to look like when you were a kid; before you wanted gritty streets filled with litter that blows around like it would in real life.
The soundtrack has also been given a makeover, thanks to Nintendo ditching the midi in favour of live recorded music. Twisted Mansion’s spooky tune, made up of violins and organs, sounds like the kind of thing you’d find Johnny Depp stumbling through a graveyard to in a Tim Burton movie, whilst the almost Zappa-like melodies you’ll find during your descent down Mount Wario are a perfect fit to the cartoonish chaos that takes place during the race.
Although the visuals and music have had an overhaul, the same Mario Kart gameplay you know and love is here, and is just as fun as ever – albeit with a few tweaks. The newest feature the game is keen to shout about is the introduction of anti-gravity racing, which allows the track designs to become even more outlandish. Your vehicle switches to anti-gravity mode automatically, and during these segments, collisions between racers will give both involved a small speed boost.
Although you’ll be driving on walls, on twisting roads and at some points upside-down, it’s far from a roller coaster ride. The main purpose seems to have been to allow track designers a little more room to be creative, which makes the courses in Mario Kart 8 stand out from previous iterations. It’s not a huge game-changer, but when you’re driving up a waterfall or when you see the racers on the track beneath you, you’ll appreciate how this new approach mixes things up and manages to make Mario Kart feel fresh – even though the series is over 20 years old.
Mario Kart 8 differs in some pretty big ways to the last home console release, Mario Kart Wii. For example, the option to automatically power-slide is now gone. This wasn’t something I even noticed at first, but when playing with my fiancée (to whom drifting is something that happens before sleep, usually when I’m talking) the omission became apparent.
Bikes return alongside the karts, but they’ve lost the ability to pull a wheelie and get a speed boost, meaning that they don’t have the edge over the karts that they used to.
The ability to collect an item whilst holding one behind your kart has also been removed. Because of this, you’ll need to change your strategy to a more defensive one when you’re in first place. Ditching a shell you’ve been saving to collect a new item might only net you some coins, and going too long without an item shielding your rear leaves you open to a rival poppin’ a shell in yo ass and taking the lead.
One of the power-ups that you’ll want to hold on to when in pole position is the new super horn, which can be used to not only protect you from any racers that get too close for comfort, but to destroy the dreaded blue shell aswell. Other new weapons making their debut along side the usual arsenal of shells, bananas and mushrooms include the boomerang – which will return to you once thrown (and can hit opponents on its return journey), and the piranha plant – which will eat bananas and shells on the track whilst giving you small boosts, and will bite anyone who dares to come too close.
Although there are some big differences between the game and the last console entry, Mario Kart 8 does have a lot in common with its handheld predecessor, Mario Kart 7. The gliding and underwater segments, and top-speed increasing coins of the 3DS instalment return, as do the unlockable wheels and gliders that alter your speed, acceleration and grip.
Customising your vehicle with these parts should be exciting, but instead you’ll find yourself scrolling through all of the available pieces to find the best possible combination. There is no easy way of comparing them, which makes the whole process needlessly time-consuming. The best way to find out what works for you is to take a load out for a spin and see how it feels. When you unlock a new piece, the game is so eager to show you it that it will select it automatically when you’re next on the customisation screen, so make sure you make a note of your winning combination.
You’ll initially spend most of your time competing in the Grand Prix tournaments. There are 8 cups (four made up of new courses, and four comprised of retro courses from previous games), each containing four races, and they can be played in three classes (50cc, 100cc and 150cc). Unlike Mario Kart Wii, karts and bikes can be used regardless of the class selected. The classes are essentially difficulty settings and while it seems natural to start at 50cc, there is barely any challenge at all. If you’re a more experienced player, you might want to start at 100cc so that you not only get the adrenaline rush of taking on the AI, but also the thrill of seeing something new while doing so.
The new tracks on offer are some of the best in the series to date, and they contain plenty of shortcuts and opportunities to drift that you’ll want to seek out and exploit. In fact, by the time you get to the 150cc cup, you’re going to need to know the fastest way to get around the track, otherwise the AI will leave you for dust. Fighting to the front of the pack is enthralling as it is, but little details such as adding percussion to the background music when you’re in the lead and hiding your position number from the display as you approach the finish line really heighten the excitement.
The returning retro courses are mostly great with the exception of a few duds, but all have been remade with the same polish as the new courses and look just as stunning as a result.
Upon completion of your chosen cup, the game will award you a bronze, silver or gold trophy depending on where you placed. If you do manage to get a gold cup, you’re also awarded a rating between one and three stars. Getting three stars on all cups involves coming first in every race and this takes not only skill, but patience, as all it takes to ruin a perfect run is to fall victim to one single shell at the wrong time. Prepare for many moments where a half-hour of perfect driving is ruined at the last minute by a bob-omb knocking you off the track, causing you to scream expletives with such bile that you’d make Frankie Boyle blush.
When you want a break from the pursuit of virtual trophies, you can race for fun on any course of your choosing in VS mode, or you can try and beat time-trial ghosts set by the staff at Nintendo.
All the single player modes can be played in multiplayer locally too. This means that for the first time, you can play the Grand-Prix mode with up to four buddies in local multiplayer. The game looks just as detailed as when playing in single player, but there is a noticeable drop in frame rate. It’s still stable, and so this appears to be a conscious effort on Nintendo’s part to allow for the HD graphics whilst rendering a four-way split of the screen.
Local two player keeps the high frame rate of the single player experience, but at a cost. The screen is now split horizontally rather than vertically. Initially, you’d think that this is due to the more vertical nature of some of the tracks, but for all their gravity-defying shenanigans, it never feels like you need to see too far ahead; but even if you did, placing the camera further behind the character in multiplayer would allow the field of vision required. There’s no option to change this, and so again, this looks to be a deliberate change by the big N – perhaps the horizontal split is easier on the Wii U’s system resources.
Racing with your friends leads to some pretty fierce banter, and Battle mode – where you try and pop balloons on your opponents’ karts whilst protecting your own in small purpose-made arenas – used to be where you’d go to settle any arguments.
The mode returns here, which would be awesome… if there were still arenas to play in. They’ve all been binned off, and now the action takes place on one of eight courses from the cups.
The tracks simply don’t work well for this kind of play as they are far too big. You can still have fun with it, but after the terrible version of the mode on the Wii, Nintendo seem intent to tinker with the formula, instead of returning it to its former glory. Maybe in Mario Kart 9, eh?
As you get to grips with the tracks and start collecting trophies, you’ll start to unlock more characters to choose from. It’s no secret that the Koopalings can be unlocked (Mario Kart 8′s official website spoils its own unlockable cast) but they replace the likes of Birdo and Dry-bones. Quite why we couldn’t have had the previous roster and new additions is beyond me, especially when some of the other unlockable racers are just variations on those available from the start.
Rosalina is my favourite character in the Mario universe by far, and as she was my driver of choice on the Wii, I was glad to see her waving at me on the character selection screen after the game told me I’d unlocked someone. I’m fond of her because she actually has a backstory, and one that has a hint of tragedy to it at that, which makes her far more interesting than Peach or Daisy…
…Ok, so the whole “over-the-eye” hairstyle and her breathy, husky voice might of had something to do with it too. Regardless, she stood out.
But I was saddened to see that she now shrieks in the same over-dramatic way as the other princesses – except with a valley girl-esque accent that makes it sound like she might take a selfie as she drives up a ramp.
Once you’ve got to grips with Mario Kart 8, you’ll want to take the game online, and you’ll be amazed at just how much progress Nintendo have made with their online service. You can now join a friend whose game is in progress, so that rather than be limited to just a private lobby, you and your friends can now race with randoms together too. You can also choose to partake in tournaments or set up your own with your own rules (look out for the Nic Cage cup, coming soon – it’s the best place to drive angry!)
You can also take a second local player online, just as you could do on the Wii. However, there are concessions the game needs to make to keep everything as fluid as possible such as using character models with a lower polygon count for your rivals, and removing smaller back ground details; something I first noticed while competing in an online race, and found that my Mario was soon joined at the finish line by a Bowser who looked like he was made of painted cereal boxes.
Whilst the vertical split of the screen isn’t much of an issue offline, online it can feel like you’re at a disadvantage due to the screen-split restricting your view of upcoming sharp corners or nearby incidents.
Although the options for playing online with strangers has increased, communicating in-game is still subject to Nintendo’s usual limitations. You can only communicate with a small selection of positive messages such as “Hello”, “That was fun” and “Good game”, which feels a bit “1984″ but also leaves me with a strange desire to set up a lobby populated with only Bruce Forsyth Miis.
You get a little more freedom with friends, as you can have voice chat through the gamepad’s built in microphone, but this is only in between courses. It’s a step in the right direction, but it’s hardly enough time to allow the kind of friendly antagonising that online play needs.
There are other ways you can rub their nose in your victory though. Mario Kart TV, a feature that records highlight reels of every race (online and off) lets you share clips online or through Miiverse.
It’s far from a professional editing suite, but you can change what the highlight reel focuses on through a series of options, and the game does a really good job of automatically capturing pivotal or comical moments. The replays are made even better by the characters’ expressions, as they’ll gurn at other drivers when passing them (by now, you should be aware of the Luigi death stare, and if not, you should YouTube it immediately).
If you get a particularly good replay and want to show it off to the world, you can also upload the footage to YouTube directly from your Wii U, like so:
The beautiful graphics, great gameplay and improved online options mean that Mario Kart 8 is a great showcase for the Wii U console; but it’s not good at showcasing the potential of the gamepad. Here, the touch screen can be used to switch between motion and button controls, and will display either a horn, the map of the course or it can duplicate the main display for off-tv play. Aside from typing messages into Miiverse, that’s about it.
I’ve no doubt that Nintendo will find a unique application for the gamepad at some point, but it’s not what they need right now. They don’t need people to buy into the unique possibilities of the gamepad – they need people to buy into them as a company, and Mario Kart 8 is a brilliant advert for Nintendo. It’s a game that’s so full of neat little touches that it re-affirms the belief that no-one makes games quite like them. It’s fun, it’s frantic, and when you see the visions Nintendo can create on hardware that others have written off, it’s easy to get excited about what the company will do next.