A caveat here first, explaining why my thoughts on this are probably irrelevant, and then some thoughts on this. Caveat: I don’t think I’ve ever truly loved Mario Kart since one magical evening at university in which a bunch of us played Mario Kart 64, then newly released, on split-screen all night long and into the morning. I loved that game so much – each moment was such a hectic joy. And it used me up a bit. I haven’t really been able to engage with the series with quite the same thrill since.
I appreciate that makes me a terrible person, and an idiot, since I gather Mario Kart 8 is a game for the ages. (The last Mario Kart I properly got to know, incidentally, was the GBA version, so again, please feel free to write off everything I’m about to say.) Anyway, I fired up World and played a few races, and they were pretty and imaginative and gently non-thrilling to me, and I thought again: what’s wrong with me, idiot? Everybody loves this. Why don’t you?
Then I dropped into Free Roam and suddenly? Well, suddenly I was genuinely in love.
Here’s the thing: I don’t know how good Free Roam genuinely is, but I do know it’s absolutely perfect for me and all my personal weirdnesses. Free Roam positions every Mario Kart track on a kind of open world, with lots of gaps and spaces between them so you can just take off and do whatever you like. You ride around, brush up against tracks, lose your way, skate down the back of a dinosaur, rush through a few temples and generally zone out.
Does it feel like Mario Kart? Kind of. But what it really feels like is that special moment I love in an open world game when the campaign is done, and the map is pretty much cleared out of big ticket things to do. But you don’t want to stop playing, so you just groove around, a podcast on, and take pleasure in movement, the surroundings, and any final stuff you’re mopping up. Free Roam in Mario Kart gives you P buttons to track down, for example, each of which fires up a tiny micro-mission. All great. But also great if you don’t find them. It’s fun just to be here, moving and having very little going on in your brain. A landscape of movement, not monument, to quote the great Reyner Banham.
There’s more, though. Photo mode is absolutely fabulous. You can pause the action, bring up camera options, move in on a frozen image, tilt the camera, change the player’s expression and do all sorts of weird jazz like that. I have already spent at least two hours just doing this – finding a Banzai Bill, say, and trying to get the most terrifying and dynamic picture of it, blasting past a billboard and trying to make it all look a bit like Jet Set Radio. I enter a new area and a buffalo hops past or birds scatter and I try to catch it all. You could play this Mario Kart exactly as if you’re a wildlife photographer and it would still be great. In fact, I think I probably will.
And here’s the other thing. Mario Kart World is made for Nintendo’s GameChat, in which a prod of the C button – a free service until 31st March 2026, after which it will require that you have an online sub even if you only play F2P multiplayer games – drops you into video chat with your pals, allowing you to play together, drop in and out of games and stick together and generally hang together. It’s wonderfully agnostic about activities, and after setting it up – a welcome bit of security, given the nature of the thing – I was soon chatting to my friend Stu while we played Mario Kart World, together, not together etc.
Here is the glory of GameChat, a thing which I thought initially I would not like at all. Stu is an old friend of mine and when it comes to Nintendo games we go way, way back. But he’s moved away, we’ve both had children, we both have jobs (sort of, in my case) and life, as Becky Hill says, has been lifing.
But for an hour this morning we noodled through Mario Kart together and I heard about his new passion for making pizzas, his new pizza oven, his new stamp for making his own pizza boxes, the way he makes his dough. We talked about everything in exactly the way we struggle to do on a phonecall, because we’re both tail-end of Gen X and hate the phone almost as much as Millennials do. If I get to meet up with Stu every few weeks as we play Mario Kart or whatever? I will be very happy.
Actually, the more I think about it, the more we did talk about Mario Kart, too. Because Mario Kart World tells you almost nothing before you start. When I first launched it and saw there was pretty much no tutorial I thought: well, it’s Mario Kart innit? Immediacy is key. But then I started to play Free Roam, and I started to talk to Stu and compare notes, and I feel like Nintendo has applied a bit of Dark Souls thinking to Mario Kart.
Just a little. Amongst the many things Stu taught me was that turbo hop you can do by holding down a button and waiting for the sparks and I could have found out about that in the manual. Fine. But then he also talked about how he had been unlocking things, and told me a dazzlingly complex story about travelling between in-game food trucks scattered about various areas.
Then, spoiler, he told me about a UFO on the map, and I told him about a time I got stuck in a boat for a bit and genuinely didn’t have a clue what was going on. GameChat allows you to explore the kinds of secret-filled games that you really need a lunch break to talk about in the real world. It reminded me of coffee with Simon Parkin when he talked about the first Demon’s Souls, or, going back even further, it reminded me of discussing strategies for Impossible Mission on the C64 in my primary school playground before the bell rang.
All that, and it’s so lovely to hear that Stu is really into making pizzas now.
A copy of Mario Kart World was provided by Nintendo.