Mario Kart World is cartoon physics at its finest

I found myself struggling to write about Mario Kart World because I wanted to open with ‘Its Mario’s World and we’re just living in it’

The Mario Kart franchise is about video game characters racing in go karts with heavily exaggerated physics and incredibly unlikely random weaponry. Aaaand  you probably already know that.

I remember a PC gamer friend telling me that the Switch 2 having a party game as their big launch game was mistake. My reaction was ‘huh, I guess Mario Kart can be a party’ and ‘Isn’t Mario Kart 8 the best selling Switch game so wouldn’t that make Mario Kart a solid bet for Nintendo?’

And, at least for our family, Mario Kart World has been a winner. To be fair, we occasionally revisit Mario Kart DS and Mario Kart 7 and played tons of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe so we were always going to be an easy sell. But Mario Kart World may become our favorite so far.

(The idea of an open world Mario Kart still feels kind of strange. I personally am in it just for the races but I do like the option of cross county races.)

Instead of boring you with details about the game, since people far better qualified than I am have published plenty of articles about it, I want to comment on one key element. That Mario Kart World leans even further into the exaggerated physics, getting us even closer to a Looney Tunes cartoon.

You are now able to do jumps and flips simply by accelerating. You can grind in rails and even things like telephone lines, although I don’t know if grind is really the right term. You are a cartoon pinball and the world is your cabinet.

Something I have come to realize as I grow older as a gamer is that the casual audience is a quiet giant. I am paraphrasing but I remember James Ernst saying at a convention that a designer asking him if a pub game like Pairs had any sales potential and Ernst’s response being ‘Have you met people?’

Mario Kart World is not a work of literature in video game form (which definitely exist) but it is a ton of fun.