The Mario Kart Retrospective: Mario Kart Super Circuit

When Nintendo had their Mario Kart 8 Nintendo Direct on April 30th, they had a little retrospective feature outlining each entry in the franchise. It wasn't in as much detail as we are doing now, but it was a little buffer to fill the space between announcements. Oddly enough though, they left out Mario Kart: Super Circuit from their retrospective. It was a smaller entry in the franchise granted, but it was still an entry and one in a series that doesn't have that many installments. Then I remembered "Oh yeah! The game kind of sucked!", and everything explained itself.

I'm not here to say that Super Circuit was bad, but it was a bit too ambitious for its time. It was a Gameboy Advance game that tried to have 40 courses (!!!) on one card, with 20 of them being original ones. However, it was also a launch title for the GBA, so it wasn't exactly the most graphically advanced game for its time. It looked a lot better than Super Mario Kart, but the courses themselves were very pixelated and oftentimes hard to see, especially on the GBA's non backlit screen. It's better on more well lit systems, but it still has some visual issues.

As for the actual game, I don't really remember playing it all that much. I remember it being kind of similar to Super Mario Kart more than Mario Kart 64, but that still doesn't make it all that special. It tries to emulate a lot of the original's gameplay mechanics, like reintroducing coins to the mix, but it doesn't work all too well, especially when it's hard to see the coins given the graphics. Truth be told, if I was to keep going with this review, everything I would have to say about this game would boil down to "It's just like the original, but with worse graphics."

It's essentially Super Mario Kart for handhelds, and if that sounds up your alley, good for you! If not, this is definitely a skippable game in the series. Is this entry a lot shorter than I would have liked it to be? Probably, but don't worry, I'll have a lot to say when I reach the next game in the series, Mario Kart: Double Dash!!

Previous Entries:

Super Mario Kart

Mario Kart 64