How a company's increasingly inhibitive tendencies corrupted the definition of "fun" and the means by which I could extract it.
Remember what I said earlier about my lack of enthusiasm for the GameCube and how it possibly played a role in intensifying the feelings of apathy that were causing me to lose interest in the Mario Kart series?
Well, it was my experiences with Mario Kart DS that initially led me to believe that it actually did.
At the start, it looked as though the tide was actually changing: I was, in contrast to how I felt about Double Dash, greatly anticipating the release of Mario Kart DS. I was eager to buy it and start tearing into it!
And that excitement was mostly being driven by my fondness for Nintendo's recently released portable system: the Nintendo DS, which was quickly becoming one of my favorite gaming platforms of all time. Its power was so great that it had the ability to make me feel excitement even for games and series that I'd long since abandoned. Its dual-screen presentation was so wonderfully alluring that it inspired me to imagine new possibilities for series like Mario Kart, which had stagnated on the iterative hardware that Nintendo was previously delivering on schedule.
Nintendo's thinking-outside-the-box approach helped it to spark a revolution and in extension find the motivation necessary to do genuinely new things with its aging franchises, and as a result, I fell in love with the company all over again and gained a new interest in modern gaming.
The Nintendo DS saved me. At a time when I was thinking about about moving on from video games, it came along and gave me plenty of amazing reasons to remain an enthusiast and find a new passion for gaming.
Mario Kart 64 was certainly one of the games that was instrumental in driving the platform's success.
Really, it arrived at the perfect moment in the DS' life: at the time when the platform's popularity was booming and it was on the cusp of becoming a cultural phenomenon thanks to the industry-shaking success of games like Brain Age, Animal Crossing: Wild World, Trauma Center: Under the Knife and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. Its doing so allowed it to exhibit its mainstream appeal and consequently bridge the gap between "hardcore" and "casual" and solidify the DS' standing as the portable that held great appeal for players both old and new.
It helped to define what the platform was and where it was going.
I already had my Nintendo-branded Wi-Fi USB connector plugged in, so I was ready to go!
For tradition's sake, though, I started by taking some time to conquer all of the Grand Prix cups, set some Time Trial records, and generally explore and become familiar with the courses. This helped me to learn the new tracks, which was, I knew, an important thing to do if I was going to engage in online competition against people who had likely already mastered the game. "I have to have extensive knowledge of the tracks if I want to stand a chance," I felt.
I was happy with the new tracks, but what really made me excited was the inclusion of retro courses like Moo Moo Farm, Frappe Snowland, Choco Mountain and Mario Circuit (SNES). Revisiting them a decade later felt surreal (and I knew, from my thorough inspecting of each of them, that they were perfectly replicated, which also greatly pleased me). So too did seeing the 16-bit tracks reimagined in true 3D! There they were--the classics--still as relevant as ever and still just as fun to race through and explore.
It was a genius move to include them, I thought, and I was hoping that their return was the start of a trend.
Playing Mario Kart with a d-pad and inconveniently positioned shoulder buttons was far from ideal (it required me to make awkward-feeling, often uncomfortable hand and thumb movements), but still I adapted to the controls pretty well. I had to make some compromises along the way (like simply choosing not to use the shoulder buttons at certain moments), but I was willing to do so because I really liked the game.
And after I learned the tracks and became acclimated to the controls, I was ready to go. It was time for me to mix it up with the world's best players!
The best news was that my skills hadn't declined. I was still a master, and thus I was able to win race after race. Each day, I dominated the competition and showed them who was king! All told, my winning percentage totaled somewhere around 95%!
I couldn't get enough of the game. I played it on a daily basis, and in each session, I spent hours battling online opponents. And consequently the day had come when I was once again hopelessly addicted to Mario Kart action!
It was just too bad, then, that I had to take an extended break from the game. I had to do so, you see, because Thanksgiving was only a few days away, and I'd planned a weeks-long trip to visit my relatives around the Tri-State area. And because I never took my electronics with me when I traveled (out of fear that they'd be stolen), my taking on the world in Mario Kart would have to be put on hold.
