![]() ![]() ![]() Which Mario Kart sometimes seems to be gasping for. It's not an original idea (I'm pretty sure I played something similar in Halo: Reach) but it's a rare breath of fresh air. The actual new addition, Coin Runners, is also a good idea: The aim is to putter around the battlefield collecting up coins, which can then be extricated forcibly from other players by blowing them up real good. This is actually a good idea, but it would have been better had it been an additional option rather than the only one. So players now score points for hitting others, and lose them for taking too many hits. But while previous games gave each player three hit points and the winner was the last man standing, the Handicapper General has now decreed that everyone must always get to play for the entire match. You still zip around a wide-open arena firing weapons at your friends. You can form a "community" of like-minded racers and adjust the game modes and the items that appear, although you can only pick from general categories ("Shells Only," "No Items," et cetera) rather than individually turn items on and off.Īfter getting ruined in the Wii game, Battle Mode is mostly back in fighting form for Mario Kart 7. You can tweak your go-kart's frame, wheels and glider (used to float down speedily off the courses' bigger jumps). There are other ways to customize your experience. It still seems a bit like swatting a fly with a sledgehammer. Given the language that I have used in front of Nintendo employees at various game preview events, I am probably the reason for this rule and I do apologize. Mario Kart 7 has online multiplayer, Nintendo-style, which means you can neither speak with or send texts to the people you are racing for fear that you may say something unsanitary. Yes, it feels pretty much exactly like 2005's Mario Kart DS with better graphics. The gameplay looks simple but has a lot of depth: you can drag items behind you as shields, tap a button to get a burst of speed every time you catch air on the undulating race tracks, etc. That's good, because Mario Kart 7's pure racing can stand on its own. I've still lost a fair few races I should have won (and vice-versa) but it all felt a lot more fair. It's possible, both against the computer racers and against other humans, to get far enough ahead that you can maintain first place after a Blue Shell bombing, which is better than nothing. AdvertisementĪnyway, the basic formula is still in place in Mario Kart 7 but it has been toned down considerably. The Handicapper General distributes the items, giving lead racers the crappy items (a tiny banana peel that you can drop on the track in hopes that someone will at some point be dumb enough to drive over it) and the racers in the back get shitkicker death cannons. You have to use items to attack them and defend yourself. You can't simply outrace the pack of Mario characters through the 32 different cartoon courses. The Mario Kart series may appear at first blush to be racing games, but in fact they are a carefully crafted videogame version of Harrison Bergeron. This has resulted in a Mario Kart more tuned to our sensibilities, which is just as well since Tillie can barely see the 3-D graphics what with her glaucoma. So this time, "playing it safe" means embracing the early-adopter hardcore gamers. ![]() (She and her 28 million friends say I was wrong to dislike it.)īut nowadays Tillie is too busy playing another round of Pissed-Off Parakeets on her iPhone 4S to bother buying a 3DS. Now, when Nintendo played it safe with the Wii version, it crafted something amenable to the console's fan base: a madcap fun-for-all in which anyone including your triplegic maiden aunt Tillie had an equal chance of winning the race. So the development team generally plays it safe, as is the case with this 3DS installment, to be released on December 4. Any other publisher would put out one of these every year Nintendo does one per console and then sells it for half a decade.
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