Mario Kart MAYhem: Roundtable #2 – Our Favourite Mario Kart Game

Welcome to Part 2 of Vooks special event, Mario Kart MAYhem. To celebrate the upcoming release of Mario Kart 8, the team at Vooks will be bringing you content every week to reflect on why we love Mario Kart so much, and why it’s such a popular and long standing franchise.

That’s not all we’ll be doing either, as staff member Troy (aka StewPenguin) will also be streaming a different Mario Kart game each week until the game’s release date on May 31st – you can check them out every Saturday on the official Vooks.Net Twitch Account.

To top it off, there’s prizes to be won too! Each Friday, the team will be uploading a brand new roundtable tackling a topic we thought we’d all enjoy discussing about Mario Kart.

At the end of the month, each comment will automatically enter the prize pool to win some cool prizes on the eve of Mario Kart 8’s launch, so stay tuned and hold on as the team jumps into the ten games across the series’ twenty one year tenure and decides which one is their favourite. There will be five roundtables total, and that means you can earn up to five chances to win! Prizes will be announced shortly – but feel free to join in and share your favourite Mario Kart game. Which game was your favourite in the series? Let us know in the comments.

Did you miss our first roundtable, where we discussed our fondest memories of Mario Kart? Fear not! All opportunity for entries are open until the end of the month – so you can comment on Roundtable #1 and Roundtable #2 today and gain two entries in the competition. As mentioned previously though – only one comment per roundtable, we can’t allow duplicate entries on the same roundtable, unfortunately.

I imagine most of the fanbase are spitting out whatever they’re chewing / drinking right now, but Mario Kart Wii really was my favourite Mario Kart game to date. It’s a bizarre game to pick, but I do have my reasons. I think. Essentially, I’m not a huge fan of Mario Kart. Well, I am, but it’s definitely not one of my most favourite of Nintendo’s big franchises. As such, I never put much time into it and I never learned how to be good at it. Mario Kart Wii, for me, was a game designed for people like me. While that’s a bad thing for those who play more competitively and more seriously, it’s essentially designed for those who aren’t particularly good at Mario Kart but want to be.

The half assed tricks system added nothing besides superficial sparkles to the gameplay. The game itself was a huge, chaotically balanced project where items took priority to more skillful manoeuvrings like jumping, drifting and the ever elusive / controversial snaking. The whole game took the worst aspect of Mario Kart – the rubber banding design – and amplified it. Finally, as a shit player, I had a chance to win battles!

The other reason I still hold Mario Kart Wii close and dear to my heart is because it was online and it was probably the first Nintendo game that I really dug my heels into playing online. Yeah, it was an immensely frustrating experience, but I could finally play Nintendo games online.  Up until that point, all I was playing was Mortal Kombat Deception online as well as Resident Evil Outbreak and Halo 2. But Nintendo finally came to the online party, and while their offering was somewhat sub-par, it was still playable and damn if it wasn’t enjoyable.

Of course, I’ve since grown to appreciate the more competitive side of Mario Kart as I’ve matured – but it’s approachability makes it one of the Mario Kart games I’m regularly playing with my mates. Until Mario Kart 8, of course.

Even though it’s not the game in the series I’ve played the most, I would have to say Mario Kart DS is my favourite.

When it was release I was working at a restaurant as poor kitchen hand. This meant I worked late, finishing most nights anywhere from 11:00pm to midnight. I was 20 years old and was yet to get my drivers licence. My real drivers licence that is. I was also a fully fledged MK license holder.

Being that I didn’t drive meant that I had to catch public transport to get around the place and getting to and from work meant having to travel on two buses and a train. Also being this late at night and in Perth, there was usually a fair wait between transfers.

Having around one and a half to two hours worth of traveling gave me quite a bit of hands on time with my DS. Mario Kart is the kind of game that I could play for hours on end and also has the convenience of being able to be played for short periods of time. Activating sleep mode when transferring from bus to train also made it easy to get back into the action without much trouble.

With my short attention span, Mario Kart DS kept me entertained for much longer than most DS games did whilst traveling and without it I’m sure I would have been witness to more public transport horrors than one person should ever be subjected to.

It was also the first Mario Kart game I could successfully play while on the toilet, so it’s also got that going for it.

While my favourite memories of Mario Kart come from the oft-forgotten Super Circuit my favourite game overall remains Mario Kart 64. Sure, on a technical level, every Mario Kart game following 64 has managed to surpass or improve on the game’s formula – but the combination of four player split screen, battle mode and the fact it was the first 3D game in the series meant it was and continues to be something special.

When playing Solo in Mario Kart 64, it contained the classic 90s-style rubber banding, no matter how well you did the CPU did even better. It kept the game hectic and while now we’ve come to a place where this isn’t cool – it was once.
Split screen multiplayer on the same console, for both races and battle mode, were (for the time) a revolution. While most today consider it cheating, being able to see the screen of the guy or girl next to you meant you had to keep on your toes. It was another thing to process and added intensity to the races.

