Mario Kart: Superannuated

To paraphrase Rick James, “nostalgia is a hell of a drug”. It’s true: while nostalgia provides warmth and comfort, it also blinds us from the past’s harshness. It can even blind us to whether or not something we loved in our youth was really good. Nothing’s more frustrating than nostalgia lying to us, especially with art. And I mention this because I think Mario Kart: Super Circuit, The GBA’s entry in the popular Nintendo franchise, isn’t as good as I once thought.

Allow me to give you some history:

The year is 2001. My younger brother and I had recently broken our Game Boy Color from all the years of dropping it. Desperate to stop us from getting upset, my mother took us to buy a Game Boy Advance at a nearby Toys ‘R Us. Since buying a new handheld was special, we were also allowed pick a game to go with it. Naturally, we went for Mario Kart: Super Circuit, as it was similar to Mario Kart 64 and we liked that game.

I can’t tell you how many hours my brother and I played it in the years to follow. We’d often bring our GBA with us wherever we went, and the game always followed. And while we’d quickly discover that this wasn’t Mario Kart 64, we’d also discover that the game had a feature that allowed us to learn from our past failures and victories. The next few years would have our GBA library expand, but Mario Kart: Super Circuit always remained a close-favourite.

Fast-forward to 10 years ago. After having recently joined ScrewAttack and received a DS Lite, I revisited Mario Kart: Super Circuit. Sadly, time had been unkind to it. What once was a fun romp was now a nightmare. What once controlled beautifully now controlled like garbage. It was so maddening that even I wrote a rant on it in a franchise retrospective.

So I put it out of my mind for years. But I recently got back into Mario Kart nostalgia, revisiting the franchise’s music on YouTube for old-time’s sake, and it got me thinking: what was it about Mario Kart: Super Circuit that I hated? Did I even hate it? And if I did, perhaps time would help me warm up to it?

Let’s get the good stuff out of the way now: I really like the game’s look. The GBA was a half-way point between The SNES and The N64, and it shows: the game looks like a supped-up version of Super Mario Kart, only with the sprites of Mario Kart 64. It’s a gorgeous-looking game by 2001’s-handheld standards, and it even looks good now. Granted, some textures are blurry in hindsight, but what can you do?

I like the music. The GBA had a superior sound chip to The SNES, but few games took full-advantage of it. This one does, with many tracks being as memorable as they are catchy. I think my favourites are the opening, which introduces the game, and the tune for Rainbow Road, which begins as a remix of Super Mario Kart’s Rainbow Road theme before going a separate direction. The rest are also pretty good.

Finally, and I can’t stress this enough, I love the Replay feature. I wish previous entries had it, as you can go back and study your triumphs and mistakes more-effectively. I used the mode a lot as a kid, and even as adult, assuming I could actually play it (more on that later), it’d probably come in handy. Whoever decided to add this feature was a genius!

Unfortunately, the problems begin where the good stuff ends. Nowhere is this more-apparent than in its biggest problem: controls. I’m not sure who’s to blame, the handheld or time, but The GBA’s D-Pad, that white button with four arrows attached to it on the left side, is stiff beyond belief. The steering of the player’s kart is, therefore, close to impossible. It’s not as if the Mario Kart franchise’s AI don’t already suffer from “Rubber Band AI”, in that they always outmatch you despite your experience, so when you can’t turn properly and keep bumping into side-rails, it’s a nightmare.

It doesn’t help that once you finally turn, your kart loses control and veers to the left and right way too quickly. To put it in perspective, imagine a bar of soap being hard and stuck to a rough surface on one side, yet wet and slippery on the other. Once it finally breaks free from whatever it’s stuck to, it flies out of your hands and hits something. That’s the D-Pad control in this game, and it’s infuriating.

Okay, maybe it’s a problem with The GBA, right? It’s not like the handheld wasn’t notorious for being a little stiff anyway, so maybe I can try my DS Lite? It’s a little better, as the stiffness is gone, but the loose steering issue still exists (ironically, my DS Lite also won’t let me fire weapons, but that’s irrelevant right now). It’s as if the soap is no longer stuck, but is still wet and slippery. I can’t begin to tell you how many times I kept bumping into walls/other players/falling off the tracks on my DS Lite, a fact made worse by The DS Lite having an actual backlight now.

That’s my problem with Mario Kart: Super Circuit: its controls feel superannuated, or “incredibly dated”. I remember first hearing the term “superannuated” in a video on Super Mario Kart, but I feel like that applies more to this game. At least Super Mario Kart could chalk its loose controls up to being the first in a franchise that’s on a technologically-limited console, something Mario Kart: Super Circuit can’t. This is the third-entry in the franchise, so what’s its excuse?

It’s unfortunate because my experience on The DS Lite actually made me enjoy the game more: the controls weren’t as stiff! The game looked and sounded beautiful! The courses were varied! The Replay feature was a nice extra! And the coin mechanic was…okay, screw the coin mechanic!

Look, I don’t like trashing this game. I love the Mario Kart franchise, even respecting its ups (Mario Kart 64, Mario Kart DS) as much as its downs (Mario Kart Wii). But none of the games I’ve played, not even the original, in the franchise compare to my frustrations with Mario Kart: Super Circuit. There’s a reason the game isn’t regarded amongst favourite entries in the franchise, and this is why. I’m sorry to say, but Mario Kart: Super Circuit’s superannuated. And that saddens me as a fan.