Ride through mansions of glory on happiness machines

Before I was aware that my income situation would be changing imminently, I ordered a Nintendo Switch 2 and a copy of Mario Kart World. I’ve got the original Switch and a big backlog of games I haven’t even come close to finishing, so the new one was a completely unnecessary luxury extravagance.

Reader, I have not regretted it. My husband and I have been playing a couple of races each night before or after dinner, and it’s been an absolute delight. After playing only single-player games for so long, and rarely even those, it’s been a great reminder of why video game consoles exist in the first place.

Back when I was trying to talk myself into getting the Switch 2, I read a bunch of Mario Kart World reviews that seemed to be desperate to throw a wet blanket on top of my enthusiasm, with accounts that seemed to go counter to every single image or video clip I’d seen from the game. A recurring theme in the reviews seemed to be that the racing segments weren’t markedly improved over the previous Mario Kart, and the free-roam driving mode felt barren and kind of pointless, because there wasn’t much to do.

I’m not sure what alternate universe those reviews were written in, because I don’t think I’ve ever felt as much unbridled joy while swearing so much at cartoon characters.1 And in free roam mode, the missions are the least interesting part for me. It’s all about the fun of exploring this ridiculously elaborate connected world full of weird discoveries.

I never had unlimited access to a Nintendo console before the N642, so there are huge sections of Nintendo history and entire casts of characters that I know only by reputation and from references in other games.

The occasional parts of the Mario Kart World that I do recognize hit especially hard. Oh, this area feels like Super Mario Sunshine, which I didn’t give enough credit to at the time, because it was really novel and delightful.

The other night I was driving around the Peach Stadium area, which is modeled after the castle at the center of Super Mario 64, and the music from the first level of that game started playing. It was one of those end-of-Ratatouille moments taking me back to the joy of first getting that game and simply running around the castle grounds, jumping and climbing trees and exploring.

What’s weirder is the parts that trigger nostalgia for things that I never played. I can recognize references to tracks from early Mario Kart games, like the farm, and a track surrounded by brightly-colored rounded blocks that I believe is based on the original game.

I knew that the ghost section of any Mario game is always the most clever and interesting, and the one in Mario Kart World doesn’t disappoint: a spooky abandoned Boo Cinema that has you leap into the screen and drive around in an old horror movie.

It’s interesting that it’s making so many references to what seems like the entire video game history of Nintendo, but it doesn’t really matter whether I get them or not. I know that the flying Moai heads are from one of the GameBoy games that I never played, and I’m vaguely aware that Goombas on giant ice skates calls back to one of the SNES games, I think. But I’m never exactly sure what parts are references and what parts are original creations for this game, and it just makes everything seem so much bigger.

There’s a train that seems to circle the entire map, and even though I haven’t tried it, it seems like you could jump on top and ride it through its entire circuit. I don’t have the free time I did when I was a kid, but I could totally imagine spending an entire afternoon doing nothing but that.

While the racing doesn’t feel that markedly different from the last Mario Kart — apart from the fact that more racers makes the AI races feel challenging again — just the sheer amount of stuff you can do makes it feel like a sampler of video game history. You can grind rails and wall ride, or find a half pipe and just do tricks over the edges, like in a Tony Hawk game. You can drive around, exploring secret warp pipes, and finding secret switches and coins like in Mario 64.

Sometimes you’re on the water, doing tricks off of the top of a wave, and it feels just like Wave Race even though I never played that. Sometimes you’re flying and trying to hit a series of mid-air boost targets, and it feels just like Pilotwings, even though I never played that, either. Mario Kart 8 already seemed to cram a billion different things into one game, and World said, “let’s do all that, and also add skate tricks and open world exploration.”

There’s such an obscene level of detail to everything — for instance, I only just noticed that as you drive through snow, your tires start to pick it up and turn white until it melts — that I have no doubt they’ve already got plans for years and years worth of DLC to populate the world with more stuff to do. I also have no doubt that I won’t even scratch the surface of unlocking everything in the base game before the DLC comes out.

The game is as much a celebration of the Mario franchise itself as its own thing, but I can’t really fault Nintendo for being an unstoppable video game entertainment juggernaut if they keep making things that are this joyful to play.

When we hit the end credits and I saw the huge list of programmers, I had a second of feeling like I was snapped out of a trance. Oh right, this is computer software, and people made it with programming and not just magic. I realize that sounds hell of corny, but how else do you describe it besides “magical” that they can make me nostalgic for games I never even played?

1
Daisy knows full well what she did.

2
Apart from some time on Super Mario Brothers 3 borrowing my brother’s NES, or completing Donkey Kong Country on a rented SNES

1 Daisy knows full well what she did.

2 Apart from some time on Super Mario Brothers 3 borrowing my brother’s NES, or completing Donkey Kong Country on a rented SNES