Full disclosure of video-game-journalistic integrity: I have been in love with Mario Kart 8 for close to ten years. I think it is one of the best video games ever made, sheer perfection that would be impossible to surpass with a Mario Kart 9 - hence why I have been banging the drums of DLC for this masterpiece for a long time. My review of these eight courses is extremely prejudiced by the fact I am just happy to be booting up Mario Kart 8 and seeing something that I haven’t already seen 10,000 times. But is it possible to add to something perfect without making it not perfect?? Without further ado, let’s review each of these courses in unnecessarily exhaustive detail:

Paris Promenade: If you browsed the video game internet in the mid-2000s, you’re likely familiar with this advert. I think it is one of the greatest video game adverts of all time, and most people who posted on video game message boards in the mid-2000s thought so too. If you posted on the Nintendo Official Magazine UK Official Forums, as I did, at least four dudes in every thread would have an avatar or at least a signature that referenced this advert in some way. It was the shit. Just funny as hell, and it also perfectly captured the excitement of finally being able to play Nintendo games online. Don Draper wishes he could've made it. I’m not one of those Ricky Gervais Jordan Petersen Richard Dawkins “cant say that these day” whatever-the-fucks but it does feel like an advert you could not do today and I am sad about that because I am currently envisaging a 2020s version of the advert for Mario Kart 8 that includes more good-naturedly outrageous cultural stereotypes and it’s super funny, dude, just trust me, honestly, please, it’s not offensive at all. Bro. Please. Anyway, as I was about to say - this course really reminds me of that advert and I get a real kick out of that, a sort of personal-liminal cyberspace, a private joke between me and my own Nintendo history, riding my little Donkey Kong motorbike around the Champs-Élysées (which is in itself pretty fucking funny imagery) and laughing to myself, having a good time.

As far as technical analysis goes - there are, in my opinion, two types of Mario Kart course: player-competitive courses and course-competitive courses. Course-competitive courses are primarily battles between the players and the environment - taking tight bends round steep cliffs, avoiding stage hazards, anticipating the movements of Goombas and Monty Moles. Other players are still an ongoing concern, of course, but they’ll also likely be too preoccupied by giant lava Bowsers and rain-slicked roads to give you their full attention. These kinds of courses usually serve as the finale of a cup, such is their intense make-or-break nature; a Survival Mode of sorts that rewards players who commit the fewest unforced errors (A Smash Bros-style stock battle for Mario Kart where you try and Death Race 99 other racers round a tough track would be so fucking sick dude, like honestly, just think about it for a minute) Player-competitive courses are, naturally, an inversion of this paradigm. With simple wide raceways and few hazards, if any, players are focused a lot more on each other and how they’re doing - expect green shell snipery, a focus on clean driving lines and a lot more counting of passing seconds. The bread-and-butter of Mario Kart, the sort of courses your gaming-illiterate little brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers probably prefer; the type of course your average anime-avatared Twitter luddite will probably call “mid and basic” because their TikTok-addled synapses require constant multicoloured stimuli in order to feel anything resembling satisfaction.

As you might have already worked out, Paris Promenade is a player-competitive course. Don’t get it twisted, though - “player-competitive” isn’t just some dogmatic mind palace I’ve created to justify the paucity of a simplistic Mario Kart course. There are bad player-competitive courses out there - take the mindless Grand Old Duke “marched them up, marched them down” tedium of 8’s GBA Mario Circuit, for instance - but Paris Promenade isn’t like that at all. It has branching turns, cute little roundabouts and a brand-new hyper-literal interpretation of “player-competitive” - the ability to drive head-first into the oncoming traffic that was bringing up your rear only a few seconds ago: a tense series of who-dares-wins moments where the leaders can fuck up the losers and the losers can get a far more visceral shot at the top than the game usually affords.

