10 thoughts on how to play Mario Kart 7 online

Rev up those thumbs because Mario Kart is back to help Nintendo pull ahead in the tight portable console race against the new Sony kid on the block. With a new stereoscopic paint lick but a largely unchanged chassis, all eyes are set on Mario Kart 7′s online multiplayer to determine whether it will give the 3DS an easy lead or leave it lagging behind. Has Nintendo learnt from their noob mistakes of previous online experiences? Is the game still fun, infuriating, or a bit of both? Here are 10 things you will learn about life, yourself and Mario Kart 7 when you play it online.

1. Saturated colours, ludicrous voice clips and a soundtrack lifted from a Twilight Zone funfair ride are excellent coping mechanisms against unabashed rage. Mario Kart 7 is a merciless exercise in online cutthroating – anyone who has played it for more than a couple of races can recount falling from pole position to eight place in the last lap after a triple whammy of red shell, thunderbolt and blue shell ownage or other similar sorry stories. Nintendo are wise enough to understand that game design that will make players prone to sailor levels of swearing and hysteric handheld hurling needs to sweeten the pill somehow, and Mario Kart 7 constantly massages the senses telling us it’s going to be all right. Even the 3D coating has a soothing quality to it. Can you imagine a Mario Kart game reinvented as a gritty, vaguely-resembling-real-life game being half as successful? There is a reason why Demon’s Souls is a niche online game, and it’s not all down to its hard as nails difficulty levels. Mary Poppins was right all along.

Child’s Play

2. Nintendo can create powerhouse home consoles like the Gamecube or the Wii (*guffaws*), give Mario Kart an online infrastructure that single-handedly justifies the shoddy Friend Code system, even dress it all up in glossy, eye-popping 3D with a ribbon on top, but don’t think for a second they would consider including more than the obligatory 32 tracks per installment. We just about tolerated the meagre 16 of Mario Kart 64, but their stinginess nearly destroyed a very divisive Gamecube entry and was only alleviated on the DS and Wii games via the retro tracks lifted from previous entries. This was an excellent addition, but in no way justifies sticking to 16 new and 16 retro circuits in the 3DS game once again. Moshi-moshi Mr Iwata, 2012 calling – you managed to fit all of the original Super Mario Kart stages in Mario Kart: Super Circuit (plus 20 original tracks) for the Game Boy Advance. If you could manage such a feat in a 32MB cartridge more than ten years ago, there really is no excuse in a console with 4GB games already out there. Stick to 16 new courses if you must (lest the quality threshold be lowered), but for the love of all that’s holy stop being so greedy and give us at least a decent number of tried and tested retro tracks.

3. Speaking of which, it’s funny how, for all the over-the-top wackiness of some of the courses in the more advanced cups in Mario Kart 7, the SNES re-imagining of the Rainbow Road stage still has a place in the heart of most fans. Finally regurgitated into Mario Kart 7 with all the sharp free-fall cornering of the original and some new undulating pleasures to boot (courtesy of revamped Spiky Thwomps), it effortlessly becomes one of the most competitive tracks of the whole series by virtue of its simplicity – either drift or DIE.

Stroboscopic stereoscopic

4. Mario Kart‘s own descent into drunken party hell, coupled with the current gaming fixation with getting your 92-year-old grandma to JOIN IN THE FUN have resulted in the series progressively turning into a celebration for the underachievers: the worse you play, the better power-ups you get. This trade-off would make slightly more sense if it actually meant your granny was still in with a chance to edge you out for the lead position, but the reality is she’ll spend the whole race stuck in the conveyor belt of Coconut Mall while throwing you off-course by indiscriminately firing shells and triggering lightnings like it’s going out of style. Items have traditionally been a great leveler in all Mario Kart games, but it’s true that the latter entries in the series have shifted the balance towards granting too much power to the racers in the rear, with some of the most strategic power-ups (the feather, the fake item box, BOO!) conspicuously absent from Mario Kart 7. Some purists see this as a sign of Nintendo dumbing down a series that had a certain level of skill in its beginnings, but the challenge is out there for the hardcore. You’d be a fool to consider Mario Kart a racing game anymore: it’s a frenetic bloodshed on wheels that laughs in the face of the Call of Duty campers. There is nowhere to hide here and only the most resilient come up on top.

5. Looks can be deceiving: the cute, rendered cover picture may lead you to believe this is still a funny little side series for Nintendo’s main mascot, but you couldn’t be more wrong. In terms of evergreen sales and relevance with the general public, you could say that Super Mario 3D Land is in fact the platformer spin-off to the juggernaut that Mario Kart 7 is about to become in the next few years. Interestingly enough, this paradigm shift first occurred with Super Mario Galaxy and Mario Kart Wii, the Wii’s best selling game after Wii Sports, and not for anything Nintendo’s sole successful foray in the online world so far. While sales of the main Mario series games is still decent, the Mario Kart series is the current major player in the business for Nintendo, a well-oiled enterprise of round the world, round the clock mass entertainment in a way that very few other Japanese games have managed in the last 10 years. Ignore this at your own peril.

