An absolute classic!
With a cast of eight Mario favourites to choose from and four different driving characteristics: all-rounder (Mario and Luigi), fast acceleration (Yoshi and Peach), fastest top speed (Bowser and Donky Kong Jr.) and best handling (Toad and Kooper Trooper), the variety in gameplay and challenge ranges further than just the tournaments, or "Cups" as they're called in the game.
Gameplay is simple: be among the first four racers to cross the line to progress to the next stage, but handily, you can pick up a variety of power-ups culled from the Super Mario games to help you, such as invincibility stars, magic mushrooms for a quick speed boost, and shells that can home in on the nearest car and cause them to spin out, handing you the advantage.
Each Cup has a variety of tracks which range from safe and simple to terrifyingly precarious, with the eye-melting Rainbow Road being a particularly bad offender of the latter. You can get bogged down in oil and mud on some tracks, or fall off into nothingness on the Ghost Valley levels which have ramps and potholes in infuriatingly annoying places. Enemies from Super Mario World make appearances on some levels, such as the Thwomps on the Bowser Castle stages that have a habit of dropping just as you pass underneath them, flattening you and costing you valuable time.
The difficulty starts gently enough but gets tough quickly, and the 150cc level sees the computer-controller racers drive faster and more aggressively, which doubles the challenge of the harder tournaments.
The two-player mode is great fun, and unsurprisingly extremely competitive, especially when you have a red shell and are in second place to your human counterpart mere seconds from the finish line! There's also a versus mode where you have to pop the other player's three balloons, first to do so being the winner.
Spawning a number of sadly inferior sequels all trying to recapture the magic of this Snes classic, Super Mario Kart has finally been released to a new generation that will be surprised at just how well this has aged and how good this really is.