Mario Kart MAYhem: Roundtable #3 – Underrated and Overrated
Welcome to Part 3 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. The game for this upcoming week is Mario Kart: Super Circuit.
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 they find to be the most overrated and which one they find to be the most underrated.
There will be five roundtables total, and that means you can earn up to five chances to win! Feel free to join in and share your your opinion on this topic. Let us know in the comments!
Did you miss our first or second roundtable? Fear not! All opportunity for entries are open until the end of the month – so you can comment on Roundtable #1, #2 and #3 today and gain three entries in the competition. As mentioned previously though – only one comment per roundtable, we can’t allow duplicate entries on the same roundtable, unfortunately. The current roundtables are as follows: –
Roundtable #1 – What’s your fondest memory of Mario Kart?
Roundtable #2 – What’s your favourite Mario Kart game?
And with that, let’s get into the responses!
UNDERRATED
This might seem like the easy way out, since, in my opinion, most of the Gamecube’s library is criminally underrated. But there’s one game that really stood out and subsequently got me hooked on the Mario Kart series. I’ve been told I’m a hard sell, so it makes sense that I’d find the most underrated game to be Double Dash!! for it finally brought me to a point where I was interested in future iterations of the franchise. Double Dash!! was so weird to play – I’d tried the traditional way in both Super and 64 but Double Dash!! was not afraid to throw everything out of the window for the sake of change. And I thought it was a clever change. I don’t like it just because it’s different, I like it because that difference brought a whole new way to play to the fold. And for that, I respect it.
OVERRATED
This might be a little bit unexpected but I never really meshed with the Arcade versions of Mario Kart. I remember being totally enamored by the idea of a Mario Kart game with “good” graphics (for the time) as well as all the bells and whistles in the cabinet itself to provide a realistic experience. People love the Arcade games, for some reason – to this day I still see people hogging them in arcades but I honestly think it’s so well revered because it brings the succesful Mario Kart formula we know and love to the arcaade setting. Not to mention it was developed by Namco, so it just didn’t feel right to me – something was off. And the stupid Namco cameos, who I’m afraid will eventually appear in the new Smash Bros. too, but that’s another story.
*shudders*
UNDERRATED
Underrated Mario Kart? Definitely Double Dash!! Now I’m not the biggest fan of the game really, like it’s a fun instalment and did a lot great and interesting ideas and it is on the awesome GameCube. The game does seem to get automatically shat one whenever someone mentions it. The game is nowhere near as bad as people make it out to be.
OVERRATED
So what about overrated? Well that would have to be Super Mario Kart. Yes the SNES original one. Why? Well it’s aged poorly, so poorly that is is no longer fun to play at all. That fun you think you get from it is nostalgia. Maybe I’m not as old and crusty enough to have been able to enjoy what a revolution it was at the time (and there’s no denying it) but I just do not enjoy the game at all and can’t see how anyone under 30 can.
UNDERRATED
I think the most underrated game in the series is Mario Kart: Super Circuit on the Gameboy Advance.
To put it into perspective, I was the only person I knew who owned a GBA. I had never owned any Gameboy previously, and the marketing department at Nintendo did a dang fine job with an awesome TV advertisement for the game. They made me want it. It was a split second decision for me to go and buy the handheld and game and I’m glad that I did.
I feel like it’s a game that many people might not have played because it wasn’t on a home console and even though I don’t think it stands up to the newer titles, at the time it was pretty awesome to play Mario Kart anywhere you want – direct light source permitting. I still can’t hear the GBA start-up sound without the Super Circuit theme playing in my head.
It also started the returning of tracks from previous games. In this case it was every track from Super Mario Kart.
OVERRATED
Speaking of Super Mario Kart, I worry that I might upset some people by saying that I think it’s the most overrated MK game in the series.
I must admit I haven’t really played it though. I never got to experienced it as the start of a new franchise, which makes me feel no nostalgia for it. I think I only played it for the first time a few years ago. I didn’t really like it, which is strange, because I did like playing the tracks on the GBA.
I remember seeing it as a challenge on the pre-teen game show A*mazing and thinking to myself that I would like to play it, however that was somewhere in the mid to late 90s.