When I arrived home, I was raring to hop back into action. I activated the game's online mode, chose my racer (usually I alternated between Wario and Luigi), and pumped myself up for the first race.
And I hadn't lost a step, man! I was cutting every corner as closely as possible! I was nailing ever power-slide! I was expertly dodging every item that was tossed at me! I was on fire!
And that's right about when I realized that I was, to my great shock, about half a goddamned lap behind everyone. I wound up finishing the race in a distant 4th place (which was really bad when you consider that the game's online mode only supported 4-player races). It was a total beatdown. And every race in following played out the exact the same way: I fell half a lap behind everyone and finished a distant 4th.
"What the hell is going on here?!" I shouted in frustration after suffering my 10th or 11th last-place finish. "How are these guys getting so far ahead of me? Have they discovered shortcuts that I don't know about? Or did I somehow wind up in a room with a group of super-experts?!"
I was completely baffled by what was occurring.
Though, things started to make sense to me when I decided to forgo racing and instead observe what the other players were doing. What I noticed was that as soon as the race started, all three opponents began to wildly swerve back and forth from one side of the track to the other. And at no time during the race would they cease this activity. They just kept swerving wildly.
Before long, it became obvious to me what was going on: These silly schmucks had discovered a way to power-slide along straightaways and thereby turn a situational skill into a readily exploitable "technique."
I came to learn, from reading message boards, that this "technique" had been termed "snaking." What happened was that some guy figured out that you could trigger an early turbo boost by rapidly pressing back on forth on the d-pad as you were sliding. If your input was correct, you could essentially turbo boost your way through an entire race.
I read, also, that just about everyone who played the game competitively had begun to use the technique liberally and had likely already mastered it. And all of this, apparently, occurred during the two-week period in which I was away from the game.
From then on, that was my Mario Kart DS experience: The race would start, my opponents would begin to obnoxiously swerve back and forth, I'd fall a half a lap behind everyone, and I'd finish in a distant 4th place. I never had any chance of winning a race.
Snaking came to plague the online scene, and inevitably I arrived at a point in which I was forced to make a choice: "Do I want to play the game the way that it was intended to be played and compete well only when I happen to be matched up against people who aren't snakers?" I asked myself. "Or do I want to learn and master this tiring, thumb-killing technique and hope to find some kind of enjoyment in doing so?"
It was an easy decision. It took me no more than a few seconds to conclude that I had no desire to want to spend hours learning how to execute a complicated, highly unintuitive "technique" that turned the art of racing into a complete chore. So after I finished recording my, oh, 200th-straight last-place finish, I switched off the DS, removed the Mario Kart DS game card, and never touched the game again.
Now honestly, I'm not interested in starting a debate about whether or not snaking is cheating. I don't care one way or the other. Instead, I blame Nintendo for creating the mess. I blame the company for not properly testing its game and refusing to fix the problem, which it had more than enough opportunity to do.
It was Nintendo's unpreparedness, and not the broken power-sliding mechanics, that drove me away from Mario Kart DS, and the whole situation sucked because I loved the game and planned to play it for a long time. But now I couldn't because I had no desire to learn how to "snake" my way across tracks and engage in a style of racing that was the antithesis of fun.
So ours was a bitter parting.
And in the end, I was once again really unhappy with the state of Mario Kart.
Then came the announcement of Mario Kart Wii.
At that point, in 2008, Nintendo was at the height of its resurgence. The Wii, its latest console, had also become a legitimate cultural phenomenon, and the company was now attacking both console and portable game development with renewed vigor. And consequently everything was lining up to create a climate in which the Mario Kart series could return to consoles and proceed to rock the world and establish a new standard for fun.
I couldn't help but feel excitement for Mario Kart Wii. Everything that I'd read about it in Nintendo Power, from its 12-player online races to its exciting selection of retro courses, convinced me that it was a must-own game. I remained somewhat skeptical, though, and felt justified in fearing that competitive players would work to discover an exploit whose use would naturally proliferate and cause the ruination of the entire online experience.
