Super Mario Kart shaped what playing games together looked like for the next 20 years, and only falls so low on this list because of the greatness of the games that came after. Of all the games I poured time into as a kid, Super Mario Kart was the first that everyone in the house wanted to play-if it was on, everyone was in the living room, despite only two people being able to play at once. Super Mario Kart is the granddaddy of not just all the games on this list, but a whole damn genre. Now we’re into the real greatness, a selection of games that so defined different eras of my life that this list may as well be “Top Five Mario Kart Games With A Four-Way Tie For First”. Mario Kart 8 is marred only by a neutered Battle Mode and a few other notable bumps in the road, but it’s a great Mario Kart to its core. The weapons are re-balanced, the game is stunning in HD for the first time ever, and the courses’ twists and turns literally defy gravity. It took 6 years for Mario Kart to sort itself out after the shaky play of the Wii version, but Mario Kart 8 (so far) feels like it’s on an even footing.
It was a great game given the limitations of the Game Boy Advance but, sadly, Mario Kart had moved on. Instead of trying, Super Circuit takes the much smarter route of styling itself off the original Super Mario Kart, taking those flat, Mode 7 powered courses, smoothing their rough turns and dropping in much prettier characters. Mario Kart’s middle child, Mario Kart: Super Circuit hit stores years after the Nintendo 64 version on a system that (reasonably) couldn’t come close to producing similarly massive-feeling, three-dimensional tracks. It’s a good game, just not one that inspires as much excitement as the rest of the games on this list.
#NITENDO WII MARIO KART PORTABLE#
Mario Kart 7 for the 3DS is a “must-buy” in the same way that every portable Mario Kart is, but I don’t know that gliding and underwater driving did much to enhance the experience. I didn’t realize how much apathy I have for Mario Kart 7 until I had to rank it in a list! I don’t really have a bad word for it, but all the words I’ve got-stalwart! mandatory! perfectly serviceable!-feel like some pretty faint praise. While these changes literally paid off for Nintendo- Mario Kart Wii is the best-selling entry by a Moo-Moo Meadows mile, having sold over 35 million copies-all I can remember is offering a lot of deflated, apologetic shrugs while auto-drifting past a friend who got blue-shelled three times in a single lap. Mario Kart Wii tries to add fairness by dropping first-place-punishing power-ups more frequently than ever before and offering players who don’t want to master the game’s drifting controls an “automatic” option so they can wiggle the Wii’s motion-controls worry-free. It makes a lot of sense that a Mario Kart made for the Wii-a console that captured the casual gamer like few before-would be the series’s most egalitarian. Some of those games suffered more than others, though, and after countless laps and heartbreaking last minute losses, this is my best reckoning of which Mario Karts get a checkered flag, and which ones get left in the dust. For a game that seems static and stalwart, Mario Kart has endured a tremendous amount of change over the years-transitioning from 2D to 3D, suffering through the addition and removal of fan favorite characters, and even the introduction of motion controls. But with the release of Mario Kart 8 for the Wii U, it’s time to take a look back at the series’ 22 year history. Okay, there are only eight Mario Kart games to begin with, at least if you don’t count the arcade versions.