That’s probably why I wasn’t too impressed. Super Mario Kart was fifteen years old, if not older when I played it for the first time, and I had multiple sequels to compare it to.
Then again, if some kid walked up to me in the streets and exclaimed that they had just played Super Mario Bros. 3 and they thought it sucked, I would probably scream obscenities at them and then openly weep at the ignorance of today’s youth.
Maybe it’s a little unfair to say Super Mario Kart is overrated, but I stand behind my decision because the tracks were fun to play, just not on the Super Nintendo.
UNDERRATED
As for underrated, I feel that Mario Kart: Super Circuit never really gets its due praise these days. Super Circuit blew me away when I first saw it. A full on proper Mario Kart on a flipping handheld, that looked better than Super Mario Kart, and almost as good as Mario Kart 64 (or better, even).
While it shares the same character visual style with 64, it fits in far better in the 2D Mode7-esque landscapes of Super Circuit. The handling was reasonably tight, there was a huge selection of tracks, and the game even let you race on an entire remastered recreation of every track from Super Mario Kart
These days, Super Circuit might not really be worthwhile playing when we have better handheld Mario Karts like DS and 7, but I still feel like Super Circuit holds up well today and is well worth a try if you haven’t already.
OVERRATED
I think that Mario Kart 64 is liked far more than it deserves to be, because of peoples’ nostalgia. It was a good game for the time, I’ll admit, but it really has not aged well.
The controls are just so imprecise for starters. If you happened to watch Troy’s Mario Kart 64 stream a few weeks ago, they discovered that your kart will always lean a bit in the opposite direction when you turn. For example, turning left, your kart will first veer to the right before turning and vice versa. This just makes the game feel super sloppy, and like the karts have zero connection to the road. The handling has always been a bugbear of mine, even back in MK64’s heyday.
It doesn’t help that visually the game hasn’t aged well either. It is understandable why Nintendo went with pre-rendered characters rather than 3D models, as they arguably look a little better than they might have had they been polygonal models, but this only added to the handling feeling awkward. It was hard to tell exactly whether you would collide with something. Nowadays the pre-rendered characters look woefully low resolution, compared to the track around them.
Mario Kart 64’s battle mode is the best of the series though, so there’s that.
UNDERRATED
For underrated, I’m going to have to go with Super Circuit. I love the tracks in MKSC, from Cheese Land, to Ribbon Road. And the way over the top, bouncy Rainbow Road. Overall, it’s the tracks that made me love Super Circuit, on par with Double Dash in terms of originality and variety. And at least Mario Kart 8 seems to have the same level of variety and creativity as Super Circuit!
OVERRATED
So, this one might be a shocker, but I reckon Mario Kart 64 is over rated. Yes, it’s my favourite, but purely for nostalgic reasons… well, that and I play the best in it. But it’s far from the best. Wii added bikes, 7 added underwater sections, and gliding. DS had some of the best multiplayer out of all of them. So I don’t mind referring to MK64 as my favourite, but it’s far from the best.
UNDERRATED
There’s one Mario Kart game that never gets talked about though – have you guessed what it is?
Mario Kart Super Circuit was a launch title for the GameBoy Advance, and is to this day, the only hand-held Mario Kart game I’ve ever bought. Something about hand-held Mario Kart just doesn’t appeal to me, but when the GBA launched, titles were slim-pickings. I was not disappointed with the series’ hand-held debut. It was colourful, and absolutely beautiful with its amazing sprites and Mode 7-like 3D. I’d never played Super Mario Kart at that point, and I imagined that it looked like Super Circuit. Unfortunately it doesn’t hold a candle to it – Super Circuit is gorgeous.
I find Super Circuit to be underrated, because it never comes up in discussion, despite being a launch game that pushed its system to the limits, right out of the gate. It controls so well, it’s an absolute joy to play, and many of its tracks have made their way into future instalments in the series (and it brought back coin-collecting for boosting top speed). If you haven’t played it, why not give it a shot before Mario Kart 8 drops later this month?
