An absolutely wretched experience through and through, and not just for the bland nature of the courses for the most part. Super Mario Kart is honestly a game that I feel fails in practically every way to the point where starting off with its positive attributes is easy enough to fit into a single paragraph. The reason I'm not giving this a lower score can be traced to a few different elements, the biggest being that even in its simplest form, Mario Kart is wonderfully charming and I heavily appreciate certain elements of this game's presentation. I also think that from a technical standpoint this is really, really cool, being able to somewhat craft a 3D effect on a 2D console and then apply it to basically everything, must've been a bit mind blowing for the time, or at least I imagine it would have been.

Unfortunately, while technically very impressive, the game is also downright nauseating to the point where playing this for around an hour is enough to make me feel genuinely ill. Every individual facet of the track ahead of the player feels as if it moves and pulsates constantly, often flickering between textures before the camera itself moves in unpleasant ways. This is an issue present throughout the game and makes the base experience of driving, even when separating it from literally everything else the game has to offer, feel horrible. This is especially notable on Rainbow Road, which combines the issues of the flickering, constantly moving textures with a rapidfire onslaught of colour that changes very quickly if you're driving at an even slightly reasonable pace, sickening stuff. The way the player controls while driving also feels very off, and I think it's both due to the controls themselves but also with the way the game attempts to establish a fully 3D space. I feel that it's extremely difficult to gain a full grasp of the speed of the character and the way they handle turns, often feeling as if you're either too slippery, as your character moves like they're on ice, or they turn at such sharp angles that you're almost guaranteed to overturn and bump into something else, made especially egregious by this issue with depth perception that plagues everything.

While the core gameplay loop itself is utterly broken it feels, it's made all the worse by how unashamedly the AI just cheats all over the place. The rubber banding is absolutely insane here, to the point where it feels as if the items you use on your opponents are practically useless as they'll speed up to catch up with their expected position extremely quickly, giving the player only about 10 - 15 seconds before it all looks the same. The idea of giving each character a "rival" that sticks close behind you is a pretty cool idea on paper, but it just makes it worse when the game feels as jankily conceived as it is, with them seemingly having unlimited access to a particular powerup, determined by what character they are. While this is already annoying with something like an unlimited supply of green shells on hand, the fact that Mario and Luigi are able to activate a star like this is absurd and makes it practically impossible to win if they're what the game considers your rival.

The way the AI acts makes it feel as if the game outright hates the player, and not in the usual, upbeat and funny way that this series already does, where it feels as if it's just sitting there grinning while it throws more nonsense at your way, but actual, genuine hatred and aggressive refusal to let the player gain any distance. The courses almost all have a couple of turns that feel way too janky, the depth perception makes it hard to properly judge how to move to avoid obstacles, the AI is specifically tailored to never give the player a hint of reprieve, and the visuals are physically sickening. While I'm sure that some people would say that the multiplayer experience is more engaging and fun as it does away with a lot of the AI nonsense, I'd say that while it's true that basically any game is more fun with friends, that I would literally rather play almost any other game with them than this nightmare.