Michaël | HouseStationLive.com

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MARIO KART IN NAME ONLY... WHEN NINTENDO CHOOSES FANTASY OVER PRECISION

HSL reacts to Sakharu Baguette’s documentary: "Mario Kart, 30 years of fun and madness". Original video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=6tMbgg7tJCE

From Super Mario Kart to Mario Kart 8, the series drifted away from kart racing and into magical nonsense. It’s not that Nintendo can’t reconcile fun and challenge... it’s that they don’t want to.
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PART 1: INNOVATION OVER CONTROL

If Mario Kart 8 was developed by Namco and Mario Kart Super Circuit by Intelligent Systems, then of course those games are very different from the rest of the series, and in a way, that’s what helped refresh the concept. I don’t see driving on walls or underwater as an improvement. I prefer a "real game" where obstacles say "stop", rather than one that becomes increasingly permissive, where the player is never really interrupted in their progression. Miyamoto is an inventor, everything he touches is original. Whether it’s F-Zero, Mario Kart, or even Wave Race, none of those games have believable gameplay. They shine thanks to their innovation and whimsy, but never because of gameplay. Because as much of a legend as Miyamoto is, he doesn’t even come close to Yu Suzuki in that specific domain.

In F-Zero, you have to press down to land. But the D-pad also steers the vehicle. That’s intentional, Miyamoto wanted landings to come with the risk of not landing straight and flying off the edge.

It’s clever, it’s fun, but when you want to clock a proper time in time trial mode, it becomes impossible to drive precisely. In Mario Kart, they removed the landing mechanic, because it’s no longer spaceships, but instead added speed boosts before jumps. So you end up being launched into the air at full speed, and again, you never know where or how you’re going to land, and you might fall off. Just like in F-Zero, it’s innovative and fun, but even though time trials can feel "sim-like", all these flights and landings destroy driving precision.

#MarioKart8 #Nintendo #GameDesign #GameCriticism #FZero

Jun 5, 2025 at 12:00pmWeb
Show threadMichaël | HouseStationLive.comJun 5, 2025

PART 2: FROM KARTING TO MAGICAL NONSENSE

Miyamoto is a brilliant inventor, and these games are fantastic, but the frustration comes from the fact that he knows nothing about racing games, he’s just bypassing the genre to make it more popular, a genre he himself admits he doesn’t like. The further we go in the series, the more it becomes a mess: now we’re driving underwater, on walls, using bikes and hovercrafts. We’ve strayed far from the original spirit of Mario Kart ("go-karting with friends"). The simplicity of the original concept was what made it fun, but to squeeze every last drop out of the license, they just keep adding new features. Nowadays, what sells are flashy graphics, easy games, and a ton of features.

Nintendo wants to sell. They’re not looking to create new IPs or to promote a mature, intelligent approach to gaming. By making the tracks wider and, as if that weren’t enough, adding the ability to drive on walls, Nintendo is creating a game that even an 80-year-old grandma who’s never touched a game in her life could enjoy. And those kinds of technical choices can only be made by sacrificing the pleasure of real players, the ones with more than 3 IQ points. Your videos are popular because you often cater to the communities and the nostalgia crowd, and that’s perfectly fine, but if you were more critical, the hate comments would flood in because you wouldn’t be validating people’s favorite games. And that’s what makes criticism on YouTube difficult, even impossible, because hate = algorithmic downranking.

I watch your videos for what they are: an inexhaustible source of information, and I love them for that. But they’re definitely not a buying guide.

Nintendo “does not want to”, and that’s different from “not being able to”, to reconcile fun and precision. As I said, the simplicity of the original Super Mario Kart has drifted into increasingly wacky and “fantasy”-based gameplay. If you can imagine, in real life, taking a kart and slipping on a banana peel, you can’t imagine driving underwater or on walls. And from a concept that was “cool and futuristic/science fiction”, we’ve moved to what Miyamoto loves: heroic fantasy, magic mushrooms, weird stuff that has nothing to do with kart racing. Mario Kart has nothing left of karting but the name.