Death Of Family, Friendship, Manners And Decent Society: Welcome To Mario Kart

Welcome to Mario Kart.

So - at the beginning of this game - says Mario, the God of Mario Kart. God, you say? Why, yes. He HAS to be a God – he’s only got one name. He’s like Oprah and Cher and Madonna. Everyone knows Mario.

Welcome to Mario Kart!

Spoken in such an innocent and chirpy voice, too. But I should have been wary from the start. NO ONE could be that chirpy, without the aid of mind-altering drugs or sweet, beloved alcohol. Maybe he’s drunk, I don’t know. He IS wearing a beret and gloves and overalls, an impossibly passe’ outfit.

But he’s no God. He’s lying. He’s crap.

Anyone who has played Mario Kart can tell you this. As any decent Karter knows, the best player in this game is not Mario, after who this game is inexplicably named, but the strongest performances are shared by Peach, Yoshi, and Toad, Mario’s fiesty little sidekicks. I say inexplicably because it’s impossible to understand why the creators didn’t make him the strongest character. It’s named after him, after all. But they had to include him because he’s what we know from all those other Mario games and that crappy yet somehow frightfully entertaining film based on him and his brother Luigi, Super Mario Brothers.

It’s a racing game with characters seated on, well, go-karts, all of whom possess varying outfits and voices and slightly differing abilities (a difference which becomes more apparent as the strength of player ability develops). There are four different grand prixs, all at different locations – pretty cool places, too, where seldom a go-kart has gone before, like haunted castles and beaches and rainbow roads in space.

So I don’t get shot down from completely resorting to off-topic tangents, I’ll give you a bit more info. There’s eight characters named Mario, Luigi (the mid-weights), Yoshi, Peach, Toad (the light-weights), and Wario, Donkey Kong, and Bowser (the heavy weights). There are four tracks to a Grand Prix, and four Grand Prix’s named Mushroom (the first and easiest one), Flower, Star, and Special (my favourite, even though it contains the impossibly boring and never-ending fourth track, Rainbow Road). The object is to win a race utilizing your driving abilities and the ‘prizes’ you can collect from boxes which appear along the tracks. Such prizes include bananas you can drop over the track and cause people to skid out of control, bullet shells you can shoot at people and therefore slow their progress, ‘stars’ which make you invincible and move quicker, and other little treats. The graphics are excellent and three-dimensional and the whole thing is very colourful. The controls are very easy to use once you get used to them and eventually become like a third hand, or, at the very least, an added gross mutation of one of your two initial hands.

The catch is this: this game will turn you into an obsessive, nasty, fiery-tempered individual who has the ability to offend not only your immediate family and friends but the whole neighbourhood. Take heed.

I tried to resist Mario Kart’s mystical pull at first for a full eight months. At night I’d lie in bed and moan as the starting music would sound and reverberate through the floorboards into my bedroom as family members would be drawn in and hypnotized by it’s flashing lights and alarmingly quick-moving tracks. Instead of joining in I focused on work, friendship, relationships, and all the better things in life until I decided to chuck it all in for a weird green little lizard-dinosaur type thing called Yoshi.

I began to learn the tracks, the ins and outs, the corners, the prizes, the best way to utilize my prizes by continually attacking and slowing down fellow competitors, how to skid in the most expert way to increase my pace, the little inadequacies and tricks of the game, the short-cuts. It was love at first skid, and it was something I hadn’t felt since Mortal Kombat. It had me in its corded grasp, or rather, it had me enmeshed in its interlaced and knotted electrical cable spider’s web.

Relationships began to change. My brother, whose skills surpassed that of everyone else, became cocky and at times extremely irritating. My swearing, provoked by strings of bad Karting luck and performance, reached ridiculous levels, and no swear word was insulting enough. But I was proud, my friends. I revelled in Kart. I threw it down on the ground, stripped it, and rolled around in it like a pig revelling in its own filth. I started talking about it to people who had no interest in it. Like now.

I began to realize all this later through objective realization and the appeals of strangers. Though I never realized the point it had reached until our neighbour, a friend of mine and an old school buddy, revealed to us that every night at about eleven o’clock (the Karting hour) the sounds of, “you f-ing bastard!” and, “you f-- s--!! I hadn’t even let go of my prize yet!” and more intricate, nastier swear words could be heard ringing out in the street. A close friend and crazy Kart reveller (as well as a pizza delivery driver – look out on the roads) befriended a girl who lives three streets away and began to tell her of his connection with me and Mario Kart. “Oh, is that why you can hear all that swearing at night?” she innocently wondered. He related this to me and we both snickered and cowered in shame.

But it’s not all depravity and sickness. There’s been moments of pure glory and never-seen-before joy that I’ll never be able to replicate, like the time I played Cameron (the delivery driver) on Kalimari Desert (Mushroom Grand Prix) and came back from a VERY distant second to wipe him and his prize out just before the finish line, beating him by .01 of a second. There was the time I came back from eighth (the last position) – after a very shaky and unfair start – on Banshee Boardwalk, a boardwalk grand-prix through a haunted castle and a murky moat, only to win the race after repeatedly shooting other players and “shrinking” them with a prize known as the “lightning bolt”, a mechanism which allows you to slow their progress down. And there’s the biggie, an incident which is not a tale of my glory but my brother’s, a moment so memorable that it must rank – if I can be distasteful in the name of humour for a second – up there, I’m sure, with major events like the Kennedy assassination in that I will always remember where I was and what I was doing immediately BEFORE it occurred. I was chatting on the phone to my friend Julie, not a Kart fan, probably about something not in the least Kart-related, when Cameron shouted out, panicked, “Karene! Karene! Come here! Quickly!” Anxious, I dropped the phone and ran into the living room with phenomenal speed. “Look!” he shouted as I took in the very ordinary sight of a large group of people gathered around the television. “Kelvin’s beating Judy with his feet!” And I saw my friend Judy*, clutching a Nintendo controller and gazing with fixed panic at the TV, being beaten – sorely – by my brother Kelvin, who was operating his intricate controller with its various buttons using his big toes. He even got the short cut and beat all the computer-driven characters. Judy pulled the plug on the machine, swore, threw the controller and was forced to leave the room amid an air of intense amazement and tension. We’ve all sort of looked at my brother differently since.

So play, but be careful. Try not to become addicted. I’ve cut my Karting time down to maybe a few hours a week, and I’m happy with that now. And I didn’t even need counselling. But it took a great deal of will power, believe me. Perhaps some of you know what I’m talking about. Video addiction is a dangerous thing, and I can still remember the way I used to lie in bed at nights as a child, staring with frustration at the uneven line produced by the tops of my dressing table and cupboards, wanting to fill in the gaps with blocks to create an even line, Tetris-style. Today, everyone in my acquaintance who has been a Kart-addict has modified their language below trooper-level and has significantly reduced their game playing hours, but the stories and legends still live on and are frequently discussed. Some day in the future we still see some kind of Kart apocalypse, some bizarre tragedy caused by a Kart-worshipping cult who take their own lives in a mass suicide honouring the frivolous and unrelenting Kart Gods. A photo of how this might look will soon be available as a link from my profile.

Anyway, this review has gone on way too long and besides, I have to go. My brother wants to Kart.

*Name changed to protect the Kart-feeble