Mario Kart World drifts over the corpses of failed arcade racers doomed to karting hell

✓ VideoGamer Summary

• So many racing games have tried and failed to do what Mario Kart has done.
• A number of them were honest attempts that fell flat, but so many were obvious shovelware cash grabs.
• We have consigned each of these to a layer of kart gaming hell, where we can try and learn lessons from their sins.
• None are safe from our righteous judgment, not even Mario himself.

Ever since Super Mario Kart on the SNES, other developers have looked to the series as a guiding light of success. Even the Mario Kart games are widely beloved and tend to be among the best-performing games on their console. By the end of its release month, Mario Kart World had already sold over 5.63 million copies worldwide, and that number is only set to rise.

It’s no surprise that so many other kart racers have tried to pick up even a crumb of Mario Kart’s success. However, most of these attempts end up in obscurity and failure due to staggering design flaws, which we’ve helpfully divvied up into seven different types. For perpetrators of any of these seven deadly karting game sins, only a karting Tartarus (kartarus?) awaits. 

Avarice overcame Chocobo GP’s poor, greedy bird

Chocobo GP follows the pattern of a host of other failed live service games. It was simply too greedy to survive. From launch, the title was riddled with microtransactions, a byzantine network of currencies, and a purchasable battle pass. The first battle pass locked Cloud from Final Fantasy 7 behind a track that took forever to grind. If you wanted to speed things up, it was a mere $28 (£20.75) to race as the broody merc.

Nine months after launch, Square Enix announced the game would no longer receive updates, and the in-game shop would be shut down. To add insult, the currency purchased with real money would then be discarded with no refund offers. Such are the wages of greed. 

Sonic Riders showcases the hedgehog’s Envy

You’d be surprised at how many racers Sega has put out over the years to try and keep up with their mascot rival, with most falling short of Mario Kart’s crown. Sonic Riders is an excellent example. In Sonic Riders, you race on hoverboards powered by ‘air’, a resource that is used to drift. As you use it up, the handling gets worse until you’re at last forced to run and refuel. 

Overcomplicating the formula, the game tried to be unique but mostly succeeded in disincentivising drifting in a kart racer. This amounted to Sonic Riders shooting itself in the foot, cutting off a mechanic known for offering a steady supply of endorphins for those who master it. Sega added hoverboards because they thought it would be hard to implement a ‘trick’ system in karts. However, it would appear that the developer fell for the greatest trick of all: hubris. 

Garfield Kart was born in Sloth, molded by it

Much like its titular feline, Garfield Kart is lazy. It’s got the most basic of karting mechanics and tracks, all with vaguely recognisable characters and their likenesses slapped on top. On release, it was thoroughly panned by critics, and with good reason. However, the title commands glowing Steam reviews as a result of powerful meme-based chicanery.  

Even that fleeting success has withered away, though. The first game was remastered as Garfield Kart – Furious Racing and survived on the bare minimum. It was the release of the sequel that depleted what little life was left here in the first place. Removing characters, collectibles, and missing basic features like a volume slider, the sloth on display was sufficient to earn ire from even the most ardent meme enjoyers.

Aqua Teen Hunger Force Zombie Ninja Pro-Am exudes Wrath

Aqua Teen Hunger Force Zombie Ninja Pro-Am was never going to be a great game, being a hybrid golf, fighting, and kart racing game based on the eponymous TV series. Here, in this layer of hell, we learn of the sin of wrath, and ATHFZNNPA was full of it. It’s not the only game to encourage throwing items at each other, but we’re used to red shells rather than RPG shells.

Karting is only one part of the game, as much of the experience is spent out on the course, hitting balls, and fighting your way to where they landed. The clunky experience induces rage on a primal level. In trying to inject violence into three different genres in a game that was unlikely to get even one right, Aqua Teen Hunger Force earns its place in gaming hell.

MnMs Kart Racing showcases gaming’s Gluttony

There have been many attempts to cling to Mario Kart’s coattails, many of which are often aimed at kids who don’t know better than to pick up low-effort shovelware. There are an ungodly number of these games, but the cherry-picked sinner here has to be MnM Kart Racing.

The tracks are awful, blocky cut-and-paste jobs, and the gameplay is the polar opposite of Mario Kart’s slick, responsive joy. MnM Kart Racing is, perhaps, the most egregious example of attempting to leverage brand recognition by slapping some familiar images onto a bare bones karting skeleton. Why are the MnMs racing? How does confectionery even manage to operate a go-kart in the first place? Baffling. 

Bear with me, but Crash Tag Team Racing is full of Lust

Crash Tag Team Racing could easily have landed in another layer of hell, but for now, it suffers from its strange desire to couple karts. The clash mechanic allowed players to ram their karts into each other, forming a hybrid kart where one racer took the wheel and the other fired from a turret in the back. This not only trivialised races, but it also made them horrifically boring against the AI.

The single-player adventure mode wanted to be something else, requiring you to go through uninspired platforming levels before you’re even allowed to race. It’s clearly just in love with the Bandicoot more than is healthy. Until Crash Tag Team Racing cools down enough to be considered solely wrathful, it’s staying here.

Mario Kart Tour radiates with hubristic Pride

Nintendo’s pride brought about Mario Kart Tour, where it allowed the mustachioed plumber to demean himself for money on mobile platforms. It’s hard to call Mario Kart Tour a failure, but ‘good for a mobile game’ isn’t what gamers expect from the series.

Alongside slippery touch-screen controls and slimmed-down courses, Mario Kart Tour also suffered due to its ruthless approach to monetisation. Starting with only two playable characters, you had to use Tour’s gacha system to access more, including having to unlock playing as Mario in his own game. 

Mario Kart Tour didn’t even have an online multiplayer mode on launch, instead simulating an online lobby by just giving the names of other players to the AI racers. Mario Kart Tour stopped updating four years after it started, showing that even Mario can’t keep players plugging in money forever.

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