Mario Kart MAYhem: Roundtable #5 – Our Mario Kart 8 Hype

Welcome to the final Part 5 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.

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. This is, regrettably, our final one.

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 items and characters throughout the games are their favourites.

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, #3, #4 and #5 today and gain five 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?
Roundtable #3 – Which of the Mario Kart games are most overrated and underrated?
Roundtable #4 – Which item and character from Mario Kart is your favourite?

Entries for this competition will be closed on Sunday, 1st of June. Winners will be announced in the Mario Kart 8 episode of the Vookcast, releasing June 4th. Prizes will be posted thereafter.

And with that, let’s get into the responses!I was of course, excited for the Battle Mode but unfortunately that looks to be a right flop so I guess I’ll have to choose something else.

Without a doubt the biggest new addition to Mario Kart 8 is the change to the way players approach the tracks. Other games have introduced underwater racing as well as several ingenius methods to traverse the air be it giant cannons or hang gliders.

But easily my most exciting moment would have to be the game’s anti-gravity gameplay. Not only does it mean you’ll be racing on all kinds of new places in the tracks, but you’ll also be having to ram other enemies for bonuses and power-ups. It’s a simple yet fantastic way to change up the way the game plays for the short moments that these sections happen in the game.

Of course, I don’t expect much, but I’m particularly interested to see how these parts of the game feel in tracks that weren’t designed for them – like the retro ones.

So, sadly, I’m one of those people who watches hours upon hours of Mario Kart game footage before they’re released. So I know exactly what to expect in this installment. However, I still reckon there’s a chance for DLC characters and karts, there’s a few key characters missing that I’d like to see coming back… and how cool would more tracks be? At the very least, I’m hoping this game stays around for a while.

As for excitement? Well, I’m excited for every damn track in this game. I mean, so many tracks in previous Mario Kart games felt like filler, like they just needed to quickly come up with half a concept to flesh out a cup. But this game has only a couple tracks that feel like that, and even then, they have so much detail that I can’t be all that unimpressed by them. Mount Wario definitely looks to be my favourite, with so many different takes on the old frozen track concept.

Can’t wait for the whole lot, though!

I suspect the first thing I’m going to do in Mario Kart 8 is jump straight into the 50cc mode of the first cup. I like to play through the cups and tracks methodically, working my way up through each engine class, with the cups in order.

However, I really can’t wait to get into online mode. It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to play multiplayer Mario Kart with my brother and now that we both have relatively decent internet connections this is a possibility!

Out of everything though, of all the features, the tracks, and game modes, I just want to sit back, boot up MK8 and salivate over how good the game looks. I’ll probably let any intro video and/or demo video play through, showing off what I’m about to experience.

The first thing I plan to do when I slide Mario Kart 8’s disc into my Wii U and boot it up, is go straight the heck into a day full of of four player Grands Prix. Gonna round up as many people as will come round and just race the day away. We probably won’t touch Battle Mode though, I hear that’s a little average.

I’m really looking forward to mastering the anti-gravity mechanics. Having the game change from avoiding other players to actively trying to collide with them and track objects is gonna change the game quite a bit once the people I play with start to build up skill. It’s going to be an essential skill to learn and I plan to play well for a while!

It’ll be super fun to join in some Vooks community tournaments too. Mario Kart online has always been a great way to play with and get to know new people from the community and catch up with the ones I already know. It’d be super great if we ended up building a long term competitive and casual community around Mario Kart 8.

Oh, and my Rosalina will slay your faves.

When I load up Mario Kart 8 for the first time, I’m going smash out as many Cups as I can. I’m really keen to experience all the new tracks and unlock some secret goodies (which has always been a really appealing aspect of the Mario Kart series). Naturally trying out the new items is going to be a blast too. We can block blue shells now with a horn? What a god send! (Even if that doesn’t really make sense…) Oh, and there’s Chain Comp? That tickles the nostalgia receptors.

That being said, there’s going to be a lot of new stuff for me to experience as I haven’t owned a Mario Kart since Mario Kart Wii, meaning aerial and underwater segments will be very fresh as well. Oh wait, there’s anti-gravity too, isn’t there? Talk about a shake-up! I think that mechanic is going to really cool, especially given how much it alters the gameplay. No longer must I fear the collision, I must embrace it! It is both literally and figuratively, turning the game on its head! I’ve got to to say when they announced this factor in the Mario Kart 8 Direct recently, it got me to board the hype train. Very willingly too, mind you.

I’m also pretty keen to try out the online multiplayer. It seems like Nintendo have really done their due diligence in this regard judging by the critics, but I’d love to evaluate it for myself – and no doubt get absolutely destroyed by the global community of racers.

Overall though, I’m just really looking forward to zany and hectic races with my friends. That’s always been the core of Mario Kart for me since I played Mario Kart 64 way back in the day. It’s the reason the series remains appealing – nearly anyone is always down for a game of Mario Kart. I’m pumped to continue this tradition over the weekend with Mario Kart’s eight iteration!

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 as many as four entries into 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?
Roundtable #3 – Which of the Mario Kart games are most overrated and underrated?
Roundtable #4 – Which item and character from Mario Kart is your favourite?

Entries for this competition will be closed on Sunday, 1st of June. Winners will be announced in the Mario Kart 8 episode of the Vookcast, releasing June 4th. Prizes will be posted thereafter.

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