"This game could potentially be Mario Kart DS all over again," I continued to think.
So my plan was to wait a few months and see how things turned out before deciding whether or not to buy the game.
In June, though, I realized something: My birthday was quickly approaching! So I came up with a better idea: request Mario Kart DS as a birthday gift and thus eliminate any financial risk and avoid feeling like a sucker if the game turned out to be a dud! So that's what I did.
At the least, I felt safe in knowing that no snaking-type exploits had been found.
"So what could go wrong?" I asked myself in an optimistic manner.
Well, where do I begin?
I'll start by saying that I extracted a lot of enjoyment out of Mario Kart Wii over a five-year period. I poured a countless amount of hours into its online modes. I spent more time with it than I did any previous series entry--by a huge margin. And at many points, I played it almost on a daily basis.
Mario Kart Wii was one of the most addictively fun multiplayer games I'd ever owned.
But in truth, I had a love-hate relationship with it. I spent as much time being entertained by it as I did being actively infuriated by it.
"Now what could ever cause a situation like that?" you ask while wearing a giant smile and obviously feigning ignorance.
Oh, you know all too well what caused it.
The main problem was that Nintendo, in its continued push to convert casual players into returning customers, decided that it was best served to turn Mario Kart's racing action into a virtual lottery, and it did so, apparently, because it felt that non-gamers were fragile, insecure little flowers who could only be made happy if they were handed victory trophies just for showing up.
Now, it might have been the case that people who fit that description were indeed prevalent in society, but still, there was no reason, I felt, to automatically assume that the majority of new customers were averse to the idea of self-improvement and the allure of reward systems.
"What a horrible inference Nintendo is making with its new philosophy," I thought. "Assuming that newcomers fear challenge is short-sighted and honestly insulting."
But it's exactly what Nintendo did.
Consequently it sought to achieve the goal of creating a false sense of parity, and it did so by ratcheting up the item-rate to extreme levels and having item boxes hand out insane amounts of overpowered attack items.
It wasn't like in past games, when you'd occasionally become the victim of an item-barrage, no. In Mario Kart Wii, contrarily, you were being mercilessly bombarded at all times, and your poor racer was seemingly always stuck in an endless hellstorm.
For the amount of horror that Mario Kart Wii inflicted upon its players, you could have easily confused it for a war game in which everyone was doomed to be a casualty!
Mario Kart Wii deservedly became infamous for its patented item-chain attacks, which saw players get (usually in this order) hit with a shell, blown up, shrunk, flattened, starred, and subsequently knocked off the course. And this would happen to each player somewhere between 8-10 times per race, which was beyond ridiculous.
And don't even get me started on the hackers whose only objective, it seemed, was to relentlessly firebomb the entire course and cause the average race to last ten minutes. To them, I guess, causing that type of mayhem was hilarious and thus something that was definitely worth the sacrifice of 100 or so of their 99,000 VR points.
This was the first racing I'd ever played where spending half a race at a dead stop was the norm. "Whose idea of fun is that?" I'd constantly wonder in puzzlement.
The result, of course, was that race outcomes were largely randomized and only supreme masters were able to win at a decent rate. All other players wound up stuck in the middle, and they were forever doomed to share in each other's pain and suffering.
Nintendo's intention was to create an environment in which everyone could have a good time, but in trying to do so, it instead micromanaged its game to an absurd degree and unintentionally pave the road to hell and created an environment in which it was also likely that everyone would come out of the experience feeling miserable. Tearing down competitive-minded gamers and veteran enthusiasts for the purpose of leveling the playing field, it turned out, was not conducive for creating consistently fun racing experiences.
Not for any of us.
I knew that if I wanted to have any hope of competing with the Mario Kart Wii masters and avoiding the item insanity, as they were apt to do, I'd have to replicate their playing style. That meant that I'd have to use a bike. But I didn't want to do that because I despised the bikes. I was deeply annoyed that their innate advantages rendered the karts inferior.