6. The past is a strange place, and what looked like heaps of fun in 1996, may not be as joyful by today’s standards. Yes, we’re looking at you, Kalimari Desert. Especially if you go and remove the only redeeming, risky shortcut in an otherwise dull as course. Considering Nintendo seems inexplicably against the idea of including some of the most popular retro tracks once they have already featured in previous games, we are left with slimmer pickings on each subsequent installment – Luigi Raceway? Waluigi Pinball?! I shudder to think what retro tracks will be left by Mario Kart 9 – and I bet even then obvious choices like Toad’s Turnpike, Bowser Castle 3 or (*hint*) WARIO COLISEUM (*hint*) won’t still make the cut. Nintendo, give us the power to rig a poll democratically elect the retro circuits we want back! (Or else others will).

Dino Dino Jungle: still crap

7. No one gives a toss about the Honey Queen. Honestly, of all the characters in the Mario universe with a micron of personality, they had to plump for a furry whose most memorable contribution to the Mushroom Kingdom canon is getting Mario to be her personal lice exterminator because she can’t be arsed to get off her bum. She happens to be female, which is suspiciously convenient for a series highly popular with girls and an unbalanced testosterone-filled roster such as Mario Kart‘s, but if you have a vagina (or like to pretend you have one when you race), you are expected to choose between being a beautiful Stepford princess or a fat, lazy, hairy Queen Bee. That sound you can hear is the clock of feminism WHEEZING back at the speed of light. They even removed Birdo from the roster! Scandal! The campaign “Justice for the Goombellas of the world” starts here.

Positive role model

8. Nintendo’s online community is, overall, a decent bunch. This is most probably thanks to Mario Kart 7′s lack of voice chat or any kind of meaningful text exchange, creating an embalming sense of fake camaraderie under the rightful nanny glance of the Big N, but I’ll take mute games without frontiers any day over the feral under-age riff-raff that shrieks “gay ass noobz!!!!” down your Xbox Live headset any day. Mario Kart 7 has also provided me with a little online moment that has made me not lose faith in humanity gamers altogether: when playing a Community cup, players whose tracks have already been picked in the random draw have started to select courses chosen by other people to increase their chances. They can (and will) be absolute fuckers on the asphalt, rubber-banding you to hell and back while pummeling your sweet, tender kart butt with all manner of WMDs, but Mario Kart racers understand that everyone wants to have a good time.

9. Unfortunately, for every yin there is a yang, and no matter how many times in a row it gets selected, there is a whole faction of fucking losers sunlight-averse nerds who still choose to play on Wuhu Mountain Loop again and again to prove to themselves they haven’t wasted several hours of their life practising a race-breaking bug for nothing. Like Millwall supporters, the aristocracy and other scummy strata of society, they are in the minority but can easily ruin the fun for everyone else with their selfish shenanigans. What’s worse, if you complain about it to the International Court of Justice, you will get to hear Nintendo’s bonkers explanation as to why they refuse to fix the aforementioned glitch: “[It] would create an unfair advantage for the users of the original release of the game“. Uhm… why? Because they had the chance to exploit a bug for longer than you? Somebody drop a note about online patches to Reggie, please.

Where saddos hang around

10. One of the most terrifying noises your human ears will ever register is the unflappable siren of a spiky blue shell homing onto your little cart when you are in the lead. In fact, while nabbing pole position in most racing games is a satisfying experience, it instantly becomes a butt-clenching exercise in Mario Kart, with that sinking feeling of knowing perfectly well that you will get rear-ended by the most odious, game-changing of power-ups just before the end of the race. The jury is out on this one, with its detractors arguing it’s just too unfair for its own randomness, but I prefer to see it as a rite of passage into gaming adulthood – in the same way a mature individual understands how the energy of fighting against certain unavoidable things in life is much better spent in dealing with them in the best possible way, so does a seasoned Mario Kart player learn to shrug off a snatched away victory by virtue of a last-minute blue-tinted apocalypse. It ain’t fair most of the time, but it’s always worth another go, if nothing else for the giggles on the rare occasion when it’s you that can laugh past a raging player who has just been shell-shocked 10 metres away from the finishing line.

Shell Hell

 

Mario Kart 7 is out now on 3DS. You can find me repeatedly selecting Koopa Troopa Beach most evenings in an effort to cling to my teenage years. Add me to your friend list (2234-7284-1633) if you want to play against an overexcited Toad.