OVERRATED
Mario Kart 64 is a solid game, don’t get me wrong. For the time it was amazing, and it still plays very well, but it certainly has its noticeable flaws. The biggest of which is the draw distance – you don’t seen any obstacle or enemy driver until you’re less than three car’s length behind them. This makes the game incredibly punishing on some particular stages (I’m looking at the one’s with the yellow bob-ombs littered on the track), which simply aren’t fair.
In addition to that, the game has a tiny character roster of only 8 drivers (a pittance in comparison to Mario Kart Wii’s 24 playable drivers) and no music during local multiplayer matches due to the constraints of the Nintendo 64’s cartridge-based medium. Yet people grip to it with such nostalgia.
I’ve tried many times to convince some of my non-gamer friends to play Mario Kart Wii (which, at least from a technical standpoint, is a superior version) and yet even after experiencing it, they yearn for the lacklustre version of their childhood.
For what I see as blind nostalgia, Mario Kart 64 earns itself the honour of being my most overrated title in the series.
As we previously mentioned, posting a comment on this page sharing your opinion on this topic 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 and third entry in the competition, and haven’t already, feel free to contribute to the roundtables we have previously run in the last few weeks: –
Roundtable #1 – What’s your fondest memory of Mario Kart?
Roundtable #2 – What’s your favourite Mario Kart game?
Want to know what you might win? Follow Pink Gold Peach through to the final prize pool.
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Mario Kart Arcade GP is the most underrated Mario Kart game in my opinion. It’s probably the nostalgia of going to the arcade with mates taking full control but their are some reasons for why its good. Mario Kart Arcade GP included for the first (and only) time all of pacman characters as well as a bunch of new items such as the square wheels item which made it difficult for drivers to have control of the kart. The main reason why I like it so much is because its an actual arcade machine. The only downside for me was that it ate my coins like they were pacman pellets. I also have to agree with James about some points but with it being different it felt distinct and unique from other instalments in the Mario Kart franchise.
Judging by recent ‘reviews’ I think Mario Kart 8 may end up being the most underrated of the series. I also think the online modes of Mario Kart Wii are extremely underrated. 12 player online racing, worldwide leaderboards, 2 players online on one console too! The battle mode in MK Wii was pretty solid too.
Overrated? Super Circuit. It has a metacritic score of 93! That is higher than any other Mario Kart game. And the same score as Super Mario 3D World & Skyward Sword.That is just wrong.
Underrated – mario kart wii is looked back on unfondly by many. It didn’t score that well in some reviews either with track design and balance being the two main issues. However, I thought there were some cracking tracks, maple treeway, koopa cape and bowsers castle being brilliant tracks. It was great online, very simple by today’s standards, but it worked and was a blast to play. No question the balance was off, with last to first runs being very possible, but I have always found that part of the appeal.
Overrated – tough, because all the console games have introduced something new to the formula each time, but I’m probably going with n64 edition as well. It has aged badly, sliding is poor and the multiplayer split screen is difficult to watch. In saying that though, some of the best tracks in the series are from this game…. It is still a great game, but probably not as great as it is remembered to be.
Double Dash is easily the most underrated, and the best instalment of the Mario Kart series. The 2 character dynamic with unique, special itemadded an extra depth to the strategy of racing that has not been matched before or since.
We used to have 4-player office competitions almost daily (until very recently), on the same 5 tracks over and over, because some are just so good. It’s amazing.
I was excited for MK Wii, but they really ruined some of the Double Dash tracks. Unnecessary widening and those annoying speed ramps turned DK Jungle & Waluigi Stadium for amazing to boring – it was such a disappointment.
I still look forward to each new game in the series, but I don’t think the pure joy of Double Dash will ever be beaten.
For reasons that I outlined in roundtable #2, Mario Kart Double Dash is both my favourite game and the one I feel is most underrated. It just involved so much more tactical strategy from using two characters at once as well as each character having unique special items. I don’t think the Double Dash feature is appreciated enough as every time I bring it up, nobody seems to care about it. If I were to take into consideration the meteoritic score though (as everyone seems to be doing), then based on that alone, Mario Kart Wii is very underrated as it had an amazing online feature that actually didn’t lag (like ssbb did) and the largest variety on usable controllers to choose from.
