This was gigantic fun back in the day, but the experience is somewhat muted now. :idea:
User Rating: 9 | Super Mario Kart SNES
When "Super Mario Kart" first came out on the Super NES, it was an absolutely fun game! You got to choose from eight different characters each with their different strengths and weaknesses and race through your choice of 4 different circuits on 3 different circuit difficulties. Each of the 4 circuits has 5 courses, and on each course, you must race through 5 laps of the course. And you have to finish in at least 4th place if you want to continue onto the next course. You only get three chances to retry if you didn't do as well as you wanted to, but if you win 1st place three times in a circuit, you get another chance to retry! Plus, before tackling the different circuits and difficulties, you can challenge all the different courses through a time trial option without any other challengers, and see how fast you can go through each course! And all of the courses are well-designed by Super NES standards, with good music and on the Wii, the frame-rate is even faster and smoother than ever! :D With all of those good points however, there do come some drawbacks. On the time-trial courses, you don't get three mushrooms like you do in later iterations to help you boost through the stages so you can't utilize cool shortcuts that are utilizable in the Circuit versions of the courses. Other drawbacks include the fact that you can't use the mini-boost technique (holding down the R button and curving to the right or left and releasing in order to increase your speed) as that option would not be introduced until the "Mario Kart 64" version of the game. And while some items that might make the game play experience cheaper in later iterations of the "Mario Kart" games don't appear in this game, the enemy A.I. is STILL cheap, even by Super NES standards, and if you happen to be hurting in last place (especially in the tougher difficulty settings for the Circuits) the good items that would normally help you rocket back into the lead don't appear as often as they should or do appear in later system releases in the video game series. Even with those drawbacks, its still a good game at a good price worth only 800 Wii points; but time has not been kind to the fun factor of "Super Mario Kart" as it has to the later versions of the "Mario Kart" video game series. :idea:
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