Mario Kart Super Circuit

"All that glitters.... and by the way, where the heck is Koopa?"

Nintendo could have been cheap and made a straight port of the SNES Mario Kart game to the Gameboy Advance. It’s not like they haven’t done such things in the past and made a decent profit. It was very refreshing, therefore, to find that Mario Kart Advance contained five all-new cups with four tracks in each. Do the math and that adds up to twenty new tracks. And in a burst of goodwill, Nintendo included all of the tracks from the SNES Mario Kart as an unlockable bonus.

Those who preferred the SNES Mario Kart to the N64 game will find a lot to be happy about with Mario Kart Advance, since due to the configuration of the Gameboy Advance’s buttons the game plays a lot like the SNES version. The controls have a distinctly “classic” feel, since there is no power-sliding and obviously no analog stick to steer with. It’s simply A to accelerate and B to break, and L or R to deploy items.

In terms of track design however, the game more closely resembles the N64 version, as the tracks are fairly long. The first cup does a good job of introducing the player to all of the possible surfaces he or she can expect in the rest of the game; these include concrete, asphalt, sand, mud and ice.

The cast of characters has not changed from the N64 version either. Koopa will make his return someday…I know he will. But not in Mario Kart Advance. No, we are stuck instead with his replacement Wario, a driver who stinks and is outclassed by the other two heavyweights, Bowser and Donkey Kong. Among the middleweights there is Mario, Luigi and Yoshi, and rounding out the field are the two lightweights, Peach and Toad.

Items in the game are acquired by driving through question-mark blocks that yield blue, red or green shells, boos, bananas, stars, mushrooms, or lightning. I won’t go into the details of each item (read a faq) but sufficed to say they are used to get the upper hand in the race in a number of crafty ways. The SNES tracks use this updated items system, even though the original game did not. Therefore you can use blue shells or the 3-shell combos even on the original tracks, and the item blocks will regenerate.

Besides the 1-player grand prix mode (which boasts three different classes: the easy 50cc, taxing 100cc and fiendish 150cc), there is a time-trial mode where the only opponent is the stopwatch, and a rather redundant quick run mode which is good for practicing a single track over and over again but does not record your time. One of the most impressive features about Mario Kart Advance is its multiplayer mode, which offers three further possibilities: a grand prix where two human players play against the full compliment of computer generated characters; a verses mode where up to four human players can race head-to-head without any computer players, a battle mode where up to four human players engage in a balloon-popping melee on wheels. There is also a single-pak mode where two players can play a very scaled-down version of the game using only one game-pak and a link cable. Another interesting feature for those with link cables is called “ghost exchange.” In this, players can store their 10 fastest time-trial races and exchange the data with other players.

So far (aside from the Koopa issue which I’m really bitter about) I’ve been singing Mario Kart Advance’s praises to no end. It would seem that Nintendo has produced a wonderful package with great gameplay, an interesting array of items and racers, a huge number of courses, many different modes, unlockable goodies, and bonus stages. But probe a little deeper and a slightly different picture begins to emerge. For example, while there are twenty new tracks, they start to blur together after a while due to many similarities. Also, the old annoyances of past Mario Kart games come back to haunt this one as well: I’m talking about the way the computer plays illegal catch-up, and the lack of quality items if you’re in first place, as opposed to getting great items if you’re at the back of the pack. In other words, gameplay is intentionally skewed towards the losers. Most of the racers have severely loose controls, meaning they slide all over the place and aren’t very fun to use. My racer of choice (since I can’t use Koopa) is Toad due to his fast acceleration and decent cornering skills, but as a consequence he gets pushed around a lot. The heavyweights are great in time trials but their poor acceleration makes them questionable in a GP.

Another bigger problem, and the bottom line of my review, is that Mario Kart Advance hasn’t evolved at all from its predecessors. The original Mario Kart was appreciated for its uniqueness despite some gameplay issues; the N64 game greatly expanded upon track design and item possibilities. What new features has Mario Kart Advance brought to the table? Aside from portability, nothing that I can see. With its cutesy music and graphics, and its cast of standard Mario characters, one wonders how much longer Nintendo is going to milk the Mario cow by rehashing the same old atmosphere in as many different genres as they can conceive of. While I was initially very excited about Mario Kart Advance, after a while I found myself going back to its smaller, edgier, less mainstream and more interesting “rival,” Konami Krazy Racers. Nintendo can pour all the craftsmanship they want into a game, but that isn’t necessarily enough to keep it from stagnating.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 11/23/02, Updated 05/06/03