Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 101: Mario Kart

Episode Date: May 29, 2017

Racing series come and go, but, over the last 25 years, Mario Kart has remained the most popular and relevant one out there. But what keeps this wildly unrealistic take on competitive driving so many laps ahead of its contemporaries? Join Bob Mackey, Jeremy Parish, and Henry Gilbert as the crew explores the ups, downs, and various rainbow roads of Nintendo's long-running racer.

This week on Retronauts. Welcome to Mario Kart. of Retronauts. I am your host for this week, Bob Mackie, and today's episode is all about the Mario Kart series. Very exciting. And who else is here with me today before I continue? Hi, I'm Jeremy. Okay. And that's

all he'll say for the rest of the podcast. Hi, I'm Jeremy. Okay, we'll have to mute his mic now. And who else is here? Coming up like a blue shell from behind. It's Henry Gilbert. Hello. The hated blue shell. Yes. And today's episode is all about Mario Kart. It's another one of our famous HD remakes of a previous Retronauts

episode. I was just in the bathroom doing some serious research on my phone, the best place to do phone research. And the last episode was April 10th, 2008. So we're nine years out from that Reginald's episode, yeah. Wow. So that was Mario Kart

Wii. It was tied in with Wii. Not the greatest Mario Kart. And this one's tied in with Mario Kart 8 for Switch. Yeah. Oh, wait. I guess it kind of is. And that's coming out in April, correct? You're welcome. I will launch it alongside it, and we will have that synergy we need to be successful. At the time of this recording, I've played a little bit of it at events, so I've got thoughts.

Oh, awesome, awesome. So before I begin, I always like to ask people on the show, when did you first encounter the subject at hands? And today's subject is Mario Kart. Maybe you guys want to talk about your experience with Mario Kart when you discovered it, when you maybe fell out of love with it or back into love with it. Jeremy, how about you? What is your Mario Kart experience? I mean, I discovered it with the Super NES version. I rented it, and that one stuck in my mind because it was one of the one.

of the few games my brother actually wanted to play. Oh. Like, we had gone in together and bought an NES together in, like, 1988, and then he never really played it. He bought a couple of sports games, like... Bill Lambere? No, for the original NES. Oh, okay, gotcha.

And then he just kind of lost interest. So it became my NES that he paid half of, which was nice of him. And then I went ahead and got a super NES, you know, a few years later, and he had very little interest, but when Mario Kart came out and we rented it, he was really, really, he was more into it than I was, actually. I didn't really get into Mario Kart that much myself until Mario Kart 64, which I realized in hindsight is not that good a game, but back in two, no, it's not. But back in 1997, I played the hell out of that game. I, like, mastered every circuit, every track, every difficulty level. I did the reverse tracks. I mean, I was working on a

student newspaper at that point and working some very long nights, and that was an essential release valve for us. We would play, you know, head-to-head Mario Kart. And Mario Kart will outlast newspapers, I think. How about you, Henry? Yeah, my personal history, slightly different from Jeremy. I didn't play the Super NES one all that much when it first came out. I don't know, I wasn't that into it. And also, when I played it at Toys R Us, like against my mom, it made her motion sick. Oh my gosh. It was when she realized, and she played the hell

out of 8-bit games, but when she saw even the pretend, the third dimension of Super Mario Cards, she got sick. It was like, well, that's games for me. No more games for me. Later, entire medium. So I didn't really play it all that much. But so

then, cut to Nintendo 64, one that first, the first system I got on launch day, I am waiting and waiting for anything. to play that isn't Super Mario 64 Pilot Wings or Wave Race, and then finally, Super Mario Kart

64 comes out, and it was the first game we could really play 4 player, and all my friends played 4 player, and we played it to death. We were into the racing at first, but then really got into battle mode. Like, we love battle mode, and I think it kind of set our

brains, it kind of programmed our brains for the 4-player split screen. We would then doing a few months later all the time in Golden Eye. And so, yeah, Mario Card 64 is my first real big love affair with the series. And it kind of just continued from there on and off and, yeah, ups and downs. I think it's important to note for that N64 game. I think why we all love it so much is that it was the game of that month or maybe two-month

period. So any meal you give a starving man, they're going to appreciate. And it has its terms. We'll get to it soon. As for me, I kind of fell in love with it from the beginning. I tinker with F0, my friend had it, but I felt it was too basic. And when Mario Kart came out, I'm like, this is what F0 needed. And plus, I love the Nintendo characters, and I love how this series kind of gave more personality to them

and explore them a little more than Mario games did before this. And just kind of exploring that fake 3D world was really interesting to me as a kid. Like, I would play the battle mode alone, not because I was lonely, but because I liked driving around, seeing all the sprites turn around as I moved. Like, how do they do this? Like, just trying to figure out how they pulled the trick off. and just being in the quote-unquote 3D world was what was really appealing to me about that first game. But then from 64 on, it was all about the racing.

And I think I've purchased and loved everyone to a point. Some of them aren't so great. We'll talk about those. But let's get into some background info first. A lot of this comes from the 1992 Super Mario Kart interview from the site Schmupplations. Them and Glitterberry are doing God's work, basically. They are taking all of these ancient magazine interviews translating them. believe they both have patrons. If you enjoy our research on the show, a lot of it comes from

this. So please look into giving to these folks because they do a lot of work. And you find out things you never knew before about people and the games they work on. And especially going back to this Andy Wada asks, I really get a feeling that Miyamoto is just a total ballbuster. I don't know why I never picked up on that before, but he's just like, oh yeah, we all went out go-karting. I don't really think we needed to spend that money to make this game. He's just like, no fun. You must make the games. Well, yeah, I think they talk around that in things. They say it in a nice way of like,

Miyamoto always upends the tea table. Yeah. But I think that really is them saying, like, Miyamoto showed up and said, this is all shit and start over. Yeah. No, actually the, okay, so I also use the Awada asks about Mario Kart We for this a lot. And that's where that up and upend the tea table conversation comes from.

It's like, Miyamoto will come in at the last minute and demand you add something and has to, you have to basically redo everything or just like make room or like clean everything up just to fit this one idea that maybe you don't want in the game, but he does. Yes. So, yes. He's kind of like video gaming's Tim Gunn. He's like, well, this is nice, but don't you think you could do it a little differently this way

and maybe change it up a little bit? And then you're like, oh, my God, everything has to be different. At least he's not the, what, Gordon Ramsey of game developers? No, that's probably. Button it. Who would that be? Oh, geez. Dennis Dyack.

Let's move on. Yes, so here's where this game came into being. I apologize for that bad joke. This game came into being because Nintendo had made F0 but they wanted to make something less intense than the standard F1 style racing, Formula 1, which it took me until maybe I was 30

to realize F0 was an abbreviation for Formula Zero. Yeah, that never got that. One of those things where you're like, oh, Dragonslayer, Dragon Slayer, oh my God, it's amazing. In our American defense, like, F1 is not a popular. It's not a thing here. It really isn't. We like NASCAR drag races, if we like that even.

Yeah, Japan does make a lot of F-1 games. You're right. Yeah, F-1 is very popular in Japan and Europe. Final Fantasy's Active Time Battles based on F-1 racing. That's right, yeah. But I think the reading that Shab-Lasin's interview, it finally, well, finally clicked for me, was why there's so many Nintendo fans who constantly say, like, bring back F-Zero, do F-0, F-0.

And this told me, like, F-Zero is not what they wanted. Zero was practiced for Super Mario Kart. It was like a tech demo for Mario Kart. And so when people ask them, like, could you make more F-Zero? Like, I definitely feel like Miyamoto, at least, it's things. Like, no, that was practice. He's like, no, that was my band jamming. Like, we gave you the album and it was much better.

Yeah, exactly. And I keep watching this. In fairness to fans, like F-Zero has evolved into something very different than Mario Kart. Mario Kart is a very sort of methodical. It's cart racing. Whereas F-Zero, you know, it really focused on the... the speed and the precision. And it is a different racing experience than Mario Kart.

So I think there is justification for people saying, like, I would like some more of that, please. I hate my life and want to be punished. Please punish me. I mean, F-0 was just a very intense game with very intense music and things are always exploding and you're always like jumping off pits and things like that. But I think of it just as a launch game tech demo almost, at least by Nintendo standards. And then the then did transform into something else.

But I also think what people love most about it is not from what Nintendo game, especially with X, or no, GX that people thought. This is finally the F-Zero thing. Like, that was a Sega racing game. That was not a Nintendo game. And Nintendo doesn't have much fondness for it, I don't think. They don't. And they really wanted to make a racing game that was more of a carefree, laid-back racing game,

because they wanted to be approachable. They are Nintendo. They've always been Nintendo. And their overall goal was to make a two-player racing game. because F0 was not two-player. And they said, we worked on the single-player element first because if you make a single-player game that's good, your second-player game will be better.

Don't start with working on two-player games. Start with the initial fundamentals. Which is why Mario Kart, no matter how you play it, it's always a split-screen game. You can either see, I think, the rear-view mirror mode or the map, depending on, like, I think you hit select or something like that. But, yeah, it's always a split-screen game. It's worth noting that F-0 could not have been a two-player game.

Mario Kart's cartridge, the Mario Kart cart, has a special, like the DSP chip in it, which enables it to do the split screen. Like, functionally, you know, FZero was an amazing tech demo for the Mode 7 feature of the Super NES hardware, but that was the extent of what you could do with the base level hardware. So in order to enable two-person racing, they had to add, you know, extra technology to the system. And I believe that chip assists with, like, 3D processing or, like, 3D equations to keep things in a, to keep things consistent visually when they're trying to fake 3D. So there were a few changes in what they came up with to the original Mario Kart. Battle mode once took place in large obstacle-free arenas with no items. Instead, you just sort of shot this kind of machine gun at your opponents, and that's how you scored points. but it actually made people sick because there was nothing to, like,

there was no, like, landmarks, and I guess without any landmarks just driving around on a flat bitmap. It kind of makes you queasy. So they added more design stages and added the balloon idea that would stick with the battle mode for the rest of the series. And drifting once worked how it would work in future games where you kind of counter-steer into the drift. This is a very complex, it's not a complex thing to pull off.

I feel it's like a complex thing to describe it to people. Have you ever taught someone how to power? drift in Mario Kart and you can't find the words like, okay, now jump into it, now turn the other way and now release it. It's a hard thing to put into words, but once you... Turn the bottom part clockwise. Yes. No, no, topwise.

Topwise. Yes. So yeah, so many players could not pull off the kind of drifting that would be in later game so they made it simpler. There was no power boost. You just hit L&R to jump and then you kind of just hold onto that button as you, you know, turn sharply. So we don't have the infamous and the best part of Mario card, in my opinion, the amazing drifting, where you drift perfectly and you come out of that

drift with a power boost and you do that with every turn if possible. That was not in the first game at all. Or you, hell, you just snake the whole way. Oh, no, no. Okay, snaking, we'll get to that. It's not a good thing. Snake! So, even from the very beginning, the quality of the item you pick up is dependent on your rank.

This would be way more obvious in future games, but I went to the Mario Kart Wiki, not Wikia. I'm sorry. It's the Mario Kart Wiki. And for every game, they have literally a table of the probability of the items you'll get, depending on what place you're in. And I think even what character you are. So even from this, and these all come from Japanese guides. The Japanese guides got into this nitty-gritty of detail. But even from this game onwards, you have that sort of your and last place you probably are going to get a star or something that will help you, you know, increase your speed, maybe not a green shell.

But the best item you'd get wouldn't be as good as the best items you'd get later. Yeah. The item creep would come in later in the games. Like the thing that turns me into a bullet bill, basically, or the golden mushroom. Those were the superpowered items. But apparently this game had a very loose experimental development. There was no master design doc. It was basically just a lot of meetings and a lot of just chatter and a lot of experimentation.

