Nearly unplayable by modern standards. The controls are unintuitive, with your turns being either too sharp or too slippery that'll result on you careening off-track more times than you should be legally allowed; the AI is borderline cheating in so many ways, not just from the insane rubberbanding that gives you barely around 5 seconds to stay a decent distance at first place and the fact they can use infinite supplies of one item that you can't use in any capacity, but they're also somehow capable of phasing through obstacles no sweat and most of the time even allowed to hop over eachother's items completely unscathed. And then there's the little things that pile up into a mountain of regret, like Rainbow Road's color onslaught barely letting you see the item boxes on it and the fact that getting hit by certain items makes your screen spin around at sickening speeds. Outside of the fairly impressive 3D environment in a 2D engine this game managed to get away with, it's a fatal misfire in nearly every respect.

With that said, though, there's not much point to really hating this game, as horribly as it aged. It doesn't matter that the game didn't age well at the end of the day, as it was an important stepping stone into one of the most whimsical, creative and fun spin-off franchises ever made. The developers did the best they could for the most part with the limited tech they had at the time in order to create a kart racing experience like no other, and it deserves all of our respect for spawning way more uniquely fleshed out iterations of this idea later down the line. And, fortunately, this is the only particularly bad entry of the entire series, so it can only go up from here.