Mario Kart 8

Confession: I've never been the biggest fan of Mario Kart.
I've been a Nintendo fan my whole life, and owned most of the Mario Kart games at one point or another, but I've never really liked the series too much. It's not that I thought the games were bad—there's no Mario Kart game that's technically less than very good, and most are great—they're just not particularly appealing to me. MK to me has always felt too slow and random to be fun or challenging. But holy wow, Mario Kart 8 is amazing.

In the past, I've always preferred Nintendo's other racing franchise, F-Zero. While Mario Kart had slow-paced cartoon antics, F-Zero felt like a blazingly fast adrenaline rush that required incredible skill. Mario Kart 8 feels a lot like F-Zero, especially on the 150cc setting. For a Mario Kart game, MK8 is very, very fast. Tracks twist sideways and upside down, sending karts underwater and gliding through the air. Karts switch to hover mode (a la Back to the Future's DeLorean) and kart-versus-kart dynamics completely change. It's this constant changing that makes Mario Kart 8 the most fun: just when you get used to the "feel" of a course, it changes. It's never annoying or unclear, and it's tons of fun.

There's also a lot of content in MK8. There's 8 Grand Prix cups with 4 courses each, for a total of 24 tracks—with two new cups on the way via DLC. 4 of the new cups are made up of all-new tracks, and the other 4 cups consist of remade versions of tracks from past Mario Kart games. All in all, that's a ton of tracks and a ton of variety. It's legitimately hard to get bored in Mario Kart 8, even when playing alone, which is a surprising thing to be able to say about a Mario Kart game.

I could ramble on about the intricacies of why MK8 is awesome, but at the end of the day it's kind of unnecessary. It's Mario Kart; you already know what it is, basically. This is the best Mario Kart game ever made. Go play it.

9/10