So it was kind of developed in a different way than how Nintendo normally does things. But it turned out very well for them, obviously, because the first game is still a really good game. And I think it's important to point out, and I think maybe our European fans, might get mad at us for saying this, but Mario Kart is the most popular and most relevant racing game ever, period. Relevant? Yes.

Oh. Yes. Take that forza, or forza, however you say it. I mean, looking at just the... It's a forza. I mean, I'm not saying if you sell more, you're a better game. It's not the Worthington scale or anything like that.

But looking at the sales of Mario Kart over time, they're moving tens of millions of units for every game. And every racing series dies. Mario Kart has been alive for over 20 years. like even burnouts. It's popular enough that they're just giving us a game that is like five years old, three years old, four years old. Yes, but with a new hat, right?

Right. And Isabelle. Yeah. Oh, yeah. No, Isabelle was D.L.C. She was, yeah. She was. She was in Link.

We're in the second one. There are some new, there's some new stages, inkling stuff. It's more Splatoon editions. But, yeah. Keeping it lively for the kids. I bet, yeah, I bet on pure sales, probably Grand Tourism. Hmm, boy, no. Nope.

When was the last Grand Turismo game? It's been ages. Boy, they've been talking about six for a while. I've been talking about six for a while. And then meanwhile, Forsa kind of ate its lunch. And then Mead for Speed still keeps chugging along, but it's not what it used to be. But then that was annualized. But, yeah, it's hard to think of a bigger one than Mario Cars.

I mean, like maybe 10 years ago, burnout seemed poised to be the next big racing thing. But then it died. 20 years ago, Ridge Racer. Yeah, for sure, definitely. And now it's just a joke from a press conference. I'm sorry, I like Ridge Racer. But when you say Ritch Racer, you immediately think of, you know what I'm talking about. That's why they don't have things called Rage Racer.

Yes. They make Project Cards. Yes. So I want to talk about sort of the, there are many directors, many creative forces behind Mario Carts. But the sort of main guy is Hideki Kono. I think we mentioned him in a previous episode. I said he was, he seems like one of the more unsung Nintendo folks. I just think he doesn't give as many interviews.

So they don't push him out on the stage as much as they do with, like, Tezuka, Miyamoto, now Koizumi, and people like that. And then he went on to make Evangelion and did such a great job. Oh, God, no. I kid. I know. It's Hidekiano is the Evangelian guy, right? Yeah.

But it was shocking to see at the Switch presentation, Koizumi on stage and being, you know, the big presenter of stuff. Like, I don't think I'd ever seen that before. It felt like at the Switch reveal back in January that it was then. trying out people to be like, could you be the next Awada? Will you be the next guy who host Nintendo Directs? And it was cute. I mean, I'm not saying I could do a better job.

The third annual Nintendo games. He didn't seem quite as ready to, you know. I'm not trying to be mean. I tried hard. I had an interview with him over like video chat through back in 2013. And he was much more personable on stage. in January than he was in my interview in 2013. He was a good interview, but I didn't see him

and think like, this guy's going to be presenting the next Nintendo system. I interviewed him in person, I think, in maybe like 2011 at GDC. And I thought he was pretty amiable. He struck me as being like a more, you know, a looser, more informal Nintendo person. Maybe I had him on a bad day or something.

But, I mean, just filling in for you water, those are big shoes to fill. And it's hard to ask anyone to do that. So, I mean, he's trying hard. I hope he achieves that role of being the sort of the friendly Japanese guy who's also a developer who greets you on, you know, on those directs and is very amiable. And I think that's also because the new, the new older boss than Awada, he doesn't want to be that. He's like, I'm a business man. You guys do this.

I don't want to host these things. Yes, he is the most businessman-looking businessman I've ever seen in my life. He was like, he was just pressed into a mold and like plopped into the world with a little suitcase. Sorry, back to Hideki Kano. Yes, so he is the longtime producer of the Mario Kart series, and he's been a key figure since the very beginning. He directed the first game with his former directing partner, Tadashi Sugiyama, who is the director of Zelda 2. And Kono has lots of great credits before Mario Kart. He played major rules in the development of Mario 2, USA, Mario 3, Mario World, Yoshi's Island, and he directed Luigi's Mansion, which is the reason why he was not as on the double-dash development as he would have been.

So, yeah, he's like sort of all over the place in terms of what he's worked on. Not all over the place in a bad way, but he's done almost everything for Nintendo. Worked on some of their most legendary games across all sorts of genres. So he's a pretty talented guy. A renaissance man. Yes. And he is still the producer, and I don't see a lot of interviews with him. But it's important to know that he is sort of the driving force, if you will, behind Mario Card.

I apologize. Did you just do that? I did. I'm sorry. So the first game in the series is the only game with super Mario card. I believe it is the only game with super as the first word. Which says a lot about all the other games. Yes. It's always Mario Kart something for the other game.

So this game came out in August of 92 in Japan and September of 92 in U.S. Not a lot of localization here. And as I said before, the directors were Hideki Kano and Tadashi Sugiyama. And I feel like more than anything, this game establishes a sort of anything goes mentality for the mushroom kingdom where it's like, villains and heroes are just having fun. There's no, nothing has been kidnapped. There's nothing at stake. It's just like, let's get together and have fun. Cats and dogs living together.

Yeah. And I mean, like, there's nothing you're trying to win outside of a trophy. It's just like, let's have fun with these characters. Champagne. I guess so, yeah. But only in Japan. Only in Japan where Princess Pete chugs it when she wins. Super sloshed.

Yeah, which is really funny. So actually, you know, going back to what you said about this being the only one with Super and the title, I always read it as like Super Mario Brothers, Super Mario Kart. But I guess it's actually like this is Mario Kart on Super Ninja. Yeah. Now it makes sense. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah, I still, I like it when, I always think of it as there's the Super Mario series and the Mario series. And I still love it that core Mario platformers still are called Super Mario something. Unless they're new. Well, it's still new Super. Oh, yeah. It's just, it's just an extra thing in front of it. More superlatives. Why not?

Yeah. Thus makes it better. But yeah, I kind of like that it just became Mario. Well, the naming convention used to be connected to the console, and they kind of dropped that about six years ago. But it used to be just whatever the name of the console was is then attached to Mark. Yeah, except for GameCube. That's it. That's double-dash.

Yes, yeah, that's true. They did break it for that. So this game plays out a little differently from the games that would follow. There are four cups with five tracks each, and all the races are five laps instead of three, and you have lives in this game. So if you get lower than fourth place, you lose a life. Is it worth explaining what a cup is in this context? A cup is a grouping of tracks.

So there is the mushroom, flower, star, and special cups. And each of those contain five races. In future games, it would be the cups would each have four races in them. But things are a little different here. And it's important to note the tracks are very short, but there's more laughs because with everything happening in the game, eight players racing, all this stuff that's, you know, going on inside the game, they have to make the actual stage smaller than they were in F0. Well, actually, yeah, I was going to say,

There's, like, an actual finite limitation for how much space can be displayed in a mode 7 bit. Right, right. Like, I think it's, like, four by five screens worth if you, if you, like, zoom out and look at it from an overhead. Yeah, but the tracks are still pretty complex, I think. They do a lot with the tracks. Yeah, there's definitely more going on in them than sub-zero. Sub-zero, sub-zero, because there's enemies on the tracks. There's different kinds of terrain.

Like, F-0, I think it was just roadways, and, you know, some of them were broken. Some of them are crumbling, but there weren't different kinds of terrain. But, yeah, there were, like, little places where it was kind of bumpy and you had, like, you know, hazard zones. They would drain your energy. You weren't driving inside a damn house, you know, with hardwood floors. And it really didn't have the very discreet shortcuts the way Mario does. Yeah, yeah, most of them you do with the feather. We'll get to that in a sec.

So, as I said earlier in this podcast, I feel like this added a lot of character to the Mario Car cast. Each racer has a unique animation as they turn around. Some of them aren't very interesting. I think like Mario just opens his mouth, but Princess Peach winks at you. I think Donkey Kong raises his arms. Yoshi sticks out his tongue. They all have unique things happening when they turn around. What does Toad do?

I can't even remember. I just remember it's really cute. Maybe he opens his mouth. I think he does. I don't know. I've always liked Toad most in these games. I don't know why, but up until they give him a terrible voice. And I was like, oh.

This is the only game where he doesn't have one. But so also to add to their personality, they all have their own themes when they win. And they're very cute. They're very character-defining. DeCouple one is very pokey. The Bowser one is just a lot of orchestra hits. The Peach one is very gentle.

I mean, I love those little touches where they have unique turnaround animations, unique winning animations for when they win the cup. They all do something different with the champagne bottle. And also the little songs that play when they win. It's just a very, very nice touch that adds a little personality to these characters who are kind of one-dimensional. Even at this point. That is.

That champagne bottle thing is such another, like, F-1 thing we probably don't get. Yeah, you're right. I mean, I guess I feel like I've seen pictures of due to win NASCAR that also pop open the champagne bottle. But I think that's more of an F-1 type thing. Or the champagne of beers. Pop open a, what, Budweiser? It's Miller High Life. Miller High Life, that's right, yeah.

So this was the first, like, declawing of Bowser, too. Not literally, of course. Right. But this was his first, like, we're, hey, we're hanging out, whatever. We're like, I'll stop kidnapping her and trying to kill you, and let's just race and have fun together. I don't know. It's almost more like a Saturday morning cartoon sort of villainy, like I am Bowser and I will prove my superiority by racing you and defeating you in the racetrack. I suppose so.

Yeah, I mean, he did build racetracks covered in lava. Yeah. All right, that's true. Full of right angles. But also that finally Peach gets to appear in a Mario game for more than four seconds. Yeah, this could be the second game where she's a playable character. Yeah, and I still don't, I mean, USA does count, but they didn't make the game thinking, oh, Peach will be seen the entire time. She just got added after the fact.

And that's also something, this is an important game to Luigi history, because, so he had never been drawn. He was a Mario clone in Mario 1 and 2 for Japan and 3, and in gameplay, though, not in the end screen for Super Mario World. In the end screen, he has drawn differently than Mario with a different body. But other than two, they had always made him in-game look the same as Mario, and that changed with Super Mario cart. Actually, Henry, I have to correct you. Oh, you're a year off. This is a very obscure game, but in the game, NES Open Tournament Golf, Luigi is in the game as a taller character. That's one year before, but you're right.

This is the first time. I think that a moving sprite of Luigi is different than Mario. I don't know if the Luigi Sprite moves or you just see them on like menus. Okay, is that a start screen or is that a... I don't know. God. I do know that was the first game that set up Luigi and Daisy as the one true pairing. Oh, you're right.

God. Yeah, Daisy isn't that game. She's catty hanging out with them. So it's one of the two. It's one of the two. Maybe even more significant about this game is that it reunifies Mario and Donkey Kong's timelines for the first time. Wow. Because those split with Mario Bros.

and Donkey Kong 3. And it's Donkey Kong Jr. It is Donkey Kong Jr. But this is before, you know, the whole rare facelift for Donkey Kong. This was actually the first thing Donkey Kong had done new, aside from like showing up in an ending to Tetris or something. Yeah. Since Donkey Kong 3, which was a 1983 game.

That's right. I mean, they'd had arcade ports. Almost a decade. What an odd choice. I guess they just need another big character. Who else would they have had? They had so... Yeah, Mario didn't have that...

I mean, they could have, like, done Wart or something, but I guess... Also, or, you know, Tatanga or something, or whatever they got that guy's name from... Yeah, yeah, the alien. Tatanga, that's the captain from Raiders Lost Ark. It's from Boy Meets World. But that's outside of... That's outside of EAD, so they probably like, hey, that's not our guy. Same with Ward.

