31 May Back on the Road Again
It’s time for Mario Kart again! I’ve been waiting for Mario Kart 8 for ages now, and finally yesterday was the release day. Of course we had to get the Limited Edition with a blue shell figurine XD. Here you can see the box. I couldn’t wait to open it!
And here’s the game and the blue shell. I does look a bit intimidating, doesn’t it?
I think it’s a really cool item. It matches our Mario figure collection perfectly!
The Mario Kart games are on my top list of longest or most played games, together with Final Fantasy XI, Borderlands 2 and Secret of Mana, I think *lol*. It all started back with Mario Kart for the Super Nintendo. We played it for hours and the best think about it was he battle mode of course. And we invented our own battle mode: Mario mit Häusern “Mario Kart with houses” XD. Let me explain: Everyone will take one zone marked by a certain color as their house. The rules where easy: Direct combat wasn’t allowed, so red shells had to be shot against a wall, green shells had to be shot to the middle. You have to drive around in your “house” and could only protect yourself by evading or placing banana shell in strategic good positions. We played this for hours…. Just don’t ask, it was fun as hell!
But the Mario Kart game we played most has to be Mario Kart Wii. Oh, you can’t really imagine how much Mario Kart Wii we played… We unlocked everything at least 3 times: First on our Wii, then on the Wii of my family and then our old Wii died, so we bought a new one and had to unlock everything a third time ^,^°. After we unlocked all courses and drivers we mostly did random 16-course team battles on 150cc or mirror, again and again and again. We also tried out online modus once, but since we had a certain lag most of the time it always seemed like the other drivers where cheating, like driving in places where you normally couldn’t be. But while driving with other players online we found the one shortcut on Blätterwald (Maple Treeway) right at the start, which we’ve never seen before >.<°. I still don’t know how we could overlook this for so long…
Mario Kart 7 for 3DS was really nice and entertaining, but I really prefer to play it together with family and friends on the biiiiiig screen. It’s just not the same on that tiny screen.
Now let’s move on to Mario Kart 8:
Of course I can’t say much about it yet, but we already did all Grand Prix on 50cc and the first two on 100cc. I really like most of the new courses, especially the disco zone, where you can see the piranha flowers head banging in colorful spotlight to hip music XD. I think the new courses are quite creative and fun to race. As for the retro courses, they could’ve chosen some better ones, but I think they’re okay. I’m still hoping for some more new and/or retro courses as a DLC, I wouldn’t mind more drivers as DLC as well, since some really cool characters like King Boo (which my sister always played), Dry Bones and Birdo are missing ;_;. And of course they can add more cars, wheels and gliders, too.
Maybe you already heard that Nintendo announced the first DLC: A Mercedes-Benz car ^_^°. And then there’s also this funny spot for Mercedes featuring a rather strange Mario:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AkgJZGspCM
[ credit: mercedesbenzjapan @ youtube ]
I read online that some people complained about how the different cars didn’t make any difference in the driving behavior, which in my opinion isn’t true at all. I just picked some different wheels for one cup yesterday and it felt totally different. For now I decided on driving with either Koopa, Lakitu or Toadette, use a bike (I never used bikes in Mario Kart Wii!), standard tires and the cloud balloons. The new items are really cool like the boomerang, the hungry piranha plant and the horn.
Well, I’m really happy about the game and can’t wait to play some more and unlock the rest of the drivers, car items and the stamps of course XD.
What do you think about Mario Kart? Have you already played Mario Kart 8? What are your favorite courses and drives?
You can still get the Standard, Steelbook or Limited Edition at Amazon