I downloaded Mario Kart 64 a couple of weeks ago to the Wii VC I owned the orginal Mario Kart 64 which now belongs to my younger brothers. Haven’t played it in quite a while I deiced to see if it was worth the 10 bucks to download.
Now Mario Kart 64 is the sequel to
Super Mario Kart for the SNES, and it was released in early 1997 to be one of the best kart racers out on the N64. So how has it aged and has it done it gracefully.
Graphics.
Sometimes cleaning stuff up isn’t so great at all, a pound of mud on the car does hide all the dents. The graphics in Mario Kart 64 are a good example. The game looks just as clean has Mario 64 and this helps the looks of the tracks out great. The tracks in the game look even more fantastic then they did 10 years ago. But there’s a problem, see Nintendo pre-render the sprites in 2d, now this look odd on the N64 but made the looks of the players memorable. Not the case here, you can see the individual pixels and some of the hard lines on the characters, especially bigger characters like Wario.
Sound.
The music in the game is also pretty good and gets the job done. The typical Nintendo voice actors do small voice samples. Since this is the N64 there are only a couple per player so expect to hear things like Here I go, or Bingo Bye Bye a lot of times.
Gameplay
Ok Mario Kart 64 like it’s previous game is a kart racer, what is a kart racer well it’s a racer and the idea is still to get to the finish line. But you can screw with your opponents by opening item boxes and suing them. Shells allow you to hit the person in front of you, banana peels allow you to spin out the person behind you, star men make you invincible from other player’s items, and mushrooms give you a big boost in speed.
Now there have been a few changes between the SNES and the N64 model. First off the classes have gone down from 4 to 3. Now you only have light weight (Peach, Yoshi, Toad), middle weight (Mario & Luigi), and the heavy weights (Wario, DK, and Bowser). The light weights have faster acceleration, lower top speed and don’t slow down in thick grass or sand. Heavy weights slower acceleration, highest top speed, slow down to a crawl if there ever pushed off a track, and if they hit a light weight at top speed they can make them spin out. The middle weights are in between the two.
2nd is new items. The ones mention before are all available on the SNES game. A few new ones have appeared. First are the triple shells, 3 green or red shells will form around your kart and act like a barrier, any one who hits them will spin out. You can also fire the shells forward and the green ones will bounce around; while the red will track down opponents. Next are the bunch of bananas, these will allow you to have a chain of banana peels behind your kart. These are useful for 3 things, gets ride of tail gaiters, acts like a shield for red shells, allows you to mine large areas of the track. Finally there is the spike shell, it makes it’s first appearance in this game, but it’s different then in the newer games. Rather then flying to the person in first place and hitting them with a big explosion, it tracks them on the land, bad if there’s a lot of obstacles on the track that could break your shell, good because the shell can wipe out multiple other racers on it’s way to the number one guy.
Finally the tracks themselves have changed. They are a lot bigger and you only need to do 3 laps instead of 5 laps. The courses of course now have bigger jumps and the courses now have hills. Stadiums like Wario Stadium have huge hills and bumps to get over. Unfortunately a lot of the courses are now easier, Rainbow Road which is always the final course in the special cup is the easiest in all the games. It has guard rails all over the course and the only thing the course throws at you are chain chomps that come up occasionally to hit you. Of course after the nightmare that the SNES Rainbow Road was this is a welcome change. The DS may have had some of the courses from this game but they cut out all the good ones like Wario Stadium, Royal Raceway, Choco Mountain, and Browsers Castle.
Modes.
There are several different modes in Mario Kart 64. You have the standard GP modes where you choose a cup and race 4 different races in a row. This one is available only in 1 and 2 player modes. There is the time trail mode in which you race around the course with 3 mushrooms and try to get the best time. In multiplayer modes 2 to 4 you have match where you choose a single course and race, and battle where you try to hit each other with weapons and knock out balloons. The 3 to 4 player battle modes alone are worth a purchase of this game. The game is at it’s greatest in multiplayer modes
Wii bugs.
Ok the transfer over to the Wii wasn’t flawless some complaints are valid some aren’t. First bug is that on 3 or 4 player match race some courses go really fast (Moo Moo Farm especially), this is bug happen to me and I personally liked it because it made it more challenging and fun, new comers will probably disagree. Then the biggie one and the ones I hear people complain the most, the ghost data saves have no been disabled. For those of you who go around saying that this alone makes the game unworthy the 10 dollar downloadable, I have this to say to you. Did you complain when you had to take out your gamecube modem in order to hook up the
Gameboy Player, seriously your complaining about a feature that not many people used. Ok this is what people are complaining about, the N64 controller had a memory card slot on the bottom of it, you slip the memory card in and you can save the actual ghost that appears when you complete a time trail. Handy kind of but this took a huge space on the N64 memory card and I remember deleting them so I could use my memory card for games that actually use it to save data. It’s really such a small part of the game that I don’t think most people would notice in till someone told them about it.
Final recommendation.
The N64 version of the game is fun and I do recommend it if you have an N64, if you don’t but own a Wii the game is still a blast to play on it despite a few minor errors.
