What other game in the Mario franchise screams multiplayer on the Nintendo 64 besides Mario Party? How about the other well-known multiplayer game known as Mario Kart 64? I just want to say that this is going to be a special review since this was the first video game I ever got with my Nintendo 64. This review will also be a little shorter since, well, why would Mario Kart 64 need a plot?
If there were any story in this simple game it would probably be like this. Mario and friend got together and wanted to race so they set up all these wacky race tracks, to see who would win first place. So, yeah, sorry, but that’s the best I can do for a summary of the reason why they are all racing.
The game play is in the form of, what else, a racing game. You get to choose from 8 characters to choose to race as, and the racing cup you want to compete in. The characters you can choose are Mario, Luigi, Peach, Toad, Yoshi, Wario, Donkey Kong, and Bowser. The character roster is quite small, but it works since I wouldn’t want to dump all of the ideas for the next game in one game and not have any new ideas for the next game. You also get an armory of unique items, which range from shells, banana peels, lightning bolt, mushrooms, and etc.
The graphics are pretty impressive for the time, but I will talk more about them later in the review. The music is also fun to listen and never get annoying or anything of the sort. The tracks themselves seem fun and crazy to play on. Some of them even have secret ways of getting in front of the player. The reason why I love this game is that you can take this game to college, and this would be one of the only games you would need to bring with you to have fun with multiple people.
Let’s get into your go-kart and get to the bad parts. The biggest gripe I have is that there isn’t much to unlock. I take that back. There isn’t ANY thing to unlock, which is annoying since the Mario Kart series now has multiple things to unlock. The biggest gripe I hear from fans are the rubber banding AI opponents. This is where no matter how far you are from the other racers, they will find a way to get right behind you if you mess up once. The graphics are nice, but they won’t impress you since there are more games on the console that have 3D graphics. The graphics for this game are more of a 32-bit style look.
All and all, this is almost a perfect game. It’s one of the few games you could play over and over again, no matter how old it is. I would highly recommend buying this game if you have a Nintendo 64 or getting it off the Wii’s Virtual Store.
This game gets an 8 out of 10.
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