Not feeling like my quest to engage with earlier Mario Kart games was done, I decided to fire up my Super Famicom Mini and give a go at trying to complete the original game in the series as well. Where Mario Kart 64 was a game I owned for many years as a kid and played on and off many times, Super Mario Kart was never a game I played all that much. I picked it up when I was much older, and never really put much time into it beyond just seeing how it played (and bouncing off of it very quickly). I don't really know what I was expecting this game to be, given how much I didn't really care for its sequel, but I still blown away at just how rough a first entry this was. I only used rewinds on the final track (to finally free myself of the torment XP), and it took me a little under 2 hours to get gold on all the cups in 50cc and 100cc.

Boasting a mighty 20 tracks (5 in each cup) as well as a battle mode, there's quite a hefty amount of content in this game compared to its sequel (at least on paper). Just like 64, Super Mario Kart has a co-op two-player mode as well as Vs. features, the basic mechanics of racing work quite well, and it has a very cool split-screen design for its races. If you're doing 2-players, you each get a portion of the screen, but if you're playing by yourself, that bottom screen becomes your mini-map of how the other racers are doing (although you sadly get no mini-map if you're playing with a friend). However, outside of these clever touches, there is no small amount of glaring issues that would've frustrated players even at the time.

First off there are small things that make playing the game a little more frustrating than it feels like it needs to be. First of all are small touches that its sequels would also struggle with in how it's often hard to distinguish between holes in the track and the actual track because of how the Mode 7 tracks are displayed. Then you have issues like how this has a life system, and you get only so many lives in a cup before you just get a game over. This isn't like F-Zero, where you can fall off and outright die, but you actually NEED to get 4th place or higher (out of 8 racers) or else you just need to redo the track. This can be a nice redo feature if you're in a situation where you need to beat a certain opponent to win, but it more often comes off as a needless frustration, especially with a scoring system that often calculates to you "winning" the cup via points even if you would get 0 points on the current track.

Then there are much deeper seeded problems in how the AI works aside from just how brutal their rubberbanding is (and let me tell you, it's extreme). In Mario Kart 64, it often feels like the AI are playing a different game to you, but in Super Mario Kart, they very observably are playing a different game to you, and them appearing on your track to interact with is often more of a formality. The same CPUs will often win tracks because items don't work for them as they work for you. While you are limited to a single item per lap (of which there are five per track), they all get items for free after a certain amount of time depending on characters. DK. Jr. gets free bananas, Toad and Peach get mushrooms that make you small until you get run over (meaning you've basically lost if you hit one on 100cc), Mario & Luigi get invincibility stars, and Koopa amazingly enough gets shells both red and green (meaning you really need to play him if you want a chance at winning single player races at all).

AI don't even get boosts in tracks (they'll drive over them but get no effect) and drive right through thwomps as well. The only thing they do interact with is the edges of the stage, and I only won a couple tracks because I was lucky enough to have Luigi (the eternal AI 1st place favorite) get stuck against a wall for most of the race. Your items on the other hand are, as mentioned, very few and often quite weak, as lighting bolts still only temporarily slow instead of stop your opponents, and red shells still go as the crow flies (making them useless unless you have line of sight, and this is another Mario Kart where the AI will start cheating their butts off as soon as they escape your line of sight). This is another case where if you start losing, it's nearly impossible to catch up because they get so many automatic advantages, and it makes the single player content very often miserable to try and engage with.

The presentation is quite good, at the very least. The graphics are bright and colorful (especially the racers), and the Mode 7 effects on the tracks looks nice when it isn't confusing you on where the floor is actually solid. The music is also very good, although there aren't a ton of musical tracks in the game in the first place.


Verdict: Not Recommended. Where there is some enjoyment to be gotten out of a game like Mario Kart 64, Super Mario Kart is a game I'd argue wasn't even good when it came out. It is an easily inferior game to F-Zero (which is older than it by about two years), and looking back it is amazing which series ended up continuing so far given the quality of their first entries (discounting things like the unstoppable popularity of Super Mario himself, of course ;b). This is a game that does not warrant returning to unless you simply have to experience where the series came from, as there is very little fun to be found here outside of conquering all of the crap the game puts in front of you.