I know what you’re thinking, 90s kid loves his Mario Kart 64 – he’s blinded by nostalgia, Mario Kart 64 is rubbish now. Well alright maybe it is, it doesn’t hold a technical candle to any of the newer games especially Mario Kart DS and Mario Kart 7 which I both love too. But it’s my favourite game, I can go back and play it and it fits like a glove, it’s not a struggle to readjust like Super Mario Kart, Super Circuit, Double Dash!! or even Mario Kart Wii with its slip slide motion control rubbish.

Mario Kart 64 is like that crappy shirt you got years ago, it still fits by some miracle and your mum/wife/girlfriend/partner hasn’t thrown it out. Enjoys it, for all its flaws.

You might have guessed my favourite Mario Kart based on my favourite memory from last week, but for me there is no competition to Mario Kart Double Dash!! for my number one. Double Dash came at the perfect time in my early teens for it to become an obsession.

Firstly it had a wealth of completely new tracks. As great as the classic tracks were in later Mario Kart games, having an entire roster of never before seen tracks was fantastic. From the frantic loop of Baby Park, the sleek racing lines and alternate paths of Luigi Circuit to the flying up a mountain via cannon and rally driving back down again, Double Dash had all the variety I could ask for.

Double Dash introduced some iconic characters from the Mario universe into Karts for the first time as well. Baby Bowser and all the other babies, Toadette, Diddy Kong and more made for a much more interesting roster than past titles. Even better, you could choose two characters at a time, so you don’t have to limit yourself to one favourite! And with two characters being able to each hold two items, strategies within races opened up significantly.

Along with multiple characters at once came selectable karts to race with as well. You could drive a little barrel train, or Bullet Bill kart if you wanted to. The customised karts have been an enduring feature ever since (well, except for Mario Kart DS)

And finally it introduced what is probably my favourite feature, and one sadly absent from future titles, unique special weapons for each set of characters. The Baby Bros. Chain Chomp weapon was just so satisfying, watching your competitors drop past you, or get chomped by your barking Chomp. Bowser’s giant shell proved a formidable obstacle for your opponents, while the princesses had a more defensive shield that let you take items thrown at you, and throw them right back! These unique powers might not have been incredibly well balanced but they really made each set of characters feel unique, and give you another factor to think about when deciding your team.

I really like Double Dash.

My favourite game is based purely on nostalgia, with most of my childhood spent on Mario Kart 64. I became unbeatable, and still to this day, I know all the ins and outs (excluding cheaty shortcuts, which I never liked doing) and remain very hard to beat in a fair fight.

Mario Kart 64 established a lot of standards that we know and love today, like the drift turbos, the triple items, and really amazing and unique tracks.

I’ve always loved when N64 tracks get featured as retro tracks, with the N64 Rainbow Road being my favourite Rainbow Road to this day. And with it returning in Mario Kart 8, alongside Yoshi Valley even, makes me a little giddy!

I will say, however, that Mario Karts get better with each iteration (don’t talk to me about Double Dash, I just can’t play it). Mario Kart Wii, and Mario Kart 7, are my go to installments when it comes to a challenge between friends, but deep down, my favourite will always be the one that really got me into Mario Kart.

I’ve not had a huge amount of experience with the Mario Kart games. My first foray into this world was on my Uncle’s girlfriend’s little brother’s SNES, playing Super Mario Kart. Of course since I was playing by myself, I thought I was great at it. In the hour or so I played, I was beating every (mostly every) competitor on 50cc. To be fair, at the time, I was 6 years old. So you can imagine my shock when I first got to play Mario Kart 64 a few years later how badly I got beaten by my friends. But honestly, that didn’t matter. Look at those amazing 3D graphics. How many more levels were there? How much cooler was this WHOLE GAME? It was definitely my favourite.

My friends of course didn’t care about that, only about winning. However, I’ve always been a stubborn boy, so I kept working at it. I didn’t actually own an N64 until a few years later, so this family probably got sick of me going round there most days to challenge their kids to races, but that’s what having kids is all about, right? To date, my crowning shame came on a day when a new girlfriend challenged me to Strip-Mario Kart 64. That was a cold day, to be sure. I still have the game and a console with four controllers tucked away, I’m waiting for the day I can introduce my now two-year-old to the same fun that I had back in the day.

As we previously mentioned, posting a comment on this page sharing your favourite Mario Kart game (and why) will get you one entry to be in the running to wine one of our many prizes! Be sure to include your name and your email address with your comment, otherwise we won’t be able to contact you.

We can only accept one comment per roundtable, unfortunately. If you want to get a second entry in the competition, and haven’t already, feel free to share your Mario Kart Memory with us on last week’s roundtable!

Want to know what you might win? Follow Pink Gold Peach through to the final prize pool.