Super Mario Kart - Tadashi Sugiyama Hideki Konno
This is the first instalment of the now household title.
Some things have remained constant since the beginning, and others have come and gone. My first experience with the Mario Kart series was Mario Kart 64.
That game was much more forgiving and playable than this. Without a joystick, racing games are very difficult.
The thing that was new to me that was not part of Mario Kart 64 was the need to collect coins. You lost coins when you ran into things or were hit by other racers.
The little cloud guys that rescued you when you went off the map or into lava also took coins from you. If you didn’t have any coins, any collision, even hitting a wall, would spin you out.
In all the Mario Karts I’ve played, there is certainly a point where the computer players will start to work together to stop you from winning the grand prix. I’ve never seen it deployed as viciously as I have seen it used here.
The 50cc cups were all beatable with some practice. It was more down to your skill and knowledge of the tracks. Towards the end of these cups and definitely by the start of the 100cc cups, the computer players are in concert to stop you winning.
It got to the point of ridiculousness where one of them would purposely ram you off the track into lava, going in with you, just to slow you down.
I found the cups towards the end of the 100cc completely unplayable because of how brutal the computer players would be. After race one, they had chosen their winner, and every other racer had one job: take you out.
I think that this would be more fun with other people playing, as this may balance out the computer’s rage against the human players. Without this, it was unplayable in the later GPs.