Because I wanted to drive a kart, man! I mean, this was "Mario 'Kart,'" after all. And for that reason, the only thing that I wanted to do was race against all of the wonderful Mario-universe characters in their distinctly customized karts, not eleven Rosalinas on bikes! (As far as I was concerned, even a single Rosalina was one too many!)
So I had no choice but to choose the second-best option, which was Funky Kong in a Flame Flyer. And I struggled to compete even with that combo.
Eventually it got to a point where I could no longer take the abuse. So for the sake of maintaining what was left of my sanity, I had to end my relationship with the game.
"So if you had all of those problems with the game, why did you keep returning to it for all those years?" you ask with a confused look on your face. "What made you keep coming back to it?"
Well, dear reader, I'm not really sure. It might have been that I was obsessed with the idea of getting into the elusive 9,500-VR bracket. Or maybe it was that my gaming options were otherwise limited at times. Or perhaps it was that I'd simply developed a taste for masochism.
Anything's possible!
Though, after seriously reflecting on the matter, I find a more plausible explanation: It was likely that I continued to play Mario Kart Wii because I was carrying the hope that what I was seeing was an anomaly and that inevitably a certain something would emerge from the chaos: the equal parts fun and competitive Mario Kart experience that I was so desperately seeking. "It's in there somewhere," I probably felt, "and eventually it'll show itself."
But it never did. The great Mario Kart game that was contained within was simply couldn't find a way to free itself from the shackles of Nintendo's increasingly suppressive control systems.
And if what I was seeing in Mario Kart Wii was indicative of where the series was headed, then I had no reason to believe that Mario Kart and I had a future together.
"You need a girlfriend," you say in a concerned manner.
Shut up.
Without my requesting that he do so, my brother, James, bought me a copy of Mario Kart 7 as a Christmas gift in 2011.
I abandoned it after about a week, so there isn't much that I can say about my experiences with it.
But don't take that comment as an indictment of the game's quality. There was nothing particularly offensive about it, no. It was a pretty good game.
The problem was that my playing experience was hampered by the 3DS' lack of comfortable ergonomics. The portable's bottom portion was completely flat, so I had to use a pincer grip reach to the shoulder buttons, and resultantly I could barely hold onto the system as I played. Additionally I couldn't keep my thumb centered on the circle pad; half the time, I couldn't stop it from completely slipping off.
I made an honest effort to adapt to the required grip, but the compromises that I had to make as a result only led to hand discomfort and poor racing performances.
So it simply wasn't worth the hassle.
From what I saw of the game, it appeared to share Mario Kart Wii's values in terms of how it handled item-distribution, so I figured that it was probably best for my mental health that things didn't work out.
I was similarly apathetic about the announcement of Mario Kart 8. It would fair to say, in fact, that I had just about zero interest in owning it.
I mean, sure: I was impressed with its E3 debut trailer. I thought it looked spectacular in motion. And as I watched the video, it was clear to me that Nintendo was finally raising its game and taking the series' visuals and course design to the next level.
"But so what?" I thought to myself. "I'm not falling for it this time."
I was certain that all of those fancy shuttle loops and shiny textures were nothing more than enticing ice-cream coating layered over the same ol' sloppy mud pie.
Buying Mario Kart 8 was out of the question. I didn't even care that it was coming out at a time when the Wii U was starving for software. I was that fed up with the series.
"I'm simply done subjecting myself to these games," I told myself. "I've had my brains beaten in enough for one lifetime."
But a couple of months later, history repeated itself: On August 18th, my birthday, James approached me with a gift that was shaped suspiciously like a Wii U game case. And as I correctly guessed, he had bought me Mario Kart 8, and he had done so because he was out of ideas and figured that a popular Nintendo game was always a safe choice.
I was gracious, of course, but the truth was that I couldn't have been less enthusiastic about the game that I was holding in my hands. I mean, I was going to play it for the sake of honoring his generosity, yeah, but I wasn't going to do so immediately. Because I did, after all, have plenty of recently purchased 3DS games that I needed to finish.
