Mario Kart Super Circuit

"Look, Mario is back in another kart racing... Zzzz..."

Almost every franchise has one. Once a movie has a few games out, the next game will be the racing game. Almost every racing game is based around karts, and rarely do they have any new changes in the whole tired formula. You always have a battle mode, and the ability to link with others who have the game to race with them. You always have a tournament mode. You always have the time trials, and you always have the choice for a quick, simple race. There are always the same types of weapons, but cleverly disguised. You have the homing weapon, the invincibility weapon, etc. Every character has his/her own talents. Is a little originality too much to ask? MKSC doesn’t add anything new or exciting, and that gives it a retro, boring feel.

Once again, Mario and his gang of friends and foes get together for more kart racing fun. Racing games do not need stories, and this game wisely avoids trying to think up a cheesy story that appears in many Mario games such as Mario Party 3. It earns points for that.

The points get quickly taken away from offering the same exact thing all of the Mario Karts had, except for putting it on a handheld. The gameplay is really all the same. Playing as one of the many Mario characters, you race around different tracks. Scattered around the tracks are coins, and as you collect more and more of them, you’ll get small boosts in speed. If you are doing poorly in a race, don’t fret. On each course are spinning “?” blocks. If you hit one of these blocks, you’ll be equipped with a random weapon. Each weapon has different capabilities, such as the red shell. The red shell will hone in on the person in front of you and hit them, causing it spin out. The green shell, however, just fires out straight ahead of your character and will ricochet off the walls until it falls in water or hits someone.

Each character has his/her own traits. Mario and Luigi are the well-balanced ones. Bowser, on the other hand, is slow, heavy, and has weak acceleration. Peach and Toad are the easiest to learn, and arguably the best. This is silly. Peach and Toad are the fastest and easiest to learn and master, and once you start to play as them you’ll think that the rest of the characters are terrible. I sure as hell have. In fact, anyone who plays as Peach or Toad has a strong, massive advantage over others. Despite their lightweight, they are great.

There are only three modes of play, and points are taken away for that. The Mario GP is the tournament that has you racing on 4 tracks, trying to get the top rank (3 stars). Once you complete a track in Mario GP mode, you are awarded 9, 6, 3, or 1 point if you finish in first, second, third, or fourth, respectively. If you do good enough in all four tracks, you’ll win a trophy for either first, second, or third place. The points are the only things affecting your final rank and score, however. The time you take to complete the tracks, the number of weapons used and the amount of coins collected also count, so in order to get 3 stars you must be perfect and make no mistakes, which is virtually impossible. The other modes are the usual time trials and quick races, which are basically the same. Time trials has you racing to bet your best time, and a quick race allows you to have a single quick race on any track.

MKSC seems to be a simple technical demo to show off the GBA’s powers, but it even does a bland job at that. The colors are all bright and happy, just like you’d expect from Mario. The characters on the character select screen look rather grainy and pixely, like they were drawn by different colors of sand. On the racetrack, they look ten times better. They are quite good looking and smooth, and maintain a great amount of detail. One of my favorite little details is related to Wario. On the racetrack, when he turns, you’ll be able to see a roll of fat as he leans to ones side or another. The backgrounds are not distracting, but they all look the same and bleed into one another. Some of the designs and structures in the backgrounds repeat themselves quite often, such as in the Rainbow Road track. In that particular track, you see Bowser’s famous floating clown castle that was in Paper Mario. As you turn and such, it goes out of view and quickly returns. This looks rather strange, and if you position the kart perfectly, you’ll be able to see Bowser’s clown castle at both sides of the screen. This left me with the impression that there were two clown castles on the track, and that didn’t gel with me.

The title screen tune is an expected happy Mario tune. It scores average on the hum factor, due to its somewhat catchy nature. All of the track’s music sounds unique, and tunes are not repeated at all, much to my surprise. As usual, the track’s tune agrees and mixes well with the atmosphere of the track. The Bowser’s Castle tracks all have fast paced, scary music in it while the Riverside Park track has a more relaxed, slow tune. The menu music is all the same, and it continuously plays until you start a race. The menu music isn’t bad, but it would’ve been better to have the three different main menus having different music. The sound effects are standard, but the twinkling star sound effects on Rainbow Road sound really, really, really great. The voice acting… oh dear lord, the voice acting… Once you pick a character, you hear them say “Yeah!” or something along the lines of that. While racing, if you hit someone with a weapon, you’ll hear your character say something. Hit another person with a weapon, and you’ll character will say the same exact thing before. This becomes a pain to the ears, ‘cos you’ll be hearing your character say that line all the time if you are a good MKSC player. Pass someone up during a race, and you’ll hear your character go “Oh yeah!” Pass up another person, and your character will say that same thing again. Another problem with the voice acting is you cannot really understand what they are saying. When Wario hits someone with a weapon does he say “Bingo!” or “We go!” The voice acting is a garbled, repetitive mess.

As for control, this is one of the most uncomfortable control schemes I’ve ever seen. A and B are accelerate and brake, respectively. Press and hold R to do the power slide. The power slide allows you to make sharp turns, but learning when and where to do it is a little tough. The bad thing is using weapons. To use weapons, press L. Sounds simple, right? If you press and hold L with a weapon, it will follow behind you. If you press down on the D-Pad and let go of L with a weapon such as a shell, the weapon will fire off behind you. If you got someone on your tail, and you have a shell or something, you'll press and hold L to get the shell behind you, ready to fire off. But while you are holding L, you must also work the gas and brakes, and use the power slide when necessary. If you want to fire the shell behind you so you hit the person, you’ll also be pressing down on the D-Pad. If you do this often enough you’ll get one hell of a pain on your hands, and it will hurt whenever you play.

Time Trials offer some replay, and the different ranks in Mario GP does the same. Too bad the game isn’t really that much fun. Since it doesn’t offer anything new or exciting, MKSC is a major disappointment as one of the GBA launch titles. If you want a good game, pick up Advance Wars. Want a boring game that isn’t too much fun? You just read a review for it.

NOTES:
If this ROTW or ROTD, I’ll kick Osama’s ass! Go America! Yeah!

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 01/24/02, Updated 01/24/02