A Look Back At is our retro review column that takes a look at games from yesterday or yesteryear and what made them so great, unique, or memorable. It will be posted every Monday.
The tracks.
That’s what made Mario Kart 64 so memorable.
Not the gameplay. Not the graphics. The tracks.
Lets face it, the gameplay wasn’t as special as some other games we’d see on Nintendo’s console. The graphics did their job. But boy, the addictive and gripping nature of those tracks. On their own they were already great, running past the dangers of the best Bowser’s Castle in the franchise or trying to keep your footing in Banshee Boardwalk. But Mario Kart 64 featured something that seems to be underrated: multiplayer Grand Prix.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I do enjoy how seemless the online multiplayer is for Mario Kart 7. But it’s just one track and that’s it; you move on and forget about the past. This wasn’t the case with the multiplayer Grand Prix. If you did poorly on the first course, you had to give it your all to make up for it. Unfortunately, this wasn’t always such an easy task, as courses such as Peach Raceway were grueling, marathon runs that required near perfection to execute, and even if you did come all the way back after completing Peach Raceway, Bowser’s Castle still laid ahead as the final task of the Grand Prix.
I haven’t felt that feeling in any modern Mario Kart title; Mario Kart 7 comes the closest to replicating it and it receives a lot of credit for being able to accomplish such a feat. Street Pass, in particular, is a great way to compete against your friends, even if you’re only facing their ghosts. It’s still a great challenge and extra degree of difficulty to a single player “campaign” where difficulty isn’t in its vocabulary. Ironically, though, there was something about Mario Kart 64 that did make it difficult. Whether it was always that one race where the CPU would be light-years ahead, or having to navigate through oncoming traffic in Toad’s Turnpike reverse, I find myself realizing that leads weren’t ever safe in Mario Kart 64, not due to item balancing, but because of the game itself; specifically those tracks, easily the best in the series in my mind.
But it wasn’t just how the tracks played, it was also how they felt. They were alive, with personality, whether they ran by at breakneck speed, had the feel of an actual raceway, or were completely over the top, each track had its own character that shined through, which is more than one can say about some of the more recent tracks that lack the same personality aside from the visual aesthetics and appeal. Don’t get me wrong; some of the tracks in Mario Kart 7, and even Mario Kart Wii have their own personality and are fun to look at, but when you think about it, they’re just fancy skins on top of shallow tracks. Moo Moo Farm was just an oval, but it felt frantic and fast compared to another simple track such as Daisy Hills.
Maybe it’s my pure nostalgic love for the game that makes me remember even the simplest tracks, such as Luigi Raceway being better than Toad Circuit. Maybe its the simplicity of the items back then and the lack of rubber banding, though Mario Kart 7 didn’t see a severe case of this. Whatever the case, Mario Kart 64 is, in my opinion anyway, the best in the entire franchise and will be until they release a Mario Kart with every track. One day, Nintendo…