It wasn't until about a month later that I finally got around to playing Mario Kart 8.
My early experiences with Mario Kart 8 told me that I might have been wrong to dismiss it. To my surprise, it genuinely appeared as though the game had come packed with all of the ingredients necessary to return the series to form: It was graphically advanced and looked beautiful. It controlled great. Its soundtrack was fantastic. And its bending, winding and twisting tracks conveyed a breathtaking sense of depth that made past Mario Kart tracks feel comparatively flat and lifeless.
There were too many Koop Kids for my liking, sure, but I didn't really care to stress over Nintendo's roster choices, no. There was no time for that! I was, after all, very eager to hurry up and finish unlocking all of the special cups and hidden racers so that I could head online and start renewing my passion for competitive Mario Kart!
However, to my great disappointment, it quickly became apparent to me that Nintendo's empty philosophy was still on full display.
I was led to believe, by what I read in previews, that the ridiculously unbalanced item system had been remedied, yet there I was feeling as though things had somehow gotten worse. It wasn't that the frequency of the item-barrages had increased, no; they were occurring at pretty much the same rate. The problem was that they were now more crippling in nature due to a misguided tweak that was made to the item-distribution system. It was one that made it tremendously difficult to catch up to the racers who had passed you by as you were enduring the prolonged assault.
I'm talking about the change that dictated that every racer in positions 4-9 was to be constantly provided speed items (Triple Mushrooms, Gold Mushrooms, etc.). Rather than helping you, all it did was make it near-impossible to gain ground and break free from the middle of the pack! Because everyone in the middle was getting the exact same items!
And if you fell into 10th place or below, forget it: All of the Lightning strikes and Bullet Bills in the world weren't going to help you to part company with the poor saps who had already resigned themselves to bringing up the rear. Because they, like you, were getting the same items and only taking turns gaining on each other.
So if you wanted to have any chance of winning, you had to storm into the lead immediately upon a race's start. Otherwise you'd spend the entirety of the race merely keeping pace with those who were similarly positioned.
Basically the system's new purpose was to ensure that you remained where you were five seconds after a race started.
And there were other problems as well: The speed-boosting coins were useless because you were certain to lose all of them very quickly (in an imminent item-barrage). The removal of the stored-item mechanic limited your means of defending yourself. Red Shells were ubiquitous to the point of absurdity. And there was so much trash flying around the track at all times that getting blindsided by an item every ten seconds was the norm.
So once again, Nintendo had created a racing game in which I was spending half the race at a dead stop. "How is that 'fun,' exactly?" I continued to wonder in puzzlement. "Why put so much effort into refining the actual racing mechanics if they're intended to play less of a role than ever before?"
The company's decision-making was simply baffling to me.
But after playing the game for a few weeks, I finally came to understand what was truly happening. I realized what Mario Kart 8 actually was: not an unintentionally misbalanced racing game, no, but rather the racing game that modern Nintendo had been actively trying to make. It was the culmination of ten year's worth of consciously regressive design choices. And at long last, Nintendo had finally succeeded in its goal, which was to create a Mario Kart game in which no player was allowed to be better than any other.
"Bravo, Nintendo!" was all that I could say in response. "You achieved your questionable goal of creating a fully controlled system and removing the human element from the game."
Yet still, I continued to hold out hope that things would get better. Eventually, I figured, Nintendo would recognize that its new design philosophy was deeply flawed and determine to fix its game. "The company will come to its senses," I thought, "and rethink its approach to item-distribution, and then, resultantly, Mario Kart 8 will rise to the next level and become truly great!"
Sadly, though, my hope was extinguished when the last of the "balancing" patches was implemented and nothing seemed to change. And a few days later, my time with Mario Kart 8 came to an abrupt end after I endured a brutal hours-long session in which I was the victim of an endless series of item-barrages that prevented me from finishing any better than 7th place in any of my races.
