I was looking forward to this one for a while. My history with the Mario Kart series is pretty short actually, as I have only ever played Mario Kart 8 Deluxe on the Switch. I love that game though and couldn't wait to discover the origins of the series. Having done that, I'm happy to say that Super Mario Kart still offers a fun time and offers lots of content to go through both in single- and multiplayer.
It's not perfect. There isn't a lot to complain about here, but the main thing I've noticed somewhat negatively is the controls. The game controls reasonably well for its time, and certainly not worse than its contemporaries (I'd give the edge to F-Zero though) but it quite often felt like the Computer had an edge over the player in handling, especially when it comes to turning corners. The drift mechanic exists in this game. Press the shoulder buttons, and your character's kart will jump up and start to drift. Unfortunately, I never really got comfortable with this. It felt pretty random as to how successful the drift is and how quickly I could regather control of the kart, as a lot of the time, the kart would just drift way further than anticipated and take an extra second of sliding before it would drive forward again. I could say I'm spoiled from modern Mario Kart, but truthfully, I just found this mechanic to not be useful a lot of the time. I'm sure I would have figured it out by playing more, but it certainly is not something I would describe as intuitive.
That said, I don't really have any more major complaints, let alone of medium importance. This game was plenty of fun. You can choose one of 8 characters in the Mario franchise, from Mario himself to Donkey Kong Jr. Each character has their own stats for speed, acceleration and handling, but those stats are only shown in the manual I believe. Karts cannot be changed and don't add bonuses/penalties.
There are two singleplayer modes. The Grand Prix mode, where you can choose between 50cc and 100cc difficulties and take on three cups with 5 unique tracks each. If you win them all on 100cc, you unlock a fourth cup that includes the iconic Rainbow Road that is still in Mario Kart games to this day. If you conquer that as well, you unlock the 150cc difficulty mode. The other singleplayer mode is called Time Trial, where you simply choose a track and try to beat your best time.
For multiplayer (2P), two new modes are Match Race, where you go head-to-head with no CPU opponents, and Battle Mode, where you need to pop the there balloons on top of your opponent before your balloons are popped.
So as you can tell, there is quite a lot of content here. No customization, but 8 characters, 20 maps, 3 difficulty modes and 5 game modes.
The music is immediately recognizable if you played future Mario Kart games, so it's nice to see that the atmosphere they're going for hasn't changed since the original entry. Tracks are very varied and cleverly designed with many different types of obstacles and challenges. In general, the presentation is just charming.
The game is the 4th best selling game for the SNES. It's not hard to see why. Unlike action/adventure/platforming games, racing and fighting titles usually have a hard time to be recommendable for play in modern times since pretty much everything is improved upon in newer titles, whereas the story and certain gameplay elements of single-player games are much harder to replicate and therefore rate more favorably in that regard. I'd say the same applies for Super Mario Kart. It is still fun, it's an iconic and revolutionary game that popularized the kart racing genre, but I have a hard time arguing for why you would play this instead of the most recent Mario Kart games.
(I played this as part of my challenge to go through notable video games in chronological order starting in 1990.)
It's not perfect. There isn't a lot to complain about here, but the main thing I've noticed somewhat negatively is the controls. The game controls reasonably well for its time, and certainly not worse than its contemporaries (I'd give the edge to F-Zero though) but it quite often felt like the Computer had an edge over the player in handling, especially when it comes to turning corners. The drift mechanic exists in this game. Press the shoulder buttons, and your character's kart will jump up and start to drift. Unfortunately, I never really got comfortable with this. It felt pretty random as to how successful the drift is and how quickly I could regather control of the kart, as a lot of the time, the kart would just drift way further than anticipated and take an extra second of sliding before it would drive forward again. I could say I'm spoiled from modern Mario Kart, but truthfully, I just found this mechanic to not be useful a lot of the time. I'm sure I would have figured it out by playing more, but it certainly is not something I would describe as intuitive.
That said, I don't really have any more major complaints, let alone of medium importance. This game was plenty of fun. You can choose one of 8 characters in the Mario franchise, from Mario himself to Donkey Kong Jr. Each character has their own stats for speed, acceleration and handling, but those stats are only shown in the manual I believe. Karts cannot be changed and don't add bonuses/penalties.
There are two singleplayer modes. The Grand Prix mode, where you can choose between 50cc and 100cc difficulties and take on three cups with 5 unique tracks each. If you win them all on 100cc, you unlock a fourth cup that includes the iconic Rainbow Road that is still in Mario Kart games to this day. If you conquer that as well, you unlock the 150cc difficulty mode. The other singleplayer mode is called Time Trial, where you simply choose a track and try to beat your best time.
For multiplayer (2P), two new modes are Match Race, where you go head-to-head with no CPU opponents, and Battle Mode, where you need to pop the there balloons on top of your opponent before your balloons are popped.
So as you can tell, there is quite a lot of content here. No customization, but 8 characters, 20 maps, 3 difficulty modes and 5 game modes.
The music is immediately recognizable if you played future Mario Kart games, so it's nice to see that the atmosphere they're going for hasn't changed since the original entry. Tracks are very varied and cleverly designed with many different types of obstacles and challenges. In general, the presentation is just charming.
The game is the 4th best selling game for the SNES. It's not hard to see why. Unlike action/adventure/platforming games, racing and fighting titles usually have a hard time to be recommendable for play in modern times since pretty much everything is improved upon in newer titles, whereas the story and certain gameplay elements of single-player games are much harder to replicate and therefore rate more favorably in that regard. I'd say the same applies for Super Mario Kart. It is still fun, it's an iconic and revolutionary game that popularized the kart racing genre, but I have a hard time arguing for why you would play this instead of the most recent Mario Kart games.
(I played this as part of my challenge to go through notable video games in chronological order starting in 1990.)