Switch 2 and Mario Kart

 

            Hello! Switch 2 got announced, a new Mario Kart was shown off, finally, so I get to talk about Mario Kart and the Wii and other things again! I’m sure you’re excited.

            I started speculating about the next Mario Kart back in 2020. I was hoping it would be a Double Dash 2 because it seemed like the perfect fit for the Switch. Now we have a new trailer out but it doesn’t look Double Dash like, except one thing. (Scratch that, I thought the front of Mario’s kart had three prong like things sticking out of it but looking at it again it just looks like a design. Guess that will save me some time.)

            People talk about an “open world” Mario Kart but I can’t wrap my head around the idea. I don’t know what that looks like or how it would work. It’s crazy that there seems to be 24 races at a time. Being in the pack is going to be a whole lot more hectic. Several YouTubers I follow look at the trailer and say “they’re hiding something from us” and I agree. I can’t even fathom what is gonna come but I hope it’s good. I hope it’s fun. I really liked Mario Kart Wii and was a little disappointed with 8 on the Wii U. Deluxe was better, and I did play it a ton but it didn’t have the same charm as Wii. For me, 8 wasn’t much different then Wii, I don’t really know what I was expecting but there wasn’t anything that really wowed me. Even 7 on the 3DS was pretty good in my opinion and 8 just didn’t do anything new. Sure you can drive up walls and upside down but that was just the track, that was just how the race worked. In the Wii version, it was very obvious that the motorcycles had an advantage. At the start of the race, if you flicked the controller you’d get a boost. Doesn’t exist in 8. As a Dry Bones player on my bullet bill bike I’d get bounced around like a pinball ball. If I was even in the presence of Bowser exhaling I’d be sent flying off the track and right into a pool of lava. It was a high risk, high reward sort of thing and I liked that. You still have different weight classes for each character but I don’t know how much it matters anymore. I think more than anything it just changes the stats of your kart. I understand wanting to let everyone play whatever character they want without having to learn a different way to play but at the same time… get over it. They did this in Mario Wonder too which to me just makes everyone less special. CTR Nitro-Fueled gets around this by letting you change your “style” of play so no matter if you’re playing Dingodile, Pura or the Checkpoint Crate you can drive the same way for each.

            As for the amount of racers, 24 for each race, maybe that’s only certain modes, maybe that’s for online only, only time will tell but in 8 Deluxe we have 48 characters in total. We have a couple Mario’s and Peach’s but 48 none-the-less. I’m hoping we’ll see characters from Mario Odyssey, little skull guy from Tostarena, a Shiverian from Snow Kingdom. I’d like the Broodals to show up. I also hope that we can change the characters costumes instead of having separate Mario’s. Fire flower suit, the tanooki suit, ect. In the Mario Movie we see Donkey Kong get a fire flower look which was kind of cool, didn't expect to see DK with a power up. I think Metal Mario and Pink Gold Peach can still be their own entities. I wish Pink Gold Peach would be a villain in a proper game, probably mentioned it before, but I see her like being Mr. Smith and assimilating Mushroom Kingdom denizens into pink gold versions. And going back to Donkey Kong, yeah he looks weird but I do NOT see the “Movie” look. His arms are MASSIVE, Movie DK’s arms are not that big. But something needs to be done with his face.

            Stepping away from Mario Kart we’ll talk a little bit about a new Smash. On one of these Switch 2 videos I saw someone else suggest a Nintendo VS Sega Smash and someone commented something like “they’d never do that, Sega doesn’t have that many recognizable characters” or something to that effect, and one, are you serious? Sega has their fingers in so many franchises they could make their own Smash clone. And two, that’s exactly WHY you do that. When I got my Wii and Brawl I didn’t really know anything about the other franchises. Playing Smash got me interested in Metroid and Zelda. If Sega was thinking about making some new games on old franchises and wanted to gauge people’s interest this is how you’d do it.

            I think I’ll end it here, I can just reiterate myself to the end of time but what are your thoughts? Do you have any predictions for what Mario Karts new gimmick is going to be? Any characters you want to see in Mario Kart. If they’re not gonna give us Bowsette the least they could do is give us Wapeach. Let me know below in the comments and I’ll see you soon. Bye-bye!

            @AztecSauce