Full transcript of “Super Mario Kart Is Better Than I Remember”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:00 [Music] What's up gang? Brandon here. And I had to have been three or four years old when my dad walked into my room with a gray and purple box. He plugged some wires into the TV and turned it on. And that's when I saw this for the very first time. This was my first contact. This was Super Mario Kart. My dad set up a Grand Prix, handed me and my sister controllers, basically didn't tell us anything else, and set us off. My smooth toddler brain hadn't quite figured out that you had to press the buttons on the controller in order to steer. So, I, being the 3 or 4year-old intellectual that I was, decided to move the
0:46 controller to try and steer. Nintendo Wii had nothing on me. The bright colors, music, and bips and bops altered my brain chemistry. my smooth brain started chiseling out some semblance of intelligence and much to my dad's eventual dismay. He made me a video game fan. So yeah, Super Mario Kart was my first ever video game experience and it holds a lot of sentimental value for me. But Mario Kart has evolved a lot in the years since and I have too. I'm getting old. As of recording this video, Mario Kart World is out in two days, and the idea of what a Mario Kart game can be will change forever again. But before that happens,
1:33 I wanted to return to Super Mario Kart and rediscover what that game is and what it was trying to achieve. I often hear people dismiss Super Mario Kart, and I can understand why to some extent. It's simple by today's standards. You can only play with two players, and it's hard compared to modern entries, but I think there's so much value here. Super Mario Kart may be the first game in the series. It may be over 30 years old, but without it, we wouldn't have Mario Kart World. It establishes a lot of elements that would become essential parts of the Mario Kart series, like its roster. Look at these chums. The sprites in Super Mario Kart range from uncomfortable to bootleg at
2:20 best, but that has its own charm. You know what doesn't have charm? Yoshi sticking out his tongue every time he turns. Why do that? Also, can we talk about the Mario roster drinking? Old Nintendo is weird, dude. Various course hazards are established here in Super Mario Kart. Got monty moles, cheap cheps, the graphics. We'll get to that one later. Drifting and hopping also debut here, and they don't feel super different outside of the lack of a boost. But easily the most important feature debuting in Super Mario Kart is the items. Green shells, red shells, banana peel, stars. These are staple Mario Kart
3:05 iconography. The fear of the blue shell has escaped video game culture and infested the populace. This thing is our universally shared trauma, but it's not in this game. The items all still do the things they did here in the original game. They got it right on the first go, and that's pretty respectable. There was one slight difference with items in Super Mario Kart, though. You get them from floor item panels instead of the 3D item boxes of today, and they don't respawn until everyone on the track has been taken. There are a lot of item panels per race, so you're never at risk for not getting one. And that's especially true since your opponents can't take them. Wait, what? Only the player can use items. But video man, that hardly seems
3:52 fair. To clarify, your opponents can't use items in the traditional sense. Each racer in the roster has their own specific item they use when you play against them. Mario and Luigi can become invincible. Yoshi naturally drops eggs. Bowser drops fireballs. Donkey Kong Jr. drops banana peels, of course. Koopa Drupa drops green shells, but I I want to talk about that one for a minute. Are these like his? Why is he still wearing one after he puts one on the field? These belong to his family. Are they okay? And probably the most unique is Peach and Toad, who drop poison mushrooms, and they make you shrink much in the same way as the lightning item. And like that, most of these items have some human player
4:38 equivalent in the game. But it goes a long way to give each NPC racer a bit more personality. When you see them on the track, you know what you should be looking out for. Mario and Luigi have especially messed me up when I wasn't careful. We wouldn't see anything similar to this concept until Mario Kart Double Dash, and never again since. But I think I know why Super Mario Kart's implementation of items hasn't returned yet. While Super Mario Kart may have been developed to be a multiplayer alternative to F-Zero, it's still primarily a singleplayer game. When you have eight racers per match and only two of them can be controlled by human players, you still end up tuning a lot of the game's design choices around that single player experience, like giving CPUs their own items, for example.
5:24 People say Super Mario Kart is difficult to control, and I agree. But I don't think that's a result of bad design. This is intentional design. Games had to keep you playing in the 80s and '90s, and we were still firmly in that era of game design with Super Mario Kart. And to keep you coming back, games had to be challenging. We talk a lot about friction in video games today, almost as if it's a fading art form. What friction is and how it's implemented in video games is hotly debated, but I stand firmly in the camp that friction can be and often is a good thing. A friend of mine once described classic Monster Hunter as operating a forklift. The forklift is difficult to control, yes, but getting a handle on it and excelling
6:09 at operating the forklift feels good. Super Mario Kart is a forklift, too. Just imagine a really fast, slippy, slidy forklift that definitely violates some OSHA standards. Super Mario Kart can be pretty unforgiving at 150cc. It demands a lot of control from you in order for you to succeed. Races can be decided by making just a few mistakes. Turns are tight and you aren't given a lot of room for error. But when you start smooing, man, feels good. Look at me go. Initial D. No, this is initial M. This level of challenge and friction is what engages my once smooth brain. I do enjoy the
6:55 chaos and more forgiving nature of more modern Mario Kart games, but those are a lot more multiplayer focused thanks to the Gamecub's four controller ports and later online play. The challenge in those games comes from overcoming other players, not so much the game itself. Single player content in modern Mario Kart feels more like a tutorial. It does get challenging, but its focus is to prepare you for playing against real people. You don't need that as much when you only have one human opponent. Grand Prix also only lets you advance if you place fourth or higher and will cost you a life if you don't, allowing you to retry the race. It's interesting how they took a more classic Mario approach to the Grand Prix design. Personally, I'm glad this didn't stick, but it's interesting nonetheless. I'd say the
7:42 level of difficulty they achieved here is perfect. Except for one big elastic problem. Yeah, it's the rubber banding. Oh, it's bad in this game. Rather than being rewarded for proficient gameplay, the programmers just decided that Peach can go Super Saiyan and be no further behind you than when you pulled off a shortcut. This isn't friction. This type of difficulty doesn't reflect your own abilities as a player. I'm not saying it should be removed entirely, but it's vastly tuned in favor of the CPUs. It doesn't end there either. CPUs can just jump over your items sometimes. Yeah, they should be able to avoid your items, but can you, the player, even do
8:28 that? The items are the only way for you to catch up outside of performing at your absolute best. Come on, guys. We were so close. You might be able to consider this one friction, but I'm not so sure. The track designs are a bit of a mixed bag. Nintendo had an uphill battle with the Super Nintendo hardware. F-Zero used Mode 7 style rendering to achieve the pseudo 3D look of its tracks, and Super Mario Kart follows suit. It's an efficient way around the console limitations, but it does have some drawbacks. Super Mario Kart is just flat. There's no elevation to speak of. There are things you can jump over, but you'll always be driving on completely flat ground. I think this is a part of
9:13 what separates what I consider classic Mario Kart and modern Mario Kart. Super 64 and Super Circuit are all relatively flat tracks. 64 does have elevation, and it focuses on it with several tracks, but the game feel lean closer to Super Mario Kart than its contemporaries. This flat design is fine and it achieves what it's aiming to achieve, being a racetrack, but the actual visuals can be a bit hard to distinguish. Mind you, I'm playing this via NSO and not on original hardware through a CRT, so I might be off base, but a track like Rainbow Road, Bowser's Castle, and Vanilla Lake. Man, I can hardly see anything. Rainbow Road is especially bad. I can barely make out
9:58 the item panels, and the coins might as well not even be there. This is supposed to be the biggest, baddest track in the game, but being a seizure inducing nightmare does not make you big and bad. It makes you a liability. Okay, I'm mostly kidding, but my dad legitimately would get dizzy playing on Rainbow Road. Did anyone on the development team talk about this before the game came out? Like, I'm legitimately curious. Outside of the visuals, Rainbow Road takes the training wheels off by removing railings and punishing you a lot for imperfect driving. If you aren't prepared, you will meet God here. Even the thamps are worse than normal. They have star power. It's honestly sick. The game, not me or
10:44 the thamps. My dad. Yeah, he was sick, but he's better now. Love you, Dad. The other tracks iterate on a few themes, which I imagine was to conserve space on the cartridge, and they get the job done. The distribution among the cups is a bit weird, though. Mushroom Cup has two Mario circuits, but the special cup doesn't have any strange. The themes are your general Mario Fair, but they include Ghost Valley based on the ghost houses from Super Mario World. In fact, most of the game is designed after Super Mario World, which makes sense given it released just a year before Mario Kart. I think the best track designs are probably Mario's Circuit, Ghost Valley, and Bowser Castle, despite the nauseating stone floor. Ghost Valley 1 is a cool shortcut you can take if you have a mushroom or a feather, and is one
11:30 of the few cases where elevation is taken into account. Not the track, but you. Overall, the tracks are probably the least interesting part of Super Mario Kart, but given it's the first game and it establishes a lot of what the series would become, I think that's okay. Up till now, I focused primarily on the single player element of Super Mario Kart, but we have to talk about battle mode. Yeah, you can play standard races with a friend, but battle mode, honestly, I love the simplicity here. You're dropped into one of four arenas and have to hit your opponent three times to win. I found myself really enjoying it. Despite there only being two players, there's more urgency knowing you only have one opponent. You start trying to get into each other's heads about where they'll go and
12:15 what they'll do. It's pretty fun. Super Mario Kart limits your view to the top half of the screen in single player, and that means each player gets the same amount in multiplayer as you would in single player. I think this limited view actually makes battle mode more interesting. The game visuals are already fairly sy, so while you can screen peak your friend to get the jump on them, I don't think it's actually that effective. I doubt this was intentional design and more just a result of limited hardware, but it makes battle mode more fun. As for the arenas, battle course 2 and four are my favorites. There are a lot of places to hide and fade your opponent. Battle Course 1 is small and pretty intimate, but probably my least favorite of the bunch. And then Battle Course 3 is basically four, but with less walls and
13:02 icy floors. So that's Super Mario Kart. For the very first entry in the Mario Kart series, I think they knocked it out of the park. I had some gripes, yeah, but so much of the series heart and soul is here and has persisted through today. I'd actually personally play Super Mario Kart over Mario Kart 64, but I I know that's an unpopular opinion. I think it's better. Have you played Super Mario Kart? Do you love it? Do you hate it? Do you stare at it longingly? Let us know. We'll be playing Mario Kart World really soon, so we hope to see you online. We play games twice a month with our gold member patrons over in our Discord server. So, we're probably going to be playing a lot of Mario Kart World. And if you want to be part of the action, you can join.
13:47 There's links in the description below. But until then, keep the games good and the vibes greater. Merry Switch, Miss. See you next time. Yahoo. [Music] [Music]