As for the most overrated game, I’m going to say Mario Kart DS. I hate playing Mario Kart alone (and didn’t play Super Circuit to really have an opinion). Although this game was the first in the series to have online capabilities, it was still pretty limited and if you didn’t have a person’s friendcode, there wasn’t too much to do. Don’t get me wrong, I played for a few hours, had some fun, but compared to the other Mario Kart games I’ve played, this didn’t seem worth the hype it got. The only reasons I feel this is more overrated than Mario Kart 7 are because the 3DS version had a better online mode that I could enjoy in single player (though I still preferred to play online on the Wii either alone or with my sister so I hardly played this game either) as well as a lower metacritic rating than Mario Kart DS. I considered making Mario Kart 64 my most overrated because it’s not a good retro game to play (compared to other classics that still play as good now), but I think a lot of people may have grown up with that game compared to the newer ones, so naturally people have nostalgia for it, (even though the n64 controller stick is the worst).
Being old and crusty (nice wording VOOK!) I’m going to say Super Mario Kart is way underrated. My main basis for this argument is that without it, the beloved Mario Kart series would not exist. Whether or not the entire kart racing genre would exist is up for debate.. perhaps SMK is also responsible for the likes of Hello Kitty Kart Kruisers – best not to think about it.
As for the most overrated, initially I was going to say Super Circuit, but I am actually going to say MK7. Super Circuit deserves praise for being the first handheld entry in the series, MK DS brought the series up to date on the handheld, but MK7 was, in my opinion, a bit forgettable. For me Mario Kart excels on a big screen, not a handheld and while solid, I just couldn’t get as invested in 7 when MK Wii was available.
I’ve never played GP or DD, but they’re the ones I think of when I think ‘underrated’. I think 7 is going to be like that soon though. 8 is so goddamn shiny, and uses the gliders and so forth but really ramps [pun intended] it up from 7 by adding the zero-g stuff. I think people will forget how great 7 looks, in 3D to boot, and how they mixed it up a bit with the long no-laps tracks. Instead they’ll probably remember the fairly unimaginative 7 pickup, the online mode ripped straight from Wii. Nobody I know uses the 1st-person/gyro controls, but at least they gave something new a shot a shot. Streetpass features are also nice to have, even if they didn’t really throw you new content.
I agree with those that said 64 is overrated. Those sprites are pretty jarring when you look at them nowadays, especially when a racer ahead of you just jumps into the sideways-drift sprite… jarring. Plus there is not progression or reward for single player; nothing to really unlock. The nostalgia is certainly there, but I can get some of my favourite tracks on the Wii and 7 versions, so there’s not a whole heap of incentive to go back.
underrated: Double Dash… But it seems to have a bit of a cult following these days…
Overrated: Mario Kart 7. the underwater driving and gliding seemed tacked on and gimmicky to me. It was a great game, sure, but never understood why it got quite as much love as it does.
MK64 is way overrated. I actually found Diddy Kong Racing more exciting to play; it actually felt like a race game, whereas MK64 felt like a Sunday drive in parts.
I’d say MK64 is the most over-rated, despite being a brilliant game. Its seems that everyone I know remembers this game from the 90s and has a nostalgic attachment to it. It makes it difficult to see past it, even though it hasn’t aged the best.
I wouldn’t say over-rated, but a lot of people I know have a distinct hatred for Mario Kart Wii. Yes it was chaotic and yes it had motorbikes which are apparently an ‘unfair advantage’. But god damn Mario Kart Wii was so accessible to everyone. Everyone is familiar with the Wii and anyone can pick up this game and play it. It has great tracks, awesome vehicle options, sweet flips and great fast paced visuals to boot. It was the first Mario Kart game to get me out of ‘gotta win’ mode and into ‘having fun’ mode.
Most over rated for me would have to be MK7. I’m not sure why but I just did not get into it as much as the other entries in the franchise. To be honest I am probably quite biased in my opinion in that I base a lot of my answers here on the experiences MK has brought me from local multiplayer. The handheld versions just never really stood a chance as being the best from my perspective. That being said, I can see why people loved the game and I respect that. It just doesn’t hold up in my books.