When I was in grade school, my teachers repeatedly told me that flying cars were just on the horizon. Having no better idea at the time, I believed them, and when I didn’t see vehicles soaring through the sky by 1996, I wondered why the world had let me down. Nearly 20 years later, I still don’t have a way to soar over scummy California traffic, but apparently Mario does.
Your immediate reaction to the fact that Mario Kart 8 features hovering karts and bikes - in addition to the recently-added gliders and under-water propellers - might be skepticism. “What would that really change?” It’s a reasonable sentiment, until you realize that adding wild verticality can change everything in a racing game.
Nintendo has always been trying to push the designs of Mario Kart stages to new extremes, finding crazier themes, crazier layouts and crazier concepts to build into otherwise-normal race tracks. But there were guidelines – not to mention physics – that seemed to always hold imaginations in check. None of those rules apply now, as a little taste of the future means Mario Kart now feels like something out of F-Zero, while still retaining its own signature style of pacing and item-based combat.
Playing through three tracks of Mario Kart 8 revealed two things: first, this is very much the Mario Kart we’ve all come to know and love, and second, hover karts are amazing. Tracks now spiral and twist out of control, splitting and careening into hidden areas, side paths and everything between the two. There are more possibilities and roads than ever, and all of it is contained within the tried-and-true Kart formula.
Of course, Kart 8 is bringing back everything I’d expect from the series – and then some. Collecting coins will once again allow me to boost my top speed, something that saved me from catastrophic crashes, and allowed me to place first in every race. The usual assortment of items, from red shells to banana peels, are back, and while I didn’t notice anything new, I also didn’t find myself on the receiving end of anything overly powerful either, the result of the series’ fierce rubber-banding principles. Here’s hoping that kind of cheap AI substitute is gone from this version – my time with the game was too brief to determine either way.
I played through three courses, two of which were relatively standard fare. A basic Mushroom Kingdom /Mario Circuit track with relatively few gimmicks or hooks allowed me to get a feel for this latest Kart outing. Considering this team is the same team responsible for Mario Kart 7, controls were crisp as expected, with a proper feel for multi-tiered power sliding, speed and road traction. The second coastal stage appeared to take design cues not only from Mario Sunshine’s Delfina Island, and Wii Sports Wuhu Island, but real-life cities like San Francisco. Again, the team seemed to opt away from giant cannons or other trickery and simply push for branching paths that split into every direction possible. These first two stages certainly seemed like they’d be positioned early in the Mario Kart 8 experience, but reinforced just how wild things could get. And that certainly proved to be the case in a haunted mansion level I’m simply calling “Boo House.”
Boo House is where things started to get wild. Not only were there branching paths, jumps that required a smart use of a kart’s glider and obstacles like undead skeletons with hammers, but in the midst of one self-contained tunnel, I suddenly found myself propelling through water. I hadn’t gone off a ledge or descended in any way – simple force fields seemed to be holding water in an enclosed area – and now I had to race through that.
It’s that sort of chaotic, abrupt change that makes me excited for Mario Kart 8. It’s that kind of bold design that will make what otherwise might be considered a relatively formulaic franchise feel fresh. The sky is the limit – quite literally now – for the Kart team’s designers, and that is going to make a huge, huge difference. Of all Nintendo’s announced offerings at this year’s show, I was most skeptical about Mario Kart, yet in many respects it actually managed to impress me the most. I’m dying to see what wild ideas the team has in store for all of us early next year.
Rich is an Executive Editor at IGN. When he was in high school and college, he’d basically stop everything to watch the annual conferences and coverage. Expect plenty of game coverage and interviews from Rich throughout the week – chat with him about them on Twitter @RichIGN.
Source : ign[dot]com
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