I'm tired of spinning my wheels.
Mario Kart 8 has been the pack-in, the default Nintendo game, the Wii Sports of our era, for nearly a decade, for the entire time that I've been an adult. I think it's the last game I first played in a store at a demo kiosk. At this point it's a bizarre amalgam of years of Nintendo iconography and design principles; the online menus featuring Mii avatars and the sort of skeuomorphism of online communication being represented by all the players standing on a globe feel like a relic of the original Wii era, we have widgets on the main menu for Amiibo and Labo. Tracks now range from remakes of the SNES original's tracks, to the brand new courses made for this game, everything in between, and levels from the more recent mobile game. Mario Kart 8 feels completely anachronistic.
Minutes before writing this I finished 3-starring every cup in the grand prix mode, finally clearing those few DLC cups I didn't quite perfect the first time. There's something absurd about playing this game single-player, and something perverse about getting good at it. Despite the fact that I have probably played more local multiplayer of this game, and with a wider variety of family and friends, than any other game released since, I can't help but feel utterly alone in playing it. Maybe it's because when I was a kid everyone I knew played games, everyone had a Game Boy, several families on my street had a GameCube, everyone had a Wii, when I was starting college everyone had a 3DS and a few people even had a Wii U. Despite now outselling most of those systems, the only Switch I've ever seen that wasn't mine was one I gifted to a family member. The sheer amount of content in this game makes me feel how a certain Minecraft developer must have felt when all his candy started rotting.
Mario Kart 8 has been the pack-in, the default Nintendo game, the Wii Sports of our era, for nearly a decade, for the entire time that I've been an adult. I think it's the last game I first played in a store at a demo kiosk. At this point it's a bizarre amalgam of years of Nintendo iconography and design principles; the online menus featuring Mii avatars and the sort of skeuomorphism of online communication being represented by all the players standing on a globe feel like a relic of the original Wii era, we have widgets on the main menu for Amiibo and Labo. Tracks now range from remakes of the SNES original's tracks, to the brand new courses made for this game, everything in between, and levels from the more recent mobile game. Mario Kart 8 feels completely anachronistic.
Minutes before writing this I finished 3-starring every cup in the grand prix mode, finally clearing those few DLC cups I didn't quite perfect the first time. There's something absurd about playing this game single-player, and something perverse about getting good at it. Despite the fact that I have probably played more local multiplayer of this game, and with a wider variety of family and friends, than any other game released since, I can't help but feel utterly alone in playing it. Maybe it's because when I was a kid everyone I knew played games, everyone had a Game Boy, several families on my street had a GameCube, everyone had a Wii, when I was starting college everyone had a 3DS and a few people even had a Wii U. Despite now outselling most of those systems, the only Switch I've ever seen that wasn't mine was one I gifted to a family member. The sheer amount of content in this game makes me feel how a certain Minecraft developer must have felt when all his candy started rotting.
AnonymousKaiju
3 months ago