48 extra tracks was very nice, even though it is obviously an excuse to just put all the Tour tracks onto the main console game (except for exactly 1 track. C'mon Nintendo you really couldn't find room for that single last track??).
It started off kind of shaky with wave 1 having infamously bad graphics, but they really saved themselves later, by not only starting to make the visuals much closer to the base game, but adding extra stuff beyond tracks. At first it was small stuff, like an item selection menu for versus battles, and updating kart stats for the first time in years (maybe since the games release?) in order to finally dethrone the online lobbies of nothing but Waluigi Wiggler's. Then we got brand new characters. In some cases we even got non-city Tour tracks before Tour itself got them.
Unfortunately we did miss out on new karts from tour, which is a shame because Tour has some very great looking karts, while we've been stuck with the same ones in 8 Deluxe since release. And while 8 does have its fair share of "fun" karts, it also has a large portion of ones that just feel very plain, while Tour had so much potential with things like a double decker bus, and a penguin kart.
I'm not sure if this did for me what Nintendo wanted it to do though. It brought me back to the game for 1-3 days every time a new wave dropped, but that's it. It didn't keep the game alive for me, it just made me dig up its corpse every now and then to inspect it and throw it back in. The main problem with MK8 isn't that it lacked courses, it's that after nearly 10 years I want new mechanics, new items, new physics, new gimmicks.
What we got was fine, and ultimately ended up making 8 Deluxe easily the definitive Mario Kart (which makes me worried how they'll top it), it's just that the timing of this DLC never made it feel like you could get the full experience of that definitive edition unless you play extensively even to this day. For me it wasn't "Huge Mario Kart game with 96 courses!" it was more like "8 new courses to try now. And then again in a few months. Repeat until wave 6."
Still, if the choice was this or nothing, I'm glad we got this.
But now stop stalling and actually make the next Mario Kart you dairy farmers.
It started off kind of shaky with wave 1 having infamously bad graphics, but they really saved themselves later, by not only starting to make the visuals much closer to the base game, but adding extra stuff beyond tracks. At first it was small stuff, like an item selection menu for versus battles, and updating kart stats for the first time in years (maybe since the games release?) in order to finally dethrone the online lobbies of nothing but Waluigi Wiggler's. Then we got brand new characters. In some cases we even got non-city Tour tracks before Tour itself got them.
Unfortunately we did miss out on new karts from tour, which is a shame because Tour has some very great looking karts, while we've been stuck with the same ones in 8 Deluxe since release. And while 8 does have its fair share of "fun" karts, it also has a large portion of ones that just feel very plain, while Tour had so much potential with things like a double decker bus, and a penguin kart.
I'm not sure if this did for me what Nintendo wanted it to do though. It brought me back to the game for 1-3 days every time a new wave dropped, but that's it. It didn't keep the game alive for me, it just made me dig up its corpse every now and then to inspect it and throw it back in. The main problem with MK8 isn't that it lacked courses, it's that after nearly 10 years I want new mechanics, new items, new physics, new gimmicks.
What we got was fine, and ultimately ended up making 8 Deluxe easily the definitive Mario Kart (which makes me worried how they'll top it), it's just that the timing of this DLC never made it feel like you could get the full experience of that definitive edition unless you play extensively even to this day. For me it wasn't "Huge Mario Kart game with 96 courses!" it was more like "8 new courses to try now. And then again in a few months. Repeat until wave 6."
Still, if the choice was this or nothing, I'm glad we got this.
But now stop stalling and actually make the next Mario Kart you dairy farmers.