Same with Ward. But, no, it's like, it's a nod back to Mario's origins and, you know, kind of pulls everything together. And I miss Junior, I think he appeared... He has made very sporadic appearances. since that game. Donkey Kong 94. I feel like tennis for 64 was the last time. I mean,

canonically, he became the Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong country. I don't respect that. We don't want to believe this, but that's what Rare made up. And I think they was... Rare does not get to make Nintendo history. They were both harangbade after 94,

so I'm sorry. I thought that was a good verb to use. Leave your complaints in the comments. We're going to move on. We're still talking about Mario 64. I'm sorry, Super Mario Kart. Everyone is ashamed of me in this room. Yeah.

So this game establishes the basic Mario Kart weapons. We have the green shell, which you fire in front of your car, and it just goes in the straight line. The red shell is sort of the heat-seeking shell, the banana peel, of course, which you lay behind your car and people slip on it. The Starman, which makes you invincible, obviously. The mushroom, which gives you a boost of power. The ghost, which I believe, I'm not sure if it steals items at this point or just makes you impervious to being hit. I think it's just invisible. Yeah, I think so.

And then lightning, which shrinks everyone on the. the course, you can run them over. It is the most annoying weapon, as always, in any Mario cart. And the feather, of course, which is used very sparingly. You can use it to jump over projectiles if you can sense them coming towards you, but you really just use this to get some very good shortcuts in a few stages. So, like, the ghost house stages, usually they're the ones you use the feather in to access these shortcuts, which is shortcuts are not really a thing in Mario Kart after this. They're not as emphasized as they were in this version, I think. So each character in this game, which is also exclusive to this game, each, each

character's a specific rival that will always be up in their grill during the single player mode. And each of these rivals has their own unique attack. That is not an item they pick up on the course. So Peach uses poison mushrooms. Bowser puts fireballs on the tracks. Donkey Kong uses banana peels. The Mario and Luigi guys, they use the Starman.

But these are not items they pick up. They can just use them at will to destroy you. It is, yeah. Wow. I never realized that. I would be like, what is this fireball? That's why when you play as a character, like, why is Bowser? always, like, attacking me.

It's because every character has their own assigned rival, and that is who is always second place, if you're always first place. So somebody is always in your grill. Well, I've noticed that in the Mario Card games. Yeah. Like, there tends to be a character who is always on, you know, your selected characters ass the entire time. But I didn't know about, like, the fireballs and bananas and stuff.

Yeah, those are all in, like, the poison mushrooms. I think those are the only three unique. Who is Peach's rival? I don't have all the rivals written down. It might be, like, Luigi or something. I don't know. There must be a character I never played. because I didn't know about the poison mushroom.

I've never seen that. They don't always make sense. It's like, I'm Luigi. Why is Yoshi have a problem with me all of a sudden? But, yeah, yeah. There's only enough room for one green guy in this world. But I think the AI would get better so that they would have a more balanced approach to what every character was doing. But I think they really just wanted to focus on the rival character as the thing you're fighting against with this rubber band AI sort of idea.

And important to point out, this game takes place in Super Mario World, which was a cool choice. You go to Donut Plains and the chocolate islands and all that stuff and Bowser's Castle, of course. So they were really using that Mario World setting, which was just a year prior to the release of this game. So it's pretty interesting. Rainbow Road was a new edition, of course, but a lot of the things you go to, a lot of the enemies you see are from Mario World. Yeah, I like that they had just finished Mario World, and so they're living in that space, again, like it was the freshest one. That's what I, it followed over into 64, and in each one since then. of like, I played this most recent core Mario game, and here are stages based on that.

How neat. I was, though, thinking about how, like, how cutesy it is and in the style of Super Mario World and just imagining the Nintendo of America people who are trying to sell this in the face of, like, Sonic 2 or Sonic 3, I forget what was 92, but they've got all this Sega 2d in their face. Okay, Sonic 2, right, Sonic Tuesday, 1990. So they've got all this Sonic 2d in their face. face trying to sell this another super cute, super cartoony thing that also, you know, doesn't

look that fast next to the blast processing of Sonic. Yeah, to me, that's one of the most surprising things about this game is that it is so slow. I mean, even at, you know, on 150cc, it's not a blazing fast game. But that was intentional. They're like, we want to make a slow, relaxed racer because like the fastest you'll go on a go card is maybe 30 miles an hour. Right.

But, I mean, it does kind of fly in the face. of convention and especially the trends at the time. And, you know, Sonic and Sega had really eaten Nintendo's luncheon away. So for them to deliberately go in and make a game that kind of shows off the system's weaknesses or perceived weaknesses, it was pretty brave. But I don't think anyone has really ever looked at Mario Kart and said, I mean, I'm sure someone has, but that's not part of its legacy online. Like you don't see people say like, oh, that game was okay, but it's so slow. Everyone's like, no, Mario Kart is so good. No one I talked to ever said it was a slow game.

It was just, it was amazing to watch an action with the illusion of speed and 3D movement. And we're talking about how cutesy them. I'm looking at the cover art. This could be my favorite Nintendo cover art. I love it. It's drawn by, what is the guy's name? I just discovered his name. Kotabe.

Kotabe, yeah, he's one of the guys who left Toe with Miyazaki. You were telling me, Henry? This was, yeah, I had gotten a reminder of it because I was going through all these old Awada Asks, partially to prep for Retronauts. and the one of the ones that like just like I was just struck dumb again with how cool it was for for Flip Note Studios the thing no one ever cared about they reached out to Mr. Katabe and who was he came up through toy animation at the same time as Asa Takahara and Hayao Miyazaki

Those are the two main Ghibli guys. The two main Ghibli guys. So they did all this great like they did so much important work in early Japanese animation and then they went off on their own and worked on a show Heidi in the Alps which he did a character design for and then he doesn't say why but there was a time where he split off from them

and they went off to work on their own things and he went off to do his own thing and in 85 got hired by Nintendo to do art design for them and he was like what? He was shocked by how much it was you should just read the whole thing One of the most interesting bits in it about his start there was

he started trying to design sprites for them for dokey-dokey panic and he did the one for the Ravens flowing carpet. They're like, this is too good. This will break the game to do it. And so they took out some of the frames of animation, but that's still why that carpet looks so good.

It was animated by a real animator. And then he also, he took the cover art from the original Super Mario Brothers from Japan, the Famicom Box Art, drawn by Miyamoto. He said, using this is my base and working with Miyamoto, he then formalized the character designs and would do almost

all the production art for the Mario series, including that. Yeah. So look him up, guys. And I mean, we talked about on the Punch Out episode how Nintendo in the 80s enlisted a lot of top talent, anime people, to do designs, to do production art. And even if you look at the Legend of Zelda manuals, especially Zelda 2, it looks like

it probably is just like literally a photograph sell on top of the background, which is why they're so distinct and so just anime-looking. But yeah, the Mario Kart SNES box art could be my favorite Nintendo box art, maybe next to Mario 3, just a great collage of all the characters, and they're all very, they're all kind of personified by what they're doing. And, man, I love it. I started to get so off track. We talk about anime.

It's a great piece of art. Yeah. And it's important. I wish I could find just, like, a clean, high-res version of that. Me too, with no logo. Yeah. We have to infiltrate Nintendo sometime. Yeah.

And ask for it. And it's important to point out, I didn't make a note about that. this, but I just remembered it. Watch every Japanese Mario Kart commercial. It will have you angry that there is not a Mario Kart anime. It is such great animation because usually when people are animating commercials, they have 20 seconds, so they look better than anything you've ever seen in your life, especially these animated Super Mario Kart commercials.

Look up everyone for every game. It's usually just an amazing piece of 2D animation that is just astounding. I could not stop watching these when I was doing these notes for this episode. So let's get back to the game itself. there's a pretty good soundtrack. It's very, very catchy. A little grading at some points. Jeremy is shaking his head and saying, no. It's not pretty good. I like it. I love the soundtrack at this game. Oh, you love it. Okay. It is my favorite Mario Kart soundtrack. It's Soya Oco. I know. She did such great work. She really, she really, I think, made full use of the Super NES's sound capabilities. And there are so many different styles. I mean, some of the, some of the instrument voices she uses, like Bowser's orchestra hits that you mentioned. I don't like those so much. It's a little, I don't know if this is a great word. It's a little thin.

Oh, yeah, yeah. A little bit, like, a little metallic. I don't know. Yeah. But, like, I'm, the entire time we've been talking, I've been hearing, you know, like the beach music and the kind of like the steel drum. But I just hear that in my head. And even some of the kind of like, I don't know, some of the instrument sample she used, they're almost like a little bit off key. They're like out of pitch.

Yeah. It adds to the personality, like the... She is a very unique, I guess, sound fonts to her compositions, especially, you don't hear these instruments in any other game, really. Right, yeah. And I don't know, like, it could be grading, but it manages to stop just short and just becomes really unique and really memorable. It does fit the tone of the game very well, I will say.

So that's the soundtrack, and we also... I mean, there's probably more to say. I didn't mean to, like, take over there. I don't have really much more to say about that. I have really strong feelings about the soundtrack. Here are some of the soundtrack in this episode, but I don't have much more to say. Although I love Soya Oco, she's kind of an unslinked composer. She was not, she's in Nintendo for like five years, and she's one of their few female composers, I think.

As far as I know, there's not a lot of them at Nintendo. Most of them are dudes. Yeah, I wouldn't be doing my job on a podcast here if I didn't say to listen to the VG Empire episode. My friend and sometimes guest on here, Brett Elston, he does a video game music podcast, and he's done two about Mario Kart, one called Mario Kart Memories and another Mario Madness. So look those up, VG Empire.

They'd hear a lot more thoughts on the soundtrack. Yeah, I don't have much more to say, although I love all of her stuff. I want to look up her stuff outside of games because she went on to do other things, and I'm interested in knowing what that sounds like, but that's for another time. To get through this, we have Battle Mode,

So this establishes the battle mode of Mario. Of course, we have the, basically your character has three balloons. There are four arenas. You drive around, and you have to pop the balloons, and that's basically... This would get a little more interesting in 64 when you had different levels to the arenas. It wasn't just a flat plane with kind of like just flat blocks that are stuck to the ground, but you still can't drive around them. It's kind of strange, but...

I mean, once you've played the other Mario carts, when you go back to Super, you definitely see how flat it is. When they bring back super stages, if they don't add elevation to it, then they feel very, very flat. Yeah. Yeah, this, I was kind of wanting to save this for Mario Kart 64's section,

but that was why that game had such a big impact on me because it does add that third dimension in a way that Super Mario Kart lacks. So this game. So this game goes on to a establish four classes of similar characters that would be completely broken after this after this game. So we have basically each, there's like a pairing of characters.

There's four pairings. So Mario and Luigi are the balanced characters, of course, which makes sense. Princess and Yoshi have high acceleration but are kind of slippery to control. Donkey Kong Jr. and Bowser have low acceleration, but have a high top speed and they're kind of the pro players. And I think in this game and maybe some other future games, they can actually squish the smaller racers like Tod and Cupa. if they're driving fast enough.

They can just, like, flatten them like a thwampoid. And Coupa Troopa and Toad have good acceleration, great handling, but low top speed. And I love Cupertupa. He's my favorite character in Mario Games, period. And I love him in this game. And he has great googly eyes when you turn him around. His eyes just, like, go up and down in his one, like, mono eye sockets. You know, I never liked Coupa, but when they brought in dry bones, that became my guy.

Oh, okay. Why don't you like Cupa Troopa? I don't know. I'm sorry. Jesus. Mario's always been my guy. I am boring like that. Optimus Prime is my favorite transformer.

Vanilla ice cream for me, please. I love vanilla. Tote was my guy until dry bones came along. And then it became dry bones. Not dry Bowser? And then Daisy because, I mean, all she says is her name. She's so awesome. She's such a deep character.