One of Mario Kart 8’s few flaws is that it’s quite easy for the podium-position racers to distinctly disparate themselves from the pack - strong defensive play leaves 4th-thru-12th to fight amongst themselves for scraps of coin and redshell, but folding the racing line back in on itself and forcing the tops/bottoms to go brave-or-grave is an ingenious little noteless balance patch that’s contained to a single lap of a single track, a very Nintendo solution to a very Nintendo problem that I’d like to see spill out entirely across the next instalment of the franchise. Paris Promenade is a track of deceiving simplicity that we’d all do well not to dismiss as “an asset flip” (curse the YouTuber who taught 11 year olds this phrase), it could well be the blueprint for more Karts to come.

Toad Circuit: Mario Kart 7, the hardworking Josephian father who helped give birth to the Christ-child Mario Kart 8, will always have a special place in my heart. In 2011, it helped form the bedrock of at least twelve friendships I still maintain to this day, its surprisingly robust online multiplayer providing a great opportunity for one of life’s most underrated means of forming a human connection - being absolutely fucking awful to other people via the medium of video games, strangers hurling “FUCK YOU BLUE SHELL PRICK” messages at each other via group DM until the ironic venom hardens in the veins of their hearts and forms the bonds of friendship.

Toad Circuit was one of my favourite courses in Mario Kart 7 because it played a sort of upbeat funky version of the game’s main theme and my brain naturally built neural links between that music and being online with my online friends playing Mario Kart online and having fun online. Sometimes it’s enough just to drive three laps to some music you enjoy and think about your friends. Who cares that the grass texture isn’t well-defined enough for you? You don’t have any friends because you’re comparing screenshots of Mario Kart grass on Twitter.

Choco Mountain: Super Mario Kart defined almost every element of the Mario Kart iconography/featurology that we know and love today, but I think it’s fair to say that Mario Kart 64 was the progenitor of the “fucked up little weird place that doesn’t really have anything to do with Super Mario” trend that has followed Mario and his friends all the way to Twisted Mansion and Sweet Sweet Canyon. The original Choco Mountain leveraged the Nintendo 64’s smudged-signature fog effects to create a terrifying Silent Chocolate Hill, and it’s unfortunate that Nintendo have chosen to prioritise things like “visuals” and “performance” over “looking like shit in an endearingly eery way”, perhaps traumatised by anime-avatared Twitter luddites who called the Switch port of Ocarina of Time “mid and basic” because their favourite YouTuber told them that the fog effects were wrong, totally trust me bro, I know you hadn’t been born yet and your dad was still in middle school but it’s all wrong man, go reply to @NintendoAmerica RIGHT NOW when you’re done talking about Mother 3 and Geno in Smash, man. Anyway, removing the creepy lag fog from the peaks of Choco Mountain is a besmirchment of Mario Kart’s legacy as a horror game; they added a cave, but forgot to make it scary. It’s still fun, though!

Coconut Mall: The Wii era of Mario Kart more or less passed me by because Mario Kart Wii came out at a time when I thought getting called “a feckless little irish cunt” (I’m not Irish) in Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas 2’s Xbox Live lobbies was a preferable multiplayer experience to this. I do remember the majesty of Coconut Mall course quite well, though, because I was old enough to do Serious Babysitting when Mario Kart Wii was huge, and I spent a lot of time observing my little cousins and their horrible little friends play it all the time, maintaining a safe distance that afforded me plausible deniability if ever seen in the vicinity of Baby Daisy instead of a virtual M4A1. Undoubtedly a missing link in Mario Kart 8’s chain that has now finally been restored, albeit as a weaker polygon-carbonfibre replica of the Wii’s solid steel original. (Though shouldn’t we have cause to return to the old games now and again?) This broken circle now only awaits Waluigi Pinball.

Tokyo Blur: An unfortunate salvo of ammunition for the people who rightly or wrongly accuse Nintendo of hiring Miyamoto’s work-shy grand-nephew to drag and drop mktour3.track into the Mario Kart 8 codebase and call it a £30 product. There isn’t all that much to remark on here, I think - the course transforming on each lap isn’t all that impressive when it’s done off-screen, and we already know the game’s track designers can do cool revolving-set shit that evokes Prey’s opening level. I’m sick of driving under thwomps! What do thwomps have to do with Tokyo, anyway?! I know Nintendo love to represent their home nation in their work, but wouldn’t it be cool if, idk, they reproduced Barcelona or Budapest or Bangkok or something other than the usual New York/Tokyo/London/Paris real-life fare?? I just wanna do a bike flip over the Dublin Dracula Museum or the Potsdam Hanging Rhino…

Shroom Ridge: Course-competitive courses that seek to emulate the feeling of player-competitive courses are nothing new (Toad’s Turnpike, Mushroom Bridge, Moonview Highway), but I feel like this one is special because it also uniquely emphasises some course-competitive elements, like sheer cliffs, and puts you and some cars next to them like you’re a henchman driving in the second-act chase scene of a James Bond movie where he’s trying to overthrow the Mushroom Kingdom’s leadership on behalf of MI:6. The traffic is enjoyably dense, forcing players to sometimes choose between weaving and bending knife-edges and cartoon fenders (try it in 200cc time trial!) and you can even try for a mushroom-jump off the back of a moving car and over a crevice, which is surprisingly daredevil for a game that is usually one step away from putting giant flashing neon signs labelled SHORTCUT over their shortcuts. I’m now hoping for a course with cars and trucks that can actively fight back instead of passively crushing you by merely existing.

Sky Garden: lol u just gotta love it. Has three of my favourite Mario Kart 8 tropes in one neat package: the random copy-pasted Koopa Troopas floating in unison at the starting line like busted Disneyland animatronics begging for mercy; Nintendo blatantly going “ehhhh the o.g. track sucked” and just ‘remaking’ it by doing a whole new tangential optioning of another course (in this case, Cloudtop Cruise); and of course, everyone’s favourite -  busted-ass giant-ass leaves and fruits that serve as quintessential Mariokartian devil’s shortcuts that give you like a 33% of getting thoroughly fucked in the abyss if even one tire isn’t aligned right, only a step removed from just watching Bowser Jr. spin a Russian Roulette revolver and press it to his scaly little temple before pulling the trigger. Apparently this one was in Mario Kart Tour too, but who played that game after launch week? Nintendo, there’s no need to tell on yourself by acknowledging that game in any way - we’ll forgive you, like we always do.

Ninja Hideaway: This fucking Wanokuni-ass shit right here!!! I have no idea why Nintendo thought it was a good idea to package this directly in a cup with the relatively-unremarkable Tokyo Blur - while Hideaway perhaps leans a little too heavily into every single “omg cool japan” design trope ever committed to cartridge, it is undoubtedly a far better advert for Edo-Nihon-Nin-Nin-Nintendo culture than anything else I can remember them making - and Nintendo fuckin love doing Edo-Nihon-Nin-Nin stuff. How good was Bowser’s Castle in Super Mario Odyssey, folks? Yeah!! How much time do I have left to talk about the music that brings this all to life? Funny to think that most people who originally played this course were looking at it on their iPhones with their sound off while riding the subway. Is it any wonder Nintendo wanted to free these little masterworks from their skinner-boxes and let normal people play them?

Let’s take a deep breath now and turn the other blind eye for a moment, pretending once again that Mario Kart Tour didn’t happen, and this course is brand-spanking new (which it will be to 99% of players). Operating on the exciting assumption that this is the logical next gameplay step for Mario Kart 9 (it won’t be called that, I hope!!) will take in 2025 or 2026 or whatever unfathomably far-off date that Nintendo decide to make a new Mario Kart game, is this an example of the “u can go anywhere!” design principles that Nintendo have been toying with in Breath of the Odyssey: Arceus’s Fury, now applied to a driving game?? Could the next Mario Kart be an off-road jam, finding new, personal routes through sprawling open Horizons or maze-like spaces? C’mon man, that would be kind of cool, man!! Mario Kart 8 is the apex of the traditional kart game - so how do you improve on that? Maybe, just maybe(!!!), the next Mario Kart isn’t going to be on a traditional track…?! Are we going somewhere where we don't need roads?

