"Fun but primitive..."

Mario Kart 64 is a sequel to Mario Kart for SNES, except it's for Nintendo 64 (hence the title). Is it raised to N64's standards? Well, read on...

GRAPHICS 7/10
I can't give any more then an 7. The worlds look very nice, especially that one on ice with the reflections, and there's very little popin. The problem is the characters; they're sprites, not fully rendered in 3D. You won't get any top-down views, only from the ground, and the characters look very scary close up (huge blob of pixels). They also work weird in multiplayer; say you, Mario, got a boost, and you use it, on your screen your engine will light up yellow and stuff. If Mario is also on another screen, it won't show that, in fact it doesn't even show the characters leaning into turns, only on the actual person's screen. I think they could have done better here, I mean look at Diddy Kong Racing, at Zelda, at DK64, etc! The camera is kind of jerky too.

SOUND 5/10
AAAAAAAHHHHH! That's about all you hear from Toad, and after a few times you'll be screaming that too. The sounds aren't very varied, each character has about 2 sound waves, and trust me, when every time Luigi passes you and says "Here we go", it will get annoying. The engines are fine, the sounds of carts going over different surfaces is good, aka the railroad tracks. The music...ah, it's annoying. The raceway tracks are all the same, the rest are, well, not that great, basically...

CONTROLS 8/10
The controls are pretty good, A to go, B to brake, the analog to steer, Z to take out/use an item, and C for camera stuff and the like. They're pretty simple, and simple is good. I like L for changing music volume, it comes in handy when racing on a Raceway track for the 2054th time... =)

GAMEPLAY 8/10
The actual levels are made well, with some nice variation, and there's 20 to choose from. I like Bowser's Castle. The idea of playing multiplayer against computers is fun but you can't choose one track, you have to compete for a cup in that. It's not much fun playing alone, round up some friends and it's a lot of fun.

OTHER...
Peach's voice is annoying, am I the only one that thinks that? Actually, all the voices are, I discussed that in Sounds. It's annoying when you fall off a cliff, like in Yoshi Valley, because when you hit the side of a cliff on your way down, you'll roll. Roll and roll and roll, and take like half a minute to roll down, instead of like 2 seconds to fall to the bottom. This is pretty frustrating. My favorite level, like I said, is bowser's castle, because it's a long course, has boom-booms from the original mario series, and, well, it's just fun!

This is an fairly old game, 1996, so maybe that's why it's a kind of primitive n64 title, compared to today's titles, but it still stands out as a pretty good racing game. Try renting and see what you think; it's not good enough to run to the store and automatically buy.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 01/11/00, Updated 01/11/00