The final straw was a race on Tick-Tock Clock in which I got three consecutive Bob-ombs thrown in my face as we were approaching the finish line. I was so pissed by that barrage and what it cost me that I switched off the Wii U before the race had even finished. And I didn't give a damn that I'd be docked points for doing so.
I returned to Mario Kart 8 a few months later after foolishly wasting money on its two DLC packs (I had an abundance of cash on my Nintendo Account, and honestly there wasn't much else to spend it on, so I thought, "Why not?"), and it only took about, oh, two races before I remembered why I previously swore the game off.
I haven't touched it since, and I have no plans to return to it in the future. In fact, the entire process has left me so mentally exhausted that I wouldn't care if Nintendo chose to never again release a new series entry.
(I have to mention that I played Mario Kart: Super Circuit when Nintendo made it available to those who were eligible for the 3DS Ambassador Program. I found it to be an entirely mediocre game and a pale imitation of the SNES original. I played it for about 10 minutes and then promptly abandoned it.)
I would actually prefer for Nintendo to bring the Namco-developed arcade Mario Karts to its online services. I understand that they're not highly regarded, but even so, I would buy them, anyway, just for the novelty of being able to play as Pac-Man and friends. And because I really love arcade games!)
So that's the story: The Mario Kart series had the potential to produce games that were equal parts fun and rewarding, as its famed progenitor so excellently demonstrated, but instead it chose to dictate to its audience that the former was far more important than the latter and that there was no point in trying hard or improving your racing skills and growing as a player. "Just turn your brain off," it said, "and allow me to determine what 'fun' is and how you should be deriving it."
Future entries will, I'm sure, arrive with the promise of being "balanced," but it's unlikely that the real problem--Nintendo's frustratingly ill-conceived design philosophy--will ever actually be addressed. And there's no reason why Nintendo would address it. Because it knows that regardless of how much these repeated criticisms are thrown its way, its Mario Kart games will continue to sell 10-million-plus copies. It knows that its games will sell extremely well no matter how deeply it embraces the fake inclusiveness of controlled spaces over compelling game design.
Each new entry will be plagued by the same issues: item overload, randomized race outcomes, Blue Shells at the finish line, and not enough organically derived fun to compensate for the fact that the company would rather the player have as little control as possible lest some purely hypothetical customer type might have a bad experience.
But hey: Maybe I'm taking all of this too seriously. Maybe I'm misreading the situation and the truth is that Mario Kart was never meant to be anything more than a silly diversion. Maybe Nintendo's is the correct course of action and I'm just spewing nonsense.
But really, I don't think that I am. I still firmly believe that Mario Kart has the potential to offer an irresistible combination of wacky fun and great racing action. It can absolutely do that if its creators want it to.
The truth is that I really do hope to see a future in which I can again anticipate the release of a Mario Kart game. I want to see a return to the days when I didn't feel as though I was an idiot who was willing subjecting myself to a Mario Kart game that was obviously designed to make me angry. I'd love for today's younger players to get a taste of the Mario Kart that my friends and I once knew: the one that didn't treat you like a fragile little flower with serious self-esteem issues and instead inspired you to improve and rewarded you for doing so; the one in which events like being blown up and knocked off a mountain were memorably hilarious because they were occurring only a few times per cup rather than every 10 seconds; and the one in which you could have a blast without needing for the game to hand you victories.
It's the Mario Kart that I'd bet younger players would love even more than the current iteration if they ever got the chance to see it.
And if it works out that I never again feel the desire to purchase a new Mario Kart game, I won't feel too heartbroken over the situation, no. Because after all: My disapproving of what the series has become will never cause me to become so sour that I forget all of the treasured memories that its earliest entries provided me. No matter what happens, I'll continue to fondly recall the many ways in which Mario Kart brought joy to my life. I'll always remember how its patented brand of wacky racing action inspired great laughs, produced many memorable moments, and allowed me to have a whole lot of fun with my old pals.
And I'll be happy in knowing that there was nothing scripted about any of those experiences.
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