Mario Kart 8 Deluxe - Thoughts

"Smooth"

That's the adjective that immediately comes to mind when I think of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Nintendo's most polished racer to date. Like a cool glass of water after a mile run, 8 Deluxe delivers a refreshing racing experience, finally finding the perfect balance between difficulty and fun. It not only builds off the solid foundation laid by the 3DS entry but tosses in new cars, racers, and bonus tracks, bundling the package together with some of the most gorgeous visuals and lively music the Wii U has to offer. 8 Deluxe buffs out almost every blemish in the series, creating a glittering crystal of pure, smooth karting.

While Mario Kart 8 brings a host of improvements worthy of merit—the live-studio retro remixes being among the best—the biggest one personally is the new ranking system. Back in the Wii and DS titles, there were a number of factors that could lead to a sub-optimal ranking, including but not limited to: time spent off course, shells blocked, obstacles hit, walls hit, pits fallen down, lap time, and number of drift boosts achieved. In 8, all of that is thrown in the rubbish bin for a pared down premise: simply place 1st in all four races. This keeps the single-player "endgame" more competitive than Super and 64 while avoiding the hair-pulling perfection required in Wii and DS, granting the best of both worlds. And considering that the trophies you earn in 150cc count for both 50cc & 100cc, it also skips the dull busywork of every game prior.

Of course, Mario Kart 8 remains "Mario Kart" at its core, so expect to wronged every now and then. Victories can (and will) be stolen by last-second blue shells just as often as opponents will attack you after you've already been hit, swiftly booting you from 1st to 9th. I think the item balance is better than its been (at least for the Wii U version), but chaos remains a large factor in determining outcomes—at least larger than I'd prefer. I also think the boomerang is an annoying item (it's useless when you have it and unavoidable when you don't) but it's thankfully counterbalanced by the super horn, a phenomenal new item that can reliably repel blue shells. Admittedly I didn't get to use it that frequently (I prevented a grand total of two blue shells) but I was always happy to see it pop out of the roulette.

If there is one thing to be disappointed by in Mario Kart 8, it's that the anti-gravity sections don't really add that much to the game. If anything, their constant bending and winding can blur details in the background, just as their twisting of the road obscures corners, thereby rendering them less impactful. This tends to make tracks feel less distinctive, despite their paradoxically stunning visuals and catchy music; it takes a while for me to recall which courses are in each of the cups, despite having played 8 longer than any other entry thus far.

Then again, I'm likely just grasping at faults for the sake of fairness, as Mario Kart 8 Deluxe delivers a bevy of fantastic new circuits. While there are a few that are groan-worthy (I'm looking at you, Dolphin Shoals and Baby Park), there's still plenty to look forward to. Sweet Sweet Canyon, Toad Harbor, Sunshine Airport, and Hyrule Circuit are all delights to race on, Ice Ice Outpost and Cheese Land have excellent (but risky!) shortcuts, and Mount Wario outshines 7's Rainbow Road as the best single lap track in the series. The retro track selection is no slouch either, especially since the SNES and GBA courses have received a much-needed, three-dimensional makeover. With a whopping 48 courses total, it's impossible not to discover a few new favorites.

By now if you haven't noticed, I've been using 8 and 8 Deluxe interchangeably, as I wound up playing (and three-starring!) both. I was initially curious if I could spot any changes between the versions, but after a while I found the game so relaxing and fun that I eagerly completed both. For the most part 8 Deluxe is the better of the two: it comes bundled with the DLC, has sharper graphics, a better battle mode, a new pink boost, a (presently active) online service, and it's more portable than its Wii U counterpart. Deluxe also brings back double item slots, but they're a double-edged sword: you have a better chance at getting an item to defend yourself, but the CPU will be tossing a lot more colored shells your way. Solely due to that I think I prefer the Wii U version more, but I can't deny that Deluxe is straight-up a better package.

Lastly 200cc is—hands-down—a brilliant addition. I was skeptical approaching its high-octane difficulty since I had heard that the game wasn't really designed around it, but what I love is that it transforms the circuits into the most dangerous part of the race. Tracks that were originally a snoozefest (Donut Plains 3, Animal Crossing, Special Cup's Rainbow Road) become brake-filled nightmares that can shorten your hard-earned lead in an instant. While it's vexing to constantly be flying off course and smashing into a wall—Bone Dry Dunes and Animal Crossing seriously require practice—it was great having a challenge independent of RNG; for once I found myself more afraid of hairpin corners than the whistle of a blue shell. Plus the CPU is poorly optimized for the breakneck speed, leading to a lot of hilarious moments where they overtake you just to zoom over the side of a cliff. I really can't suggest 200cc enough, especially if you've grown bored of conquering 150cc.

If you set aside nostalgia, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe emerges head and shoulders above its peers. It's gorgeous, easy to control, loaded with characters, karts, and tracks, and both the AI & item balance feel perfect. It took 12 years but at last Mario Kart has built a sturdy bridge between competitive and casual play, especially for single player; aiming for three stars is a serious challenge that's tense without being rigid, and light-hearted but not lackadaisical. If Mario Kart Wii left me feeling like I had choked down ice cream slathered in ketchup, 8 Deluxe was akin to feasting on an unlimited supply of buttery waffles and crispy fried chicken. It's not only the best Mario Kart, but possibly one of the best arcade racers ever made...

... so long as you can overlook the ever-awful blue shell.

BOXBOY! - Thoughts

BOXBOY! is a neat game that's tethered to some unfortunate... eccentricities. While suffering through the merciless Snakebird, I needed something to play before bed that could give my poor brain a pat on the back. I remember enjoying BOXBOY! back in 2015 yet had left it curiously unfinished, so I started a new save file and dove in. Sure enough, HAL's humble adventure worked well as the polar opposite to Snakebird: it was slow, mechanically diverse, and extremely easygoing—I can count the amount of times I was stumped on one hand. But it had one other quality, one that most other puzzle games try to avoid: BOXBOY! was fiddly.

In BOXBOY! you play as the eponymous boxboy, who extends boxes out of his body and can detach them at any point to form bridges and staircases. You might be fooled into thinking the game plays like a 1-D Sokoