Chris Allcock

Released just two years after Mario Kart: Double Dash, the shortest gap between entries to date, there was no doubt that Mario Kart DS had a lot riding on its success. The chaotic, weapon-heavy races of the series’ Gamecube outing had alienated some of Nintendo’s audience and core titles were thin on the ground, but with a broad DS consumer base already enticed by titles like Brain Training there was a delicate balance to be maintained if Mario Kart were to maintain its popularity.

Mario Kart DS was to be a straightforward title, one that sought to take advantage of the DS’s improved connectivity and provide a “best-of-breed” entry without anything that might be perceived as extraneous gimmickry. Racers were once again driving solo, slipstreaming returned and was given a visual makeover, and the density of weapons fire was greatly reduced. Possibly the greatest demonstration of the game’s rebalancing is the remade Double Dash circuit Mushroom Bridge; all but one of that track’s many shortcuts and its speed boosts have been stripped away, leaving an experience that’s almost sedate by comparison.

Yoshi Falls has tropical palm trees and a jungle drum soundtrack – a dino invasion of DK Island?

For some, it was a balance that had shifted too far. It was easier than ever to pull off drift boosts and thanks to the width of the new circuits, savvy players soon discovered that they could “snake” along straights, repeatedly drifting this way and that to earn boost after boost. As the technique spread across the internet, online matches became a stratified tussle with elite players cramming as many drifts into a single corner as possible, and bemused novices who couldn’t or wouldn’t follow suit being left inexorably behind.

With no number of blue shells able to disguise the frustration at opponents who were just plain faster than you, there were more than a few cross words to be had. Many of these were directed at Nintendo themselves, with demands to “patch the game” and eliminate snaking (and just as many demands to maintain the status quo) showing just how intertwined the relationship between developers and players had become in an online age. While the game was never updated – the DS’s online flexibility was far removed from the PCs and consoles of its time – it’s fair to say that the majority of Mario Kart DS‘s 20 million-strong audience were oblivious to the hardcore’s discontent.

Nor would snaking spell guaranteed success in single-player races, as the preferred racing order and rubberbanding returned once more. Mario Kart DS‘s single player was a thoroughly challenging affair after Double Dash, with blue shells and lightning bolts causing trouble for players even on 50cc races. While there were few unlockables this time around – the number of karts had been reduced and were now driver-specific – there were still secret characters for completionists to discover. More intriguing were the large number of single-player missions; familiar territory to anyone who’d experienced arcade racers like the Project Gotham Racing series. Players were tasked with bite-size challenges like racing through gates or driving backwards before being ranked on their performance and ultimately coming up against Bowser’s minions in boss battles. Despite having a significant amount of content, these missions were entirely optional and offered no larger reward – had they been presented in combination with full races, they could have provided the series’ first true solo campaign.

Mario 3 blocks and bricks line Figure-8 Circuit, which acts as a gentle introduction.

Not that solitary players had to content themselves with racing alone; most of the barriers to entry that had thwarted Super Circuit had been removed by the DS’s hardware; a way to exchange friend codes was all that was needed to battle opponents globally. The single-cart “download play” feature returned, too, letting players effectively demo the game to their DS-owning friends. With Nintendo’s online infrastructure in its infancy, there were a number of sacrifices – items couldn’t be dragged or spilled and twelve of the game’s courses simply weren’t selectable – but there was a definite joy in being able to finally test your Mario Kart metal against distant friends or forum rivals alike.

As had come to be expected, the title displayed a high level of visual and audio polish, with polygons wisely spent on the characters rather than the scenery. With no DS Mario offering as yet, the game chose Super Mario Bros. 3 as its motif – a decision that delighted older players and allowed for many tongue-in-cheek references, like the Angry Sun disgorging fire snakes into the twisting Desert Hills course. While several of the tracks were unambitious or rehashes of what had come before (Wario and Waluigi’s circuits in particular borrowed heavily from Double Dash) there were more hits than misses – the sharp angles of Delfino Square and Airship Fortress would go on to become fan favourites.

Upscaling retro courses would continue in future titles as Nintendo upped the driver count to 12.

Every Retro Grand Prix, meanwhile, was arranged nearly into an entry from each generation, with some faring better than others. While the Gamecube courses transferred remarkably well considering the DS’s reduced horsepower, the SNES tracks had been radically scaled up to provide a meaty race within a three-lap structure and lost much of their challenge and distinctiveness as a result. With the entire back-catalogue as yet unplundered, some of the returnees seemed questionable – the Shell Cup was mostly composed of starter courses while unloved entries like the N64’s Banshee Boardwalk padded out the later cups. Even so, with retro tracks now standard fare for any Mario Kart, it’s important to remember how impressive the remastering seemed at the time.

Taken as a whole, Mario Kart DS was an impressive if risk-averse entry, and received the critical acclaim it deserved, striking a better balance of racing and items than Double Dash and giving the DS a flagship title for its core audience. To assess the game’s legacy, one need look no further than its successors – it set the template for Mario Karts to come, with everything from its mixture of new and retro courses to the layout of its HUD being reprised in future titles. Even without analogue steering, anyone who returns to the title today will acclimatise easily, slipping back into a well-worn pair of driving gloves. With the closure of Nintendo’s WFC service it’s the first Mario Kart to be lost, at least in part, to time, but so much of its spirit survives in other titles it’s hard to feel too much loss. Mario Kart DS is dead – long live Mario Kart.

(Images taken from Nintendo UK )

Delaying Mario Kart 64 couldn’t have been an easy decision. Much had been made of the Nintendo 64’s four controller ports, one-upping (or rather, two-upping) the upstart Playstation and ensuring that games like Bomberman and Worms could be played the way nature intended. By sacrificing team members to the timely completion of Super Mario 64, Nintendo were leaving themselves without a title that supported multiplayer of any kind, least of all their promised utopia of four friends battling for supremacy.

Launching in Japan in late 1996, it became  apparent that the game – which had once been obliquely dubbed “Super Mario Kart R” – may have lost its SNES prefix, but the gameplay was an evolution, rather than a reinvention, of a title that had overcome critical indifference and become an enduring classic. Nips and tucks had been made: coins were the most notable casualty, though few lamented their passing. Additionally, the game’s four-tiered driver stats had been reduced to three, inadvertently ensuring that arguments over who got to play as Toad would last for the rest of the console generation.

Mario Kart 64’s title screen would change as players completed objectives, but most content was available to dive into right away.

It was to be two under-sold mechanics that would go onto define not just the Mario Kart franchise but also shape the wealth of copycat karting games to come. In this new edition, pushing a power-slide to the very brink of catastrophe and then slamming the analogue stick in the other direction would see your smoke trails turn from white to orange, netting you a handy burst of speed when you exited the turn.

While the intricacies of drift-boosting would change in the games to come, here was an implementation that allowed skillful players to boost several times around even the gentlest of bends, opening up a whole new level of depth. Slipstreaming, while curiously redundant in a game so heavily weighted towards dragging your items as shields, was also introduced in Mario Kart 64 and has made a number of reappearances (to much better effect) since then.

While there were relatively few new items considering the imagination that the Mario series has always been famous for, the headliner of Mario Kart 64‘s arsenal became one of its most notorious. The blue shell would zoom around the circuit at high speed, blatting aside anyone unlucky enough to get in its way before seeking out the first-place player and exploding in a ball of polygonal fire. Gifted surprisingly rarely considering the reputation they’ve come to earn, the blue shell was either a canny way of levelling the playing field between players of different skills, or a punishment for doing well and the downfall of Western civilisation – a view that normally depended on whether you’d just been on the receiving end.

“Fake” Item Blocks made their first appearance, and were far harder to distinguish than in future installments.

The blue shell was also one of the few weapons that could push past the stockpile of goodies players built up as they raced. Not only could single items be tugged along behind your kart to absorb the impact of an attack, but shells now came in orbiting packs of three, meaning that just brushing your opponent could be enough to send them tumbling. Seeing players armed with six red shells wasn’t uncommon, a frustrating arsenal that would later become the special weapon of just two characters in Mario Kart: Double Dash. Weapons were retained during collisions, which led to protracted exchanges of fire between human players and should have been enough to see off the CPU opposition… were it not for one of Mario Kart 64‘s most divisive decisions.

While the running order was no longer determined by the player’s own character, certain drivers would once again be picked out to act as the player’s rivals. Unlike Super Mario Kart, however, these opponents were artificially and continually placed to snap at the player’s heels – a mechanic usually referred to as “rubberbanding”. These rivals would buzz around your character so closely that they’d inevitably crash into, and deduct from, your defensive items over and over again, spinning out of sight only to return unscathed a moment later at speeds any human would find impossible.

While rubberbanding in racing games was not uncommon – some claimed it provided an action-packed race regardless of your skill level – the approach had become increasingly criticised as control systems gained the fidelity to emulate the skill of real driving. Even on 50cc settings, being jostled and harassed often diminished any sense that the player was improving, as well as making attacks seem powerless and feats of skill unimportant. It was also a decision that could wreak havoc in a two-player Grand Prix; a trailing human player would get caught up in the rabble trying to fight past particularly aggressive AI for a stab at first place. Sadly, it would be a dilemma Nintendo would continue to struggle with in years to come.

In a series renowned for its visual polish and art direction, Mario Kart 64 contained a number of interesting quirks and oddities, some of which showed Nintendo’s experimental design process at work. For one, the game had three completely different HUDs that the player could switch between at any time; the (now standard) Player List & Map combo, an all-but-useless speedometer and an abstract representation of each player’s relative position. Additionally, player actions were overlaid with bizarre onomatopoeia, with “Boing!”, “WHIRRR” and (a personal favourite) “Poomp!” accompanying hops and impacts.

Coming so soon after Mario 64, seeing Peach’s Castle tucked away as an afterthought was an impressive display of horsepower.

Other unusual features included the ability to dynamically adjust the music volume, a feature mapped awkwardly to the L button and therefore barely accessible during normal play unless the player owned a friendly octopus. Equally redundant was a single control meant to move the camera further back from your kart – but since the player effectively was the camera, all this did was rapidly (and nauseatingly) fiddle with the field of view. The rear-view mirror, sadly, did not make a reappearance.

Looking back, it’s clear that Nintendo were determined to use every last polygon to explore a wide variety of terrain for their track designs. While the environments themselves stuck to familiar motifs, the diversity of their layout and how they made use of “true” 3D was impressive. Unfortunately, with so many ideas on display, it was perhaps inevitable that some would fare better than others. Highlights included the bumpy, Motocross-inspired terrain of Wario Stadium and the almost SNES-flattened ground and right-angled turns of Bowser’s Castle, while Yoshi Valley (a tangled maze of intersecting routes) simply didn’t work. One route was demonstrably fastest, so experienced players would sail onto the second half of the course (an inexplicably barren meadow) leaving newcomers confounded and annoyed.

Equally infuriating were the courses that set you back a full minute for taking a hit mid-jump, or ones that delighted in simply blocking the way ahead with a train or giant egg. It culminated with DK’s Jungle Parkway, a track which sped its racers across a huge gap only to leave them facing in the wrong direction, necessitating an awkward about-turn from each and every player. The game’s soundtrack was consistently enjoyable, at least, with first-time composer Kenta Nagata contributing several themes that would go on to become series staples.

Much like its forebearer, Mario Kart 64 relied on its multiplayer to make the most of what were, at its core, still inherently fun and compelling gameplay mechanics. The N64’s first four-player game required a few technical sacrifices – there was no music, and the lack of a frame rate lock meant that some tracks ran at almost twice the normal speed – but the battle mode in particular benefitted greatly from a 3D overhaul. The most successful courses were those that were practically shooter-like in their construction, allowing for multi-level assaults and quick escapes.

Toad’s Turnpike made good use of 3D, squeezing players between looming vehicles that could change lanes on a whim and send you tumbling.

While battle mode remained a highlight, it didn’t have the lasting impact of its ancestor. Super Mario Kart remained something of an oddity within the SNES library, which meant that battle mode did too, but the youthful N64 would soon offer many ways to step out of the go-kart and hunt your friends down in first-person, all of which challenged Mario Kart for the multiplayer throne. In years to come, the console would also see more technically accomplished racing games attempt to topple the series – usually substituting in hot property like the newly born South Park in their efforts to do so.

Yet despite the suddenly crowded playing field, Mario Kart 64 was once again a sales success – and this time, the critics were on-board. While the game received a solid string of 8s and 9s from the press, it was noted that compared to the N64’s launch titles – games Mario Kart 64 had once been planned to sit alongside – there was little evidence of radical thinking. While Super Mario 64 had just redefined the platformer and Pilotwings 64 had taken full advantage of all that 3D space could offer, Mario Kart 64 had done little more than (as one critic put it) “soup-up” the original without addressing some of its fundamental problems.

Yet for all its faults, the game laid the groundwork for modern Mario Kart titles – not for nothing did other companies chase its popularity and charm well into the dying days of the N64. Rough and ready in parts, gloriously future-thinking in others and sometimes just plain baffling, Mario Kart 64 did a lot with a little – for better or worse – and set the series on a course that would remain largely unaltered for the next eighteen years.

(Images taken from http://nintendo.co.uk)