Some might argue that Ninja Hideaway’s exceptionally tight turns and freeform movements are more a consequence of this trying a straight transplant of Tour’s invisi-barriered track design tenets to the high-octane world of Mario Kart 8,  but I see it more as a prototype, accidental or otherwise, that addresses another of Mario Kart’s few flaws: that even in 150cc, the game often doesn’t require you to think all that hard about how you’re driving. See bend, take bend. See ramp, do trick. You might, at most, have to apply a slight brakepadding on a wet Neo Bowser City hairpin, but even then, that’s usually just a wrist-slapping punishment for favouring the kinda-broken top-speed big-boy builds. 

200cc is an admirable quick-win solution to this problem, but you can’t play 200cc with your grandma. And if your grandma can’t play Mario Kart, you’re not playing a Mario Kart game, right? It’s almost impossible to broach the skill canyon that exists between your grandma and proverbial snakers who pick the optimal weight class, but what if this is what the Booster Pass is intended to explore? Are there ways to make Mario Kart equal for all again after creating an essentially perfect game? With the last pack not coming until the end of 2023, this is a two-year experiment in the future of a game that has sold 35 million copies. I’m excited to see where it goes.

Every single interesting idea undertale has is either tackled better in other games (LISA, Moon, etc.) or are only vaguely gestured to without saying much about them (i.e. most of the meta elements). Most of the interesting ideas are stuck behind the genocide route, which is dull as shit and gives me zero reason to play it. Characters range from mediocre to annoying to meme shitposts i cant take seriously (deadass if you say "sup kiddo" to me in a shitty critikal impression i'll prolly laugh my ass off). OST is mid. Not very funny either, but those last two are just me. I respect it for trying and exposing these ideas to a wide audience ig, and Toby Fawcks seems like a nice guy.

Yknow, despite having worked on Homestuck.

What's the bare minimum you need for a game? How little do you truly need to be engaging? How much do you really have to put in front of a player? ICO is a 2001 adventure game that is an exercise in minimalist game design: a game designed around weaving a tale of romance and trust whilst having as little as possible interrupt your experience.

It's a tale as old as time immemorial: boy meets girl. Our lead Ico and the girl he's escorting, Yorda, are trapped in a massive citadel, and cannot communicate with each other due to a language barrier. Despite this, the duo must work together to escape the labyrinthine prison they find themselves in. It's a plot we all know the basic beats to, but what makes it unique is the minimalist way the story is told. On the gameplay front, we play as Ico, who handles the heavy lifting: he climbs chains and cliff-faces, pushes blocks, carries items to-and-fro and engages in combat. While Yorda cannot do any of this, she is needed to help open the magically sealed doors that Ico cannot open by his lonesome. Therefore, each puzzle is designed around creating a path as Ico for Yorda to travel and open the next door up ahead. This gameplay loop builds dependence on Yorda for both Ico and by extension, the player. You will often lead Yorda through each room hand-in-hand, and the little moments and stellar animation work, like Ico helping Yorda climb up tall ledges or extending his hand to catch Yorda as she makes leaps of faith builds trust in both Ico and the player. In turn, Yorda will often wander around environments looking for puzzle solutions, or inviting Ico to rest at a save point. In a game with as sparse a story as Ico's, these little moments do most of the heavy lifting for the player's investment in the plight of the duo.

The atmosphere is the other part of why ICO works so well. Very rarely is any actual music heard, and what little of it there is, it's mostly ambient and drone. Your journey is instead backed by the sounds of howling wind, running water, crackling torches, and Ico and Yorda's footsteps. Lacking a HUD or a UI of any kind outside of the save points and the pause menu, the game is all about the vistas: a camera more interested in big panning shots of the citadel and it's walls, where you are a secondary, if not tertiary concern. You exit the citadel momentarily to see an endless ocean, and the far walls of the rest of the citadel, places you have been and places you will go. It's one big connected odyssey, that fully engrosses you in it's world. When I sat down for my first playthrough, I was so invested I completed the entire game in one sitting.

ICO is a beautiful game that thrives in what it lacks rather that what it has. Its striking minimalism and strong aesthetics tell a story stronger than any normal narrative ever could, purely through it's use of in-game actions and mechanics, and it is an experience you won't regret having.