Mario Kart 7 (3DS)

It’s often hard to know when to consider the one-player part of a game like this finished, but now that I’ve got 3 stars for every cup, including the mirror ones, and now that I’m a little sick of it, I think that’s enough time. It’ll remain a fun multiplayer game, but that’s the only way I’ll need to play it now. It got a lot of hours of play out of me in a short time, though, and is definitely the racing game I’ve enjoyed the most in many years…probably since the first WipEout.

Though I’m not a big racing game fan, the original version of Mario Kart was a fixture of my life on the SNES, one of the few fun things that brought all the boys in my least fun secondary school together. The older boy who had brought it with him was a real expert, knowing all the shortcuts and having a grasp of the powerups that still amazes me today. He could hit you going around corners with a thrown banana every time, he could shoot you backwards with a green shell while going around a corner with perfect aim and red shells almost never worked against him because he knew exactly when to hop. I learned from someone very, very good.

And then I never liked another Mario Kart game until this one. The N64 one was fine, but the controls felt so different. The Gamecube one I only just tried and utterly hated, expecially how you cannot hop. The Wii one with its wheel controls is a totally different thing. And I just got my DS too late to be very into that version.

This one, though, I played at just the right time thanks to a timely gift, and got a bit obsessive over. It has its significant differences from the SNES original – on the negative, there’s no feather for super-jumping, you can’t hop over shells if your timing is great and the infamous blue shell is of course an element of random luck that ruins many a three-star run on a cup. On the plus side, the tanuki tail you get from the feather is useful, the drifting mechanic works well and it’s nice to be rewarded rather than penalised for longer, sharper drifts, coins are no longer necessary for maximum speed and of course the thing is beautiful to behold, especially in 3D.

I have to say I’d like a version that plays exactly like the SNES version. I’d like to be drifting only in short, sharp bursts. I’d like to be able to hop red shells and bananas again with good enough timing. I’d like to be able to hop over the right brick wall with a feather if I had it at the right time, and I’d like to no longer drop from first to fifth moments from the finishing line because of a lucky blue shell. But this comes much closer than any other version, and I’m very happy with it.