Don’t really care about the price of the games as my gamefly subscription is payed up until 2027 and I haven’t paid full price for a game in over a decade anyway, and $450 for the console itself is fine I guess in these times of tariffs and inflation. But charging for a glorified tech demo / interactive instruction manual is messed up. This is the company that gave us legendary pack-in games for free like Mario Bros, Tetris and Wii Sports, but they really couldn’t eat the $6 this time and throw in this dumb not-a-game for free? Kind of shows you they’re really worried that the Switch 2 won’t even come close to the OG Switch sales so they are nickel and diming wherever they can.
The $20-30 upgrade path for the Switch 1 games is also messed up. I mean, don’t they want people transitioning to their new hardware asap? What better way to do that than throwing in some free or cheap incentives for the games they already own? But asking for $30 for Kirby dlc that’s going to certainly be just a couple hours of content is, again, messed up.
MK World looks neat. They really had no other choice but a soft reboot like this since MK8 was the definitive MK experience and probably could not be easily topped by a traditional sequel. I expect they will do something similar with Smash (open-world, maybe a transition to 3D arena fighting) because there is not much else that can be done with the existing formula.
I’ve been watching YouTube videos analyzing every bit of MK World info, and it looks like we’re getting 29 tracks but with variations based on weather and time of day. This was inferred from looking at the official map on Nintendo’s site, although we can assume there is a Rainbow Road somewhere in the sky that’s accessible in the late game and that wouldn’t be shown on the map. This would bring the total to a nice, even 30 if true. Not a great amount- the original MK8 had 32 tracks iirc… though no variations existed aside from mirror mode. It looks like there are battle tracks hidden on the map though if you look closely. There is an area by Bowser’s castle that looks suspiciously like the round lava battle level from N64. Makes sense to put these battle levels in there as side content in the open world.
51 characters spotted so far. That’s a massive amount. Makes me sad that the Koopalings seem to be absent. Morton Koopa was my main since the Wii U game first released and I even got him as a tattoo and named my black lab after him. No Diddy or Funky either, but these omissions are probably related to DK’s weird and unnecessary redesign. Kamek seems to be gone too but now he is an item, though it’s unclear what he does (my guess is that he swaps your position with another racer, which has the potential to be as enjoyably frustrating as the blue shell or pre-nerf lightning bolt). Bizarre and obscure enemies and characters like the bat, snowman and skeletal fish are now playable though they seem to have minimal animations and no costume options, so they are probably the equivalent of collectibles that you can find in the open world.
The costume thing is odd. It seems the costumes are thematically related to the courses you are currently driving on, which is interesting. They even change the stunts you perform and it’s not just the popular main characters who have access to them, as Lakitus and even Koopa Troopa were spotted in different costumes. This kind of stuff makes my Nintendo fanboy heart swell …. but it seems a bit pointless? Like, I can’t imagine the amount of work that went into creating all these costumes and alternate stunts with such a huge roster. Maybe they are using some sort of AI tool, I guess. The attention to detail and world-building is insane tbh. The way tires look when driving in the rain or sand, the way the Koopa Troopas and Toads driving cars in traffic on the road look at you and react to you, seeing other track landmarks off in the distance, the facial expressions on the characters down to even each eyebrow being animated separately… Crazy stuff. But again, dunno if I would’ve just preferred more tracks instead of this kind of detail. Why does every game need to be open world? I just want to race online against people like I have been doing in MK8 for almost ten years. I’m sure that’s an option here too, but with just 29-30 tracks instead of MK8’s 96 tracks, so that’s kind of a bummer. TBH if they just went the Smash Ultimate route and made a MK9 with every track and character in series history along with maybe a handful of new additions, I would’ve been happy.
One other thing that I found interesting is that a lot of the retro tracks in World like Dino Jungle and the Airship were at one point expected to be in MK8’s booster pack as their audio data were datamined early on. So at some point they were brought over to World instead and replaced with stuff like Daisy Circuit and Moonview Highway in the DLC. Dunno what this indicates besides maybe the DLC and World were being developed at the same time by the same team. This also explains why so many of the tracks in the booster pack had traffic, as that’s seemingly a big part of World.
Well that’s my autistic wall of text about mario kart. Certainly looks fun and it’s my favorite game series of all time, but I’ll wait. Nintendo is trying to cultivate crippling fomo in people by saying the Mario Kart bundle is limited, but I doubt that will be the case. Mario Kart console bundles have been their bread and butter since the Wii days. Gonna hit my backlog for the next couple of years, play Metroid Prime 4 on my old Switch along with whatever other interesting games it’ll still get, and maybe wait for an OLED switch 2 or some cool limited edition version. And there’s always the possibility this thing will bomb- especially in this current economy and with how deranged the game industry is right now- so there could be a price drop or better bundles down the road like there were with the Wii U and 3DS.
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