She's got great characterization. One thing that I like about this game that would go away and eventually come back is coins. And I like them because they give you a secondary objective when you're racing. And they also sort of indicate the best way to take turns. They reward you for taking turns in the best way. And they build up your top speed. You gain one kilometer per – wait, one kilometer per hour. Is that how it works?

I think so. Okay, sorry. There's no metric time. Yeah, I was like, wait a minute. Yeah, one kilometer per hour for every coin you collect up to 10. So you can hold up to 10 coins. Getting all 10 will give you 10 more kilometers per hour as your top speed. Which in this game is important to note because your top speed is not nearly as high as in like F0 where you're going 700 kilometers.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. And the engine, even the engine noises are very just like small and whiny. They don't sound powerful at all. But, yeah, that's basically Mario Kart setting the standard for future games. 64 would deviate from this in some ways. But we have all of the basic stuff set in stone almost. Do we have anything else to say about this game?

So it looks like we're all out of info on Mario Kart. One, we'll be back with Mario Kart 64 after this nice musical break. I'm going to be able to be. And so, you know, I'm going to be able to We're going to be able to be.

Today on Geffen Playhouse Unscripted, we are joined by actor, producer, director, author. What else can you do, Brian Cranston? I sweep floors. You do? And I load a dishwasher really, really well. Do you unload it? Not to minute. Okay.

We can give you a job in our house. The talent is loading it, not unloading. No, the talent is buying the dishes that fit together. and not the dishes that I buy that don't fit in the dishwasher. Well, I could teach you how they can fit. Okay, Brian, thank you. That's Brian Cranston on Geffen Playhouse Unscripted. Be sure to listen on Podcast One or through the Podcast One app and Apple Podcasts.

Hey, Retronauts listeners. I regret to announce that our current reality is boring. Instead of jumping on the back of a chocobo or into the cockpit of a wondrous airship whenever we want to go down to the local Trader Joe's, we have to rely on cars. Machines made of fiberglass and steel that run on liquefied dinosaur corpses. But if you're in the market for a new ride, consider turning to Truecar. With TrueCar, you can see what other people in your local market paid for the car you want, information that empowers you to feel confident.

Once you register with TrueCar, you can connect with a certified local dealer and see real pricing on actual inventory. And with over 13,000 certified True Car dealers nationwide, and over 3 million cars sold by TrueCard dealers, you can rest assured that TrueCarr has a history of happy customers. So when you're ready to buy, visit TrueCard to enjoy a more confident car buying experience. Some features are not available in all states. Let's go racing.

It's Super Mario Cart Funny Car Madness. Open field's Super N.E.S. Turn the track into a giant mud pits. Or burn rubber on ice wood or asphalt. Wixing up for the Big Boys. Cousousin is Bigfoot-topping trucks. See Yossey's goat car. They go!

Mushrooms, banana peels, turtle shells! Dino might! Check your rearview and make a mean dust! Or go into battle mode and ruin his day. Two speeds. Fast and way too fast. It's two-player fun on the split screen. Only for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.

Now you're playing with power. Superpower. Hi, it's Jamie, Progressive number one, number two employee. Leave a message at the... Hey, Jamie, it's me, Jamie. This is your daily pep talk? I know it's been rough going ever since people found out about your a cappella group, Matt Harmony,

But you will bounce back. I mean, you're the guy always helping people find coverage options with the name your price tool. It should be you giving me the pep talk. Now get out there, hit that high note, and take Mad Harmony all the way to nationals this year. Sorry, it's pitchy. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates, Price and Coverage Match limited by state law. So we are moving on to Mario Kart 64, released on December 14th, 96 in Japan, and February 10th, 97 in the U.S. This is directed by Hideki Kano all by himself, and I don't know if this source was correct, but it was, I found it everywhere.

Originally, this was going to be called Super Mario Kart R, and the R was going to stand for rendered. Jeremy thinks it might have stood for returns, but rendered seems like a choice a Japanese company would make that maybe didn't really, they use English words in ways that don't always make sense or aren't always as meaningful to us in certain ways. Did you actually see this information someplace? I did. I saw it on, like, unseen. 64, like, not that, but some cut game content wiki. I could just be a misremembering, and this could be Mandela effect in my head. I feel like I can see that logo in my head of Super Mario Kart R.

It was printed in magazines with a lot of different changes, and we'll get to what was cut from the game. But this is just, there were a few games in anime around that time that had like R and it as a return. It's like Sailor Moon R or something. I mean, there was just Super Bomberman R, which that does stand for return. which I, it's, that game is cute that it has the 33rd anniversary of Bomberman is that's like its logo like it. That's a meaningful number. They're goofing on how they didn't do anything for the 30th, but it's also like one of the worst localized things I've seen. Oh, really?

No. And it really should not be $50. I totally agree with you. But anyway. Yes, so this is the first Mario Kart to be in full 3D outside of the characters. And again, as I said previously, this was the first N64 game after a total. post-holiday drought. So I just remember, I didn't have an N-64, my friend did, but we were both super excited

about this game. And really, I associate this game in 97. I associate it with eating nothing but, like, just stacks upon stacks of Bigfoot pizza. And there is a, okay, so Reggie Fizomey when he was a Pizza Hut. What's that? What even is big pizza? Bigfoot pizza is like the ultimate act of hubris from the 90s. It's like, we are America, we are strong, we are rich, and we are going to give you

a pizza the size of a football field. That's basically a pizza, a pizza. size of this table, Jeremy, that would come like on a giant platter. It's just the age difference here, I guess, to Jeremy, you weren't eating Bigfoot pizzas and sleepovers at that time? No, I mean, there was a pizza place when I was a kid, like a local pizza

place that had pizzas that size. That was like what they sold. It was like Pistol Pets pizza that was called the Big Pete. Which is a terrible name. My God. But it was like, I think, 20 inches across or something. Just ridiculous. Yeah, that's pretty much what Bigfoot was. It was very thin, but it was easy just to

eat 19 slices of it if you're 15. Yeah, they had to cut it into like squares because it was too big to be... And it was fun that it was like in a paper sleeve. Yeah, with a cartoon Bigfoot on it. Yeah, in like a cool 90s hit Bigfoot, man. Yeah, he was the poochie of pizzas. Thank you for filling me in on this important piece of Americana. Well, it's important because I think it was an idea spearheaded by Reggie Fisomey when he was at Pizza Hut.

That's what I've heard. Yeah, I have read that multiple places. Okay, so it's a father of Bigfoot pizza, yes. He's the father of Bigfoot pizza, yes. He's like, I need a pizza my size. I'm Reggie Fizzie. I need a Reggie-sized pizza. So, yes, that was important for me to say.

But I just associate this with sitting on a carpeted floor, shoving my disgusting teenage face full of pizza, and just playing Mario Car for hours and hours and hours. And that explains who I am today. Yeah, this was, as I said before, this was the first one I really played. I think it is, that's kind of a big moment, too, that it was the first of a Nintendo drip feeding of games, that to be a Nintendo fan for the last 20 years,

that is your life, waiting for a Nintendo game on your Nintendo system. And there were no Indies to fill the void between major releases. Yeah, no Nindis. We didn't have the dream team, however. Oh, that's right. Oh, that's right. Oh, that dream team.

Quality over quantity. We're going to get to that this weekend, by the way. So some characters are swapped out, which is sort of ruining the pairing balance of the first game. So they get rid of one of the smaller characters, Kupa, which I am against. He was going to be a comic or Magicupa, however you want to localize that. But he was replaced by Wario, who was sort of taking. off in his own way, I believe Wario Land 2 was this year as well. Was it

97 or 98? Wario Land 2 was 97. Okay, cool. So it was sort of some sort of synergy, but Wario was emerging as a kind of breakout character who would go on to receive many games before sort of fading away in recent memory. I mean, this is an EAD canonization of something

which doesn't have, like the, like I said, the stuff in Mara in the land games don't always appear in EAD development. Yeah, like Matango or whatever the whatever the guy's name is. I think it is Tatanga. Tadanga of Sarasar Land.

All right, there you go. I think you're right. I think all of the enemy needs are just transliterated and not actually given real names. Noco bomb. Yeah. You're right. Yeah, but, you know, Wario had actually been in quite a few games to this point. Wario's Woods, Mario and Mario.

It's true. There were a few others. That's right. Not like anyone was going out of their way to play Wario's Woods, but he was, they were trying to do more things with him. That's for sure. You know, I think he can look at Wario's popularity as he was the, the embracing of that 90s to, like, he was the one character that could

work for all the, you know, gross commercials they needed to have a dudes, like, exploding while eating stuff or whatever. It's more of, like, Japanese gag manga than Renan Stimpy. It's just like, he farts and picks his nose, but there's no, like, grotesque close-ups or whatever. It works pretty close together, though. Maybe he actually

just successfully hypnotized a generation of kids with that one commercial. With that commercial. Play Mario. Yeah, I love that commercial. Destroy Mario. I've seen it a billion times. So, for the first time, we have some important first in this game. We hear Luigi's voice and Wario's voice for the

first time, but it's important to note that these voices would vary between regions. And I'm going to play some of the differences, but Luigi has a much higher voice than Mario in the Japanese version, and Mario has a much lower voice. And the U.S. version of Super Circuit would use the Japanese voices. So I thought the standard was established by this point that, like, Mario's like, I'm Mario. And Luigi's like, I'm Luigi, but it's not. It would take them until I think the 21st century to figure that out. So I'm going to play a clip here. It's a bunch of the voices, but I'll try to find the more important differences. So I think this video actually starts with Luigi, so let's play it now.

Oh, ho! So that's, you're going to hear the American voice first and then the Japanese voice. So that was Luigi screaming. Wow. Yahoo! Here we go. Here we go. Mamma mia.

Mamma mia. Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow. Oh, wow, wow, wow, whoa. Bingo. Oh, ho, ho. Bingo. I'm Luigi number one. Luigi is the pop.

Okay, so that was Luigi. Isn't that bizarre? Like, his voice sounds much more... My, I'm all the way up here! Yeah. His voice sounds much more distinct in the American version. Like, the Japanese versions really sounds like they just pitch-altered Charles Martinized Mario his Mario voice.

I don't know why they made that change, I feel like this voice of Luigi really person person person person person person person person person person person person person person person he sounds a little more put upon yeah and not as excited as Mario and I think that that's a very important difference I'm always number two yeah yeah so I'm gonna whatever Mario I'm gonna play I think I think I think the toad voice is different too so uh towed in the n64 version sort of sounds like slippy it's just like it's it's a girl's voice like that it's not like but I think it's slightly different in Japan so we'll hear toad now

Here we go Here we go So it's clearly an American woman In a Japanese woman, that's really the only difference Tote actually sounds almost more like a guy is doing its voice in the U.S. Okay. Yeah, there's a, I don't know, maybe I'm wrong, but it just sounds slightly more masculine. I was like, did they just pull up as a Japanese child?

Oh, yeah. That's for sure. So the biggest difference is Wario, and it's, it's basically just like, it's basically just pitch shifted literally. I'm not sure if Luigi was, but this one is definitely like, let's run it through a machine and make a, make a more, more deeper voice. Auto-tune warrior. That explains a lot. Auto-tuning is the Wario of music. Oh, good.

So, again, we're going to hear the American one first. and then the Japanese one, so here's Wario. Okay. That's Toads, I'm sorry. I fooled you. Fire! Fire! Here I go.

Here we go. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Why, aye, y, aye, yeah. So I miss. Wah. Wow. I'm a Mario. I'm gonna win.

Wario, I's gonna win. Okay, it's enough out of your word. He's not trying hard at. Oh, he kind of sounds like Brutus from Popeye. Yeah, I mean, I prefer... His Nintendo getting back to their Miyamoto's love of Popeye. That's true. I mean, but I prefer the whiny voice Mario.

He just sounds like an angry Luigi. He's like, I'm Luigi. I'm Mario. It's like not very much different, but I like it more. I'm glad they went with those choices for the American version. That makes me appreciate Charles Martin A lot more than before. Like, he, it was very... There are at least more specific differences in energies.

to them than just am like, I'm a Mario, I'm a Luigi. Like, there's a lot more, there's more nuance to it. Yeah, and I think like Martinette, or Martinet, however you say, he would do both Mario and Luigi at the same time, sort of talking to each other at conventions. I mean, he's a, he's a real goof. Yeah. He's fun, he's fun. He also had some, like, I haven't followed his Twitter that much, but post-election,

he had some harsh takes. I was like, well, I don't know if Nintendo is happy with your anti-Trump stuff, but Thanks, but also, yeah, that he, I say Martinet, I'd always said Martinette, but he introduces himself as the announcer of BitTrip Runner 2 as Charles Martinet. Well, then that's Martin A, for sure, yeah, I believe it is Martinet. So in Mario Card 64, the coins are gone, which I don't like, but item blocks are now 3D objects instead of flat things on the ground, which is fine. They're this weird rainbow color that I think does not fit with the Mario world. I would prefer they were, like, actual blocks like you see in the games. Rainbow Road.

I guess they all fell from Rainbow Road onto the planet. Well, they wanted to show up their gradients. That's true. There's a lot of visuals showing off in this. Maybe did it hurt when you fell from Rainbow Road? It's killing me. So slip streaming is introduced. I never used this in Mario Kart 64.

I forgot it was part of the game. But basically, if you stay behind a cart long enough, another rider's cart, you get a boost of speed by doing that. I think the DS version would really give you more visual tells as to if it was working or not. They would put like a little zip lines going off of your cart. It's a nice anime zip lines. Yeah.

So drifting is finally here in its most basic form. They'd eventually make this much easier to pull off and more of a sort of mandatory thing to win. But the fundamentals are the same. You read the, okay, so all of the carts have these onomatopoeia sound effects spelled out in words behind them. So in order to pull off drifting, you jump into a turn and I don't think you countersteer in this version of the game. I'm not sure if you do. Yeah, you do. You do, okay.

So you jump into the turn, you counter steer until the VRRRR MMMMM turns from yellow to red. I think you can just do yellow as well. It's not as much of a boost. Yeah, you get a little bit of a boost from a boost. But if you can hold it down until it cycles through colors, then you get a really great boost of speed. And it feels really good. And this would be the essential of like what would make Mario Kart, Mario Kart. I think this is very important.

For some reason, I didn't do that this much in this game. I sort of just raced it as a regular racer and didn't. play around. It was only when further games would make it easier to do that I would go back to Mario Card 64 and be like, okay, this is what they want you to do throughout the entire game. Yeah, I don't know how I latched on to the fact that you could do that in this game because, you know, I wasn't like trading tips with anyone. But for whatever reason, it just, like, it was something I realized you could do and I jumped into it. And it really, it does add a lot of sense of speed to it. And not in a haphazard or reckless sort of way, but in a way like,

I have earned this. Like, I did something. that involve technique. It's really about technique and skill, too. And I feel like you didn't need to use it. You can play against people without using it in this game and still do okay. But future games would make it mandatory. Like, learn how to do this and do it around every turn you can. I think it was a, especially that boost part, it felt like the evolution of the rocket start,

which was in the very first, which was in Super Mario Kart, of just timing your start right to get that extra boost of speed at the start. But once the flag goes down, but if you get it wrong, then you're going to spin out. Yeah. So doing something nice and being rewarded with a boost of speed, it feels like something out of the rocket start. There's also some other little technique, skill-based things in this. And I think this might be in some future games, but not all. If you run over banana peel and hit B at the exact right window of time, a little music note appears above your head and you don't spin out.

I could never do that. For some reason, that is just the muscle memory for that is etching to my brain. and I can do it every time, but I don't know if that's in future games or not. I don't think it's in eight at least because I tried it in eight. And one thing, this does not matter at all, but I was playing this on virtual console and I was like, oh, I hit the L button once for the first time of my life,

and it lowers the music volume. So you can just lower it all the way and turn it off and then click it again to turn it on. I don't know why you would never even touch the L button while playing Mario Car because you're holding the right side of the controller. But the L button has a use. I just want everyone to know that. That was shocking to see when we played it.

Bob and I did a 20th anniversary stream of it, And, yeah, there were, it was a surprising, that was a surprising thing. And I also, I never knew about our, the, another person we were playing with Jack DeVries, formerly of IGN, he, he showed us on the, the, uh, the frape snowland, the, the trick to just race, like, you can glitch out and, and skip a lap. You're just like, no, no, go in reverse, and then go over here, I'm going to reset you. No, you're in a second lab. Like many early 3D games, there, there are a ton of glitches. Go online to YouTube, look up all of them. They are amazing, especially the one in the Donkey Kong jungle level.

It's really interesting what you can do. It's the same thing that Jack did. You just go backwards, and the game thinks you actually went through the lap. It's pretty interesting. This game has some of my favorite and least favorite track designs in the entire series. So Wario Stadium is your favorite? I love Wario Stadium. I also love the City.

Oh, the City. Toads Speedway or whatever. They started doing some really interesting dynamic things with the tracks. You know, also the desert has the train that comes through, and sometimes that can mess up your time. Yeah, I love the tracks with life and cars and traffic on them. They're really cool. And especially when you get the mirror mode, and now all the cars are coming at you, and you have very little time to react. I wonder if that was our first look at New Donk City.

Oh, my goodness. Toad Speedway is on New Donk City. And I did, like, the little things they hit in there. One of their first little surprises they give you is in the Luigi track, which is one, like, the first tracks and super easy. to do, but it has that hot air balloon that will then lower down and have a very good item. It's always a star or something like

that or a golden mushroom. I think so. Or the blue shell. The blue shell is new to this game. And I think the blue shell works slightly different in every game. I'm pretty sure. There are slight rule changes. I forget what it does in this one. I worked on an article on the history of the blue shell. I can give it quick.

Please do, Henry. Some up with that. So, this first blue shell, it is inextuble and it is still heat sink. and it does not hit a wall and explode. Do you get the mushroom cloud? You don't. No, no, no.

So it doesn't fly, so it also can fall off things. So it can't follow you over a jump or over a gap. So that's a problem with it. But it will still hit you, but it doesn't have the AOE effect either. So it'll only mess up, number one, and whatever, it hits on its way there. And a lot of people, pro-Mario-Cart players, also realize that if you get the that you maybe even don't want to shoot it because if you trail it behind you

it never explodes like it it will block for you the entire time that is the one change in this game to that weapon system you can trail anything behind your cart almost I missed the trailing that they took away from the other ones because it was just like all right got it oh this banana peel isn't as bad as the banana chain

and you have just like a line of banana peals behind you nothing can get in touch with you and you also had to work hard on it added something to the control difficulty that I liked of You have to get good at holding down the button to trail like a mystery box behind you that could take a hit while you also go over the next mystery box and hopefully get a red shell or something. And there are some new weapons in this game. Mario Kart games do not really add more weapons outside of the first, but this one does have some new ones.

It has the triple red and green shells that sort of act as shields. And if you get a triple red shell, you're set for life, I think, until you fire them all. the fake item block and the triple mushroom and the golden mushroom, which the gold mushroom is like the loser item. If you get that when you're losing, and you can get it to kind of spam your character's like voice sample, basically. There's also the bomb. The bomb is not in this game.

You can become a bomb, but you can't throw a bomb. No, like the explosive fake box. Oh, yeah, I said that the item box. Okay, yeah. The bomb would be, I think, in the D, the... Okay, sorry. I always called that a bomb. I like that a bomb.

Okay, yeah. Yeah, I was thinking of Bob-Bomb. But that one's always good. It mainly works against newbies because, you know, if you put it down, like, hey, there's a suspicious item box in the track where there's not normally one. I wonder what that is. You really should put it down where there are other item boxes. That's my favorite would be to drop it in the middle because it could take up the same space as regular item boxes. Like, it wouldn't be displaced.

So you could perfectly drop those polygons among the other polygons and somebody would hit it. But you had to be careful. Definitely. And so this would kind of standardize the Mario Kart track listing. There are only 16 tracks. We have the, again, four cups with four races each, each with three laps instead of five. In the future, it would be eight cups and four would be retro cups, which I love because this is an ugly game. And there's nothing more I like than seeing an N64 track on Mario Kart 8.

That's like glorious to me. I just love that. It is an uglie game. I think because they couldn't get the actual polygonal characters ready in time. And then so... Some for reason, Rare could. I mean, rendered... They had that next year.

Could the hardware have handled that many characters? That many characters as polygons? Probably not. I don't know. I played Donkey Kong, Diddy Kong Racing, and it ran well, and they were all polygonal characters. Not as detailed... Did it require the jumper pack?

It didn't know. It was... I think it predated that, but, um... Yeah. So, yeah, you get, like... You still get pre-rendered sprites in an N-64 game, which if I thought about it would make me saying, this doesn't seem like the future of...

This doesn't seem like the 64 bits I was promised. I mean, the tracks were still fully 3D. They were extremely dynamic. Like I said, you know, this also has some of my least favorite levels. Like, I love the speed and the just the sense of energy of Wario's Raceway or Speedway or whatever. But then you have like the chocolate mountain or whatever, which is ugly. Oh, yeah, lots of blotters. And also not fun because, yeah, like things can knock you off the track and send you tumbling down the side of the mountain to earlier in the

the track, which is really annoying. And then Rainbow Road just goes on for ever. It's so boring. That's interesting, you note that, because I feel like this Rainbow Road would define the rest of the game's Rainbow Roads. The first Rainbow Road was a grueling, a grueling track full of sharp turns and pits

and thwams and barriers. After this, it would be like the victory lap, the relaxing track. But even if it's going, even if it's boring, Rainbow Road has the best music, and I love this Rainbow Road song the best. Okay, it does have good music. That is the one redeeming quality to Rainbow Road. Also, I I think they try to make it the most visually spectacular track.

Like, you're in space, you're racing on a rainbow ribbon. They're showing off. It's supposed to be a visual, like, finale. Like, see what we did? You made it to the last track. Especially, like, the corkscrew hills and the loop-de-loops and things. It's like a roller coaster. It's like Space Mountain almost.

It is really. I feel like a heretic. I mean, it is. I was going to say my favorite tracks are always Rainbow Road and are usually Rainbow Road. It's in my top five. And yeah, the song in this one is great, especially. It then was like early Internet comedy was that one dude singing that song to, It's Rainbow Road. It's where you go.

Oh, that's actually the double-dash version. Oh, it is. Oh, man. He puts it to the, he puts the N64 footage behind him. Interesting. What a liar. How dare he? I hope he was ruined.

So, again, we mentioned the music. This is by Kenton the Gata, and he would go on to write things for, like, the Wind Waker and other things like that. His music in this game is very laid back and jazzy. I think Mario Kart 1 would have some peppy, very bouncy music. This is just kind of laid back and just sort of jazzy. And there are some more peppy tracks, but I just associate this game with just very relaxing music in general. Very like I'm cruising, I'm driving, I'm having fun, I'm not really in danger. It just, I don't know.

Maybe I listen to it too much, but I like this soundtrack a lot. My least favorite track, I forget the name of it, was the ice one full of the paper. England's this, you're bouncing off of them straight into the waters. It's like, oh. It's like iceberg something around that thing. Yeah, I hate that track too. I always fall in the water. No fun.

So it really amps up the battle mode. Now it's four players setting a standard for the game. And it is a real technical achievement for the N64. But if you play with three or four players, the music disappears because that is too much for that system to handle. And I think the system didn't have a separate sound chip is the problem. So to use, you know, like it had to use, actually. actual processing cycles in order to play music. Wow.

Yeah. And I think they remove elements of tracks or they remove certain AI things that are happening when you're playing with more than, you know, two players just because of the 64 itself. I never noticed the music was missing just because we were all trash talking so much that we never, we never noticed there was a music. You'll never miss it. The sounds of trash talking, Bigfoot being eaten and farting. So it was, yeah, we ended up playing battle mode. Me and my brother and my friends in high school.

We ended up playing battle mode a lot more than we played the races against each other, the four-person races, because it did become like how we would play GoldenEye, and we'd still even post-Goldeney go back to it. Like, I wasn't, sorry people who were playing PC games and Doom competitively and all that who say, like, who hate hearing N64 players say. My perspective is the only correct one. But this was how I got into multiplayer games like this one. Yeah, yeah. Same here. More than two player ones.

Not everyone could afford a computer, guys. I'm just telling you. And the three-leveled one with just the color-coding on it of like, you know, the green or the red or the blue level. And just, screen-looking was what you were supposed to do. Yeah. And have to do this. It was also an interesting challenge of playing it sort of like, especially in that stage, playing it a bit like a competitive shooter, but with driving control.

trolls and silly weapons that most weren't a direct just shot at somebody, it was an interesting challenge to play competitively against each other. Yeah, I played a lot of this competitively, and I love the racing, but it was always fun to go to that. I forget what the name of the level even was, but the one with the platforms, the colored platforms. And the ghost house one was pretty fun, too. It just was a, this would really set the standard, I think, for it to be a four-player

experience, but I think most games would kind of follow after that. I mean, we, GameCube, DS, obviously. I mean, N64 taught them that they, I mean, it was them by establishing that they want more than two players. Yeah, for sure. And four ports really helps with that. So is there anything else about Mario 64? We're, uh, Mario Kart 64. We're kind of going long and I have a lot more to talk about.

Anything else? Looks like we're going to go to our break. We'll see you after this nice song. You know, I'm going to be able to be it. So we are back to talk about the third Mario Kart game, Mario Kart Super Circuit for the Game Boy Advance, released in August of 2001 for Japan, and sorry, that's July of 2001 for Japan, August of 2001 for us. And I feel like this is the black sheep of the Mario Kart family. no one wants to go back to play it. It's not bad, but it's like, oh, you got Mario Kart one kind of working on the GBA.

I consider it the Circle of the Moon of Mario Kartz. I don't know if that's unfair or not. That's a little much. You can at least see it. It's not as dark as Circle of the Moon, but it's sort of a just going back to the original stuff. All the important good things that N64 Mario Kart added are not in this game. And I kind of feel like it's cool you got this working on the GBA. And it was sort of an early showing of what the GBA could do.

but I can respect the S&S Mario Kart for being a product of its time but almost a decade later this kind of throwback I didn't like as much I don't know how you guys felt about it. Where do you stand on the great Mario Kart Super Circuit versus Konami Crazy Razors debate?

I haven't played a lot of crazy racers. I was YWI racing all the way. I didn't expect to be that. Some people liked it more, yeah. You could play as a Moai. Yeah, and... It was Dracula. Yeah, Dracula, I believe it was Ninja.

Ray Fox. Foxes in there, yeah. And so, yeah, I liked, I like Konami Crazy Racers more. I didn't expect that because it was just, it was like this third game I had to buy in a bundle to get my Indigo Game Boy advance from... Do people still do that? The store's still do that. I heard actually a co-worker of ours, her partner had to buy a bundle to get the switch.

We're going to hold the switch ransom. Do you have to buy Bomberman R. Yes. We're out of Zelda. That's your punishment, Bomberman R. I'm pre-ordering on time. Eat your disgusting vegetables. But I super circuit's fine.

Yeah, it's not bad. And it's, it works. I went back to it because it was an ambassador game as well on the 3DS. And when I replayed it there, what I was impressed was with, was that they did get some N64 levels to work in there. And it's got N64-ish level detail to the rendered characters. Yeah, it's the same roster as MK64, the exact same roster. Yeah.

So I appreciate that they pulled that. that off, and the Game Boy Advance needed all the games it could in 2001 as well. So not as much as the DSDS really needed them. So, I mean, it was fine for its time, but it's also why I think people don't return to it as much, too, because it really leaned hard on recreating old stages, and when you can replay those recreated stages in better-looking and better playing games, they really don't need to return to it. Do you think this game would have fared better in people's esteem if it had been a straight remake of the original Super Mario Kart? If they had just said, yeah, this is the game you loved, you know, 10 years ago, but on a handheld system.

There were a lot of SNES ports or remakes or whatever on the GBA. I could see that happening. I don't know if people would be that nostalgic at this point for Super Nintendo stuff, but maybe. There was definitely nostalgia going on. I probably prefer if it was a remake of Fire Card one. I actually feel like by trying to do something a little different, they might actually have sort of undermined the appeal of the game because people wanted something really different,

whereas this is kind of like half of a remake, half of a reincorporation of Mario Kart 64 ideas, and some new stuff. If it had just been like, here's Mario Kart Super Circuit, plus we put through in some bonus in 64 stages, I think that might actually have gone over better, which is counterintuitive and weird. It is weird, yeah.

That's how video game people are. Yeah. I'll give it to intelligent systems, too, for doing their best with their first Mario Kart game. And last. And last. Yeah. Oh, sorry, guys. I mean, hey, they would get too busy with advanced wars being a surprise hit in the U.S.

Yeah. Like two months later. No, one month later. On a very special day. A very special day in American history. Yes. I associate this and that game with 9-11 a lot because it was like I was playing them in the shadow of 9-11 because just sad and playing Game Boy and being afraid.

That's how we sort of through a lot of our feelings and kids. Yeah, for me it was Klonoa Empire of Dreams and Wario Land Advance. I feel like I was reading your thoughts on that in the shadow of 9-11, like on your old site. So maybe that's why I don't think back as fondly on this game. I'm just remembering being afraid and not knowing what's going to happen. Am I going to be drafted? Yeah, whatever I think of Wario Land Advance, I are for, I always think of watching, you know, the McLaughlin group, arguing about whether or not we should have a war in Iraq.

So this game does add some things to the series that would be retained in future entries. We have the star slash letter grade ranking system because it's not just, can you get enough points to be in first place for the cup? No, can you get in first place in every race in the cup and get the three stars or the A letter grade or whatever? Like that became a part of Mario Kart from this point on. I'm not sure if it's in every game, it would appear from time to time and also be an eight. So it was also just a way of like, okay, you can get first place in this cup, but I'll get it. the first place in every race, and we'll see if you can do that. And also, as we talked about before, this was the first game to bring back old tracks.

I think just kind of out of necessity in this game because they just needed content. But you also have extra cups, which are S&S game tracks. So you have those thrown in, and that would become a major feature from, I believe, the DS game onwards. They would not be in double dash. But I don't have a lot more to say about this game. No one really cares about it. It's just a weird. I'm sorry.

I'm sorry, super circuit. Yeah. Somebody listening out here. listen, I'm sure it sold millions of copies. Millions people played it, but in the grand scheme of things it was just sort of a look what we can do and we'll see you next time.

It didn't bode well for the future of the series. Like if this had been the direction Mario Kart had gone, I think that we would not be looking back. We would be looking back fondly at the old Mario Kart games, but it would not be a vital force today.

And it definitely gave me, I still get like, huh? Moments when a G-B, when a Super Circuit track appears remade. That game had original tracks? I don't remember this. Oh, okay. I'm racing on clouds. I'll take your word for it.

And I, you know, if we're okay moving along, I do feel like the general lukewarm response to Super Circuit probably accounts for why Double Dash was so different. It's very different. And this game came out, Maricar Double Dash in November of 2003 and in both, Japan and United States. And you're right, Jeremy. I feel like this was the era of weird Nintendo where it's like every major franchise is going to get weird. Mario's going to get a gun.

Samus is going to go into first person in Metroid. The Windmaker's going to be a cartoon. And Mario Kart's going to have two racers per cart. Like it was just a very experimental through everything into the era, sort of era for Nintendo, just trying to figure out what they can do to innovate. I feel like we got a little blaming with Miyamoto early in this. I'm going to do it again. But I think it's just a general Nintendo thing, but I've heard him say,

and people attribute from Nintendo attributing it to him of just saying well if why just make a direct sequel or why just do it again we need a new thing to that it's what's really

it's what's been bedeviling Star Fox fans for 20 years now I'm just like just make a real new Star Fox don't do something goofy just do that and then he's like well Star Fox is just the place to experiment

it's like no we like the one thing you made make more of that one thing and so Double Dash was definitely a part that too in that era of trying to do something goofy or different with it and I loved it I honestly loved what they did

with Delo Dash. I think it is in the Mario Car community a divisive game. It really is. It's a real 7.9. Oh wow. There are only 16 tracks. There are no retrocups in this one. But there are a lot of racers. There's a huge focus from this point

on unlocking carts and racers. There's so, so, so many. And of course, the main gimmick of this game is that you choose two characters and you choose a car as well. And that all has different variables as to how you race. Some characters when paired have a special weapon they can use. Certain characters

have their like one true pairing partner. I think it's like Luigi and Daisy and Mario and Peach maybe. And also on I believe it was in Double Dash or maybe one after this that when you go to the Daisy track there is a giant golden

statue of her and Luigi dancing together. Oh, sexy. Set many devian artists They don't need any more fuel for that So again There are so many things to unlock in this game So many racers You're just kind of used to eight

For the first three games But now there are 10 character teams 20 characters 190 possible combinations So I'll go over the new characters now We have Berto We have Princess Daisy of course Which had the infamous Hi I'm Daisy

As her one line of dialogue That really personifies her And we have the advance of the baby We have baby Mario, baby Luigi. The Rubicon was crossed there. Coupa, peritrupa, a red-shelled cupa with wings. Diddy Kong, Bowser Jr. Boo!

Yes, he was a fairly new character at this time. We had just started to hate him at this point. Waluigi, who had just fresh off of Mario Golf for the N64, I believe. Yeah, graduated from sports games to real games. Yeah, as ascended, really. As sort of a joke about how lame Mario is, I guess. I don't know. A toadette, who is a female toad, although we learn later that toads choose their gender in an official interview.

Yeah. That was confirmed. That was an official interview. It's official as any Mario mythology is. Yeah, or Zelda. Yes. And P.D. Piranha from Mario Sunshine. Sure.

The piranha, like, in shorts, I guess. He's wearing shorts. He's got a big belly button. Yeah. And King Boo. So those are all the new characters. A lot of characters, a lot of different carts. 21 different carts.

I will not name any of them, but there's a lot of them. Was King Boo original to Luigi's Mansion? or did he appear in something before that? I think he was... I mean, there were big booze in Super Mario World. But he was the final boss of Luigi's Mansion. I feel like King Boo was original to that. But, yeah, also the inclusion of Diddy Kong.

I wonder if that was, like, them kind of doing, like, respect to Diddy Kong racing, trying to... Or in some ways, like, outdoing Mario Kart 64. Because Diddy Kong... We haven't talked much about the copycats, but I think Diddy Kong Racing is interesting that it was a Nintendo public... copycat. Yeah. And it varied things even more so, like, why just have a cart when you could have a hydrofoil and a biplane?

That all move in different ways, yeah. And I think the fallout between Nintendo and Rare had already happened at this point. Yeah, they'd sold it. Yeah. And sold it no one. Maybe Diddy was just them, like, spinning in their eye like, we own Diddy. You may have, I don't think he was spied. It could just then prove.

Corporations don't really act out of spite. I know. It might have been more, like, to maintain a claim on the character. Yeah, that could be it too, yeah. Copyright. Which is a legal kind of spinning in one's eye. And if, hey, if that's why we haven't seen, you know, the stupidered Kongs because Rare may own a percentage of it, then fine.

Good. Candy Kong. You want to talk about deviant art. We'll talk about deviant art. So, drifting will change in this game and Mario Kart DS. Sparks, baby. Now when you're sliding into a turn, you flick the stick left and right to build up sparks. Instead of just holding it, instead of just counter steering, rather.

You flick it back and forth until you build up those sparks. It's an interesting mechanic, but it really wears on your body itself, especially when you're on the DS version and playing with a flat control patch. You're going to tear the skin off of your thumbs. But yeah, in this game in DS, that is how power sliding works. How do you guys feel about that? Those sparks are so satisfied. It is satisfied.

I love them. And I love just the feeling of like the rumble you get to, just the resistance against it. And then just finally that, like, do I go, how long do I hold this boost? four, do I just do it now? And I obviously wasn't a pro enough player to get into snaking with that, but honestly, that's a... Snaking ruined Mario Kart DS's

online player. The fact that you have to spend your entire race just sliding back and forth, pressing back and forth in order to build up sparks, in order to be competitive, like that's not fun. All those people destroyed their tendons now, Jeremy, they can't touch anything anymore. Your crippled hand is your

punishment. I did, like, I think it was a little, got a little tedious, but it did feel satisfying. It felt like you're kind of like pumping a hand cart, like on a railroad track just to build up that, build up that energy to boost. It didn't make any sense in terms of driving, but you're right, earning those blue sparks, but I think it were

the ultimate form of sparks, right? It was a one from red to blue and then taking off, it felt really good. Yeah, like outside of snaking, I feel like it was very satisfying. Yeah. I don't know if you can snake in this one, though. I think it was to a limited capacity. It really became exaggerated when

you know, Mario Kart DS came out. And, you know, incorporated the online feature where everyone was basically trying to cheese everyone else. Yeah. But you talked about the animation of characters and the other ones, like this one really upped it. Like, this was the first time they were actual polygonal characters doing specific animations for things. And just seeing just the animation for the hopping between driver and backseat. Really cool. It was just so amazing.

Just wanted to push up on over and over again, too. And it was just such a visually stimulating levels they got in there. Even I was a hater on Delphino Plaza in Sunshine. I did not like that area. But when they built a stage for it in Dulvash, it was like, oh, this looks neat. I like this. I like this more. And also, you could sort of go online with it.

Oh, right. And that was something we did or we tried out. Was that like the warp pipe or whatever it was called? Yes. Yeah. So we got super. my friends got super into it again this is like a console

baby discovering things everybody did on PC way earlier but when we got Halo friends were like you know you can put these together and have like four TVs and and do different like way more players like what? And so

when you can land together double dash as well like I had these really happy memories of our my parents living room my poor parents I feel that for him of just, like, they're now, like, 19, ages 16 to 19 sons in the living room with, like, the TV in the center of our nice living room. And then three smaller TVs around it of us all just playing Mario Karting against each other. But it was- That's amazing dedication.

I never went as far as to lug a TV somewhere to play on, like, our multiplayer game. And again, these were two TVs kids. Yeah. These were heavy. They weighed more than you. Yes. Exactly. God.

But it was. a real special moment. Now you look back on it and it's just like you wonder how it took Nintendo so long to do anything with the internet. And you had to like trick it thanks to the land thing. You could then trick the land into

doing online matches but it was so chaotic. You couldn't get many in a row before something went wrong. There was a GameCube modem but as I recall it worked for one game Fantasy Star online. Yeah, that was probably it. Maybe like one weird Japanese game. I think also

like Fantasy Star Online, Card Revolution. Oh, right. Ah, yes, the card battle game, yeah. And I did, I'm pretty sure I did buy that keyboard GameCube controller, too, to go with that. Oh, I had the Dreamcast keyboard. For PSO 3 or episode 3, ah, good times. So there are some new battle modes, but as always, no one cares about them when they add them to Mario Kart game. So there's a Shine Thief, which is just kind of like Capture the Flag.

And then this is very uninspired. Babam Blast, you just battle exclusively with Babams, which I don't care. It's cute. It's fine. But this was also when the, this was the next one where the blue shell became more powerful and they gave it wings to avoid, like, oh, you thought you could avoid it over this jump? It's going to fly to you. You don't get away from this.

Yes. Like, screw you person in first place. How dare you be in first? I think it turned from the spiny shell to the official blue shell in this game too. It became the blue shell, not spiny, yes. So anything else about this game? It has not been available for some time because there is no GameCube virtual console yet. I wasn't able to play it again because I would have to dig my Wii out and then find double dash,

so I didn't get a chance to actually replay this game. I do miss, I wish Nintendo hadn't gotten away from that double dash thing. It'd be nice if they could put it back into a game. But a lot of the modification, they did embrace, especially in eight, the other variables you have in this game of carts and stuff. So I could see them not want to do the pairings anymore. And just that that's too complex. And if there's, I think that's also the people on.

I know who love, this is their favorite Mario Kart, that they love it because it's more technical, more difficult, and more skill-based. It really is. This is a DS game, for sure. And they would make, and Nintendo made a real pivot away from that in later ones. For the sake of being approachable. So I think we're going to wrap our show up with the discussion of Mario Cardias. I think we're going to wrap our show up with the discussion of Mario Kart Diaz. I did take a lot of notes on Wii, but we, We are just getting really into the nitty-gritty of every one of these games. That's fine because I think this is a good place to stop.

So this game came out in a holiday for 2005 in both Japan and the U.S. From like double-dash onwards, there was not a lot of differences between these release dates. We got it first. Yes, that's true, I think for the first time. But this was the, I think, before Brain Age, before other things like that. This was the Nintendo DS killer app for video game players. The DS launch was not that great, but by the holiday. of 2005. We had a lot of weird games, a lot of cool

games, and Nintendo built a 3DS, not 3DS. They had a pack-in system, which is the one I bought. It was a red, it was a red DS with a racing stripe sticker that I threw away. But it came with Mario Card DS, and that's how I got mine. But that's when I started getting excited about

the DS, for sure. Totally, yeah. I mean, I had been having fun with it. I bought the Electric Blue DS a little earlier for that for Advanced Wars Dual Strike, but But definitely Mario Kart was the one I could sell a lot of my friends on the DS with. So there's not as much of a focus on like a ton of characters and a ton of carts.

It keeps the N60 forecast intact, but it does add four characters. We have Drybones who Jeremy loves. He has a cool tank, if I recall. Daisy, Waluigi, and ROB, which I don't think I ever unlocked, but it was cool to see ROB in a game outside of like a joke and smash brothers. It's okay to call him Rob. Rob. Rob was an F-0-GX. He had made an appearance before that.

So they had begun re-embracing Rob as something other than shame. I call him Arrobeak because he is my buddy. Sorry, I'm sorry. So, and then each character has their own exclusive carts that can't be used by other racers. So I believe in the GameCube version, you could just choose any cart you wanted, even if it was incongruous with the, like, Coupa's going to drive the baby carriage or whatever. But I'm not sure if that's the case, but I'm pretty sure it is. So this would basically set the standard from this point onwards as to how Mario Car Games would operate.

There would be four cups, each with four tracks of new tracks, and then four cups, each with four tracks of reused tracks from old games. Usually spruced up and made to look really good. You can only make games look so good on the DS, but it was always fun to go back to Super Mario Kart levels. And the 3D was okay on the N64 levels, but I loved revisiting those old tracks, and I think it's a great thing for these new games to do, for sure.

Yeah, the character models had very sharp polygons, as I remember from that. Yeah, I mean, it was a very sharp knuckles. It was like a PS1 level system. But, I mean, despite the fact that it was so modestly powered, the hardware, it did have, you know, fully polygonal tracks and characters. And so, you know, that was really nice. It felt more advanced than Mario 64. Oh, yeah. And on top of that, it was also an online game.

It was. Which was a huge, huge change for Nintendo. The first game to use WFC, Wi-Fi connection. Yes, that was, that was like a... Two years ago, I believe. Yeah, that was a big thing for Nintendo. And they finally said, all right, we have to do this Internet thing. And, yeah, so I have, I really love Mario Kart DS, and I feel like probably a lot of that is just because of the experience that I had covering the game.

You know, after Double Dash and Super Circuit, I was like, Mario Kart. So I wasn't really wanting to play this game, but it was kind of one of those, well, you know, Jeremy, you're the guy who writes about DS stuff, so you go write about it. So there was like an event where up at Nintendo's headquarters in Seattle where it was kind of, you know, early in Reggie's tenure. And that was where he gave his Blue Ocean talk. And they gave everyone just a Mario Kart DS cartridge. And we're like, here you go. And this was like six or eight weeks before the game came out. So we had it a long, long time.

How long? It was like six to eight weeks before the game came out. It was crazy. Really early. What a luxury. So it was like a bunch of people who went to that event had this game. And basically, any time I got online and was playing, you know, before the game came out, there was always someone else who was playing.

And there was like a pool of like two dozen people, maybe, three dozen, I don't know. But not very many people, but someone was always playing it because everyone loved it so much and wanted to go online. And I remember just like randomly playing against people online. And at the end of one race, I didn't know who I was racing, but I got an email from Tyco from Penny Arcade. It was just like, this game is awesome. That's all it said. I was like, oh, I was racing against Tycho.

How about that? All the gaming celebrities of the era. I guess so. But that, like also, you know, in addition to that, it was a chance to, like for me to just as a writer to do fun stuff because it was like this new exploration into the online arena for Nintendo. And of course, they did it their own weird way with the little NFC dongle. Not NFC. in WC, I guess. NWC, yeah.

And then they had the setup with McDonald's where you could, like, go play. So I, like, randomly went out onto the McDonald's near our office and, like, stood outside by the BART station and, like, tried to get on their Wi-Fi and race, and I could. And I was like, oh, so I turned that into an article.

You know, it was a chance to be kind of goofy and weird and to, I feel like that was the appropriate way to approach Nintendo's very, very long, overdue movement into the online world. I mean, even if it was overdue, they still played it incredibly safe. And looking at the Mario Kart Wiki, I noticed that there are a ton

of restrictions in online mode because they're like, we don't want lag to ruin this experience at all. So I'll name some of these. So only up to four players. You can only choose 100 ccs. 12 of the 32 courses are omitted completely, which I didn't remember. No triple bananas or triple shells.

No spilt items on the course can be used or tripped on. They're just lost. You can't trail items behind your racer, and you can't stop the item roulette manually. So there are all these little restrictions, but I don't think they were that noticeable when you're playing on it. I didn't know. I didn't even notice at all that, like, oh, 12 of these courses, I can't choose. Yeah. Yeah.

Once I got it to, yeah, I definitely, you had to, you couldn't just be on any Wi-Fi, right? You had to be at special places like McDonald's. No, you could be on Wi-Fi, but it had to be a certain kind of Wi-Fi. Yeah, I bought that toggle on it, too. I don't remember having a don't remember playing it off of my Wi-Fi at my house. Was there a dongle? There was a dongle that they released, and you could just plug it into a computer, and it would work. You didn't have to use that.

You could use normal Wi-Fi, but you had to ratchet it back. You know what? I think I did have that don't have that dongle now that you mentioned. Yeah, so it could only do 802.1-A. So, yeah, that was the lame-o situation I was in, that I was still living in all my parents. I'd be moved out a year after that but they didn't have Wi-Fi. We didn't have Wi-Fi like they weren't

going to pay for it and so I went to, I bought through Nintendo's wonderful online store at the time, that doggle to plug in and unfortunately that dongle could then be like later plugged into, I reused it on my Wii to make my Wii wireless

later, but anyway, that's what I would use at home but it wasn't the greatest and then I do remember while waiting to get that dongle in the mail. I went to McDonald's. I pretty much been done with McDonald's at that point, but I went to McDonald's several times

just to try it out and see the online for myself. And, yeah, again, this was happening when the 360 launched, like, that shows you where Nintendo was at compared to other companies. Yeah, they were dipping their toe in online and Microsoft was doing a cannonball, basically. I mean, not that, although Sony was also just like

it was in the kiddie pool. as well with online but just ahead of Nintendo but still pretty light So a few more things about Mario Kart Diaz This would be the only game to have missions These these fun strange little Little mini missions

They would gate off parts of the course It would be like drive backwards to these eight rings Fight this boss There were boss fights in this Mario Kart game Or like drive over all these crates In this limited amount of time And those were kind of fun I don't know why they didn't come back

But it's just like little fun Little Diversions I always enjoy them And no one remembers them As I can see by the... Yeah, I totally forgot about that. I didn't touch it. If they were to unlock characters like Rob, then I must have played them, but I don't recall them at all. Yeah, what I really remember about that game is just, like, anytime I logged on, there was someone playing.

It was just like someone I knew was playing. Like, everyone wanted to play that game for months. And that was the start of this era of Mario Car. Like, every Mario Car game that came after it. DS is really where they draw from and build on that. With online, with single racers, with the roster,

with specializing stuff, and they just kind of built it built in there from there. And also, same with a lot of courses. Like you said, the remaking of classic courses was also in this too. Yeah, the four cups. And a few more things, they added two new items, which I don't like. The blooper, which if I'm racing

against the computer, like what is it going to blind the computer? What does it even do? I don't know. There's no measurable effect for me. And the bullet bill, which I think turns you into a bullet bill. It is the ultimate loser item. If you're, if you're sucking, you get that item and you feel bad. They're like, well, if you're not good enough with the star, like if you're still going to drive off the road with the star, then this will just drive you yourself and faster. I get insulted whenever I've gotten the bullet bill.

I'm like, oh, I'm doing that bad, huh? You're bastards. I love this game a lot. I like Mario Card 8 the most because it looks and sounds so much better. Mario Card 8 is the greatest one. It is my favorite by far. But this, I think, is the most skill-based Mario Kart game. You have to be good at playing Mario Kart, which is why the next game was not so great.

We'll talk about it super briefly, but it basically was a reaction to the DS game. The director was like, I wanted to get my parents to play Mario Card DS, and they're like, this is too hard. So he's like, we've got to make this approachable for everyone, which is where the wheel came in. And my grand theory, which is sort of hinted at in the Awat asks, is that the entire game was balanced around the fact that some people would be using. the wheel and some people wouldn't. So the wheel is a less accurate means of inputs. So you have to balance the game so people using that wheel will be able to

compete on the same ground, which is why winning and losing feels absolutely arbitrary in Mario Kart Wii. That wheel, that wheel, look, I hate it. I hate it so much. I got, at the event where I played Mario Kart 8 deluxe, and to try it the new battle modes,

which they brought back, that was the one problem of Mario Kart 8 that is battle modes sucked. They've made a good battle mode. for deluxe and but they handed me the wheel with a joycon and I was like you guys are still doing this I don't want this no here's the thing the wheel is what made it successful because

I know we sports was like here's a stick used it to do sports things with stick like objects here's a wheel you know how wheels work use this for your video game that was that was the immediacy that sold this game and it sold 36 million copies it is the greatest selling racing game of all time I hate that I hate that so much

think about that 36 million like Final Fantasy 7 It's so crazy. Sold like, what, like $8 million, $6 million? It's not that much in the grand scheme of things. I mean, GTA is one of the few non-Nintendo things that can challenge that number. Yeah. GTA 5 and 4.

Tetris. Yeah. It's like upper echelons right there. As I've said before, if you've got a game you love and you think everyone else loves it, look at the numbers on Mario Kart Wii, look at the numbers on Nintendo dogs, and you'll know like, oh, no one played the game. I like everyone played these other games. Or Wii sports.

Yeah, but I mean, I think we're all on the same page. I know, Jeremy, did you review this game for one of? I did. I think I gave it like a C. Yeah, yeah. There was an outrage. But when I played it, I was like, no, you're totally right. I'm playing with people who never played Maricar game before and they're kicking my ass.

This doesn't make any sense. Yeah, I mean, there were some people who were angry about that review, but not that many. Most people were like, yeah, yeah. I think once they played it, they understood what your problems were. But that's Mario Kart Wii. Luckily, I believe Mario Kart 7, I find kind of boring, but it put things back in the right place and then eight build off of seven. And 8 is, like, so great, great music. Beautiful, beautiful game.

Just amazing in every way. We did introduce motorcycles. That's the one thing that carried over from it that I don't mind. Yeah. And there were also a couple, just to mention it so if somebody doesn't say we did mention it. There were two Namco developed arcade Mario Kart games as well. I kind of left those out because they don't play like Mario Kart game any way whatsoever. They're more like Ridge Racer camps or something.

Yeah, we drove down to Golf Land. And so what the hell city? Like, I don't know, south of San Francisco someplace. It's like a Sunnyvale. Who cares about South? It's like a 30-minute drive. But we went, a bunch of us from one-up and the early days went to play it. And it was like, eh, this wasn't really worth the drive.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, we had casillas and did some retro game shopping, so it was fine. It's cool to experience once just to see how weird and different it is, but it's not the best version of Mario Kart. No way. I've only played them like twice both in, both in Japan. And I'd never seen them in the wild in America, but then again, I haven't gone looking for it. But they were mainstays there, and I think, I'm sure it's easy to get people to drop coins in it just because I've heard of Mario Kart, and this looks cute. And you can drive as Pac-Man.

That's great. Take a picture of your face before you drive to. Yeah, and it's funny that they did that, and it's more probably like Pac-Man Rally, but I couldn't say it because I never played those games. Are those way, Pac-Man Rally's real? Yeah, it was for GameCube. I never played that. on car game. Before we leave the Wii behind and Mario Kart behind, the one thing I

like also that they added is, I don't like it in this game, but I like it in future games. So when you go off a hill or a ramp, when you shake the Wii moat, you get a little boost. Seven and eight, turn that into a button price. So it's one more little skill-based thing to do that is not explicitly told to you, but it will help you gain more speed and it'll help

it's very satisfying to do perfectly off of every jump. I don't like it in the Wii because I hate wagling the Wii moat for no good reason, but in seven and eight, you just hit the R button, you do it. So I really like that too. We also talk about eight. One of my favorite facts about it is that I forget the exact attach rate, but it's definitely more than 50% of Wii U owners own Mario Card 8.

Yeah. And that is an insane attach rate for a game that is not a package. But I'm sure it's only like 8 million sales, maybe not even that much. 8 million of 12, it might be, yeah. It's the Wii U, RIP, buddy. But just think about that. A Nintendo game selling 36 million copies, what a world that was. Is the system really dead if it never even lived?

Yes, that's true. But, yeah, I mean, New Super Mario Brothers pretty much close to that, but I don't think it even, I believe we outsold it even. New Super Mario Brothers Wii. Oh, I'm going to double check this. It outsold Mario Kart Wii? No, no, the Mario Kart Wii outsold New Super Mario Bros.

Oh, I would think so. I would think so. I think, like, let's pause while you look this up. New Super Mario Bros. We has sold two days of September 2016, 29.9 million copies. So still behind Mario Kart. But again, I think the consumer shopping with a Wii sees that wheel. It's like, that's a driving game.

I like Mario. I probably played Mario Kart 64 or the S&S one. Let's go for this. There's less of a consideration where it's like, oh, a new Mario platformer, do I want to play this? Yeah. I mean, I can totally see why. It sucks. I hate the wheel.

It's awful. But the wheel is why it's sold so well. There's landfills full of plastic of third-party wheels, too. There's going to be just a great barrier reef made. out of Wii accessories and rock band controllers that we'll be seeing before we die. It's going to be frightening. It's where we'll be buried, too.

Yes, just throw me on the pile of drums and I'll be fine. My skeleton will be totally fine for the seagulls. It'll be great. So, yes, that was our Mario Kart episode. We're talking about my course while we end this show, but that's fine. I had a great time on this show.

I wish I could talk more about the Wii one because there's a little more to dig into, but I think Mario Kart's in a good place now. I thought it would be dead, at least to me, after the Wii one. But I didn't care about seven at all. I bought it. I love it for this episode.

episode, I was like, after playing eight, it's hard to go back to seven. Yes, fine. But eight is just amazing. Buy it for Wii, you buy it for Switch. If you're getting a Switcher, if you have one already, you will not be disappointed. It is such, like, the perfect balance of everything you love about Mario Kart, and it just looks so good. I can't talk enough about how much I like eight.

Seven, seven is really good, but yeah, you can't, you can't go back after eight, really, too. But seven was so awesome. It was the, it was the one-two punch, 3D Land, and Mario Kart 7, that, that, you can't go back after. that fall, the first fall of the 3DS, it can work, it'll be, it'll be fine. Yeah, it came at a good time to 2011. Very good time, yeah. So we should wrap up.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode. We went kind of long, but that's been the case for everything today, I think. We just have so much to talk about it. I write too many notes, to be honest. But you can find me online as Bob Servo. And every other Thursday, I write a comedy article for Something Awful. Go to Something Awful.com to read those.

And also, I am on the podcast. with Henry and Chris Antista called Talking Simpsons. Every Wednesday, it is a new episode of The Simpsons that we cover in excruciating detail. They're starting to get to be 90 minutes long, folks, examining a 22-minute show. But we discover every last fact. And we had the great Bill Oakley, co-runner of season 7 and 8 on our podcast. He was a guest. So I think that makes us legit.

I'm pretty sure. So every Wednesday at TalkingSimpsons.com, go there or find Talking Simpsons in your podcast device. Henry, please. I'm H-E-N-E-R-E-Y-G on Twitter And also you can see my work still with the Lasertime Podcast Network every now And then especially Talking Simpsons And that is Patreon-supported like this show At patreon.com slash laser time

So keep an eye up for that And yeah, just again want to plug my friends' podcast, Brett Elston He's V-G-E-G-E-Myre video game music podcast There are very good ones about Mario Kart. Just search V-G-M-P-I-R-E. And then Mario Kart, and you'll find those great podcasts with me talking more about Mario Kart and its music with bros. And Jeremy.

Hi, I'm Jeremy. But on Twitter, I'm GameSpite. And, of course, you can find me at Retronauts because that's what I do. And we have a Patreon that pays for all of this stuff because of you folks out there who are so kind and nice. there are incentives to donating. You get episodes early and ad-free, and there's also some physical stuff on top of that.

And we're building retronauts into a business, an empire, if you will. We're going to take down everybody in our path. No, we're not that violent, I swear. But we want to become big. I don't want that kind of pressure. No, no. We want to become big and huge, and we want to do this for a living. And Jeremy is already doing that.

I want to be next. So please donate to patreon.com slash retronauts. No, no, no. Also, Bob is Bob's if you're listening. They're not listening. So go to patreon. dot com slash Retronauts and find our stuff there. And if you

want to give just a dollar a month, that would be amazing. If all of you gave a dollar a month, we could just do so much stuff with our podcast. How many orphans we could feed? Oh my God, I would feed every orphan. A delicious podcast every week. I'm a supporter too. Give money. If you can afford it,

I give to the creators you like on Patreon. It is the future. Yes, please do. And thank you so much for listening. We'll be back next week with another full-length episode of Retronaut. See you then. Thank you. The Mueller Report. I'm Ed Donahue with an AP News Minute.

President Trump was asked at the White House if special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess from what I understand, that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine, Susan Collins, says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproved. of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican Senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed

as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police say acted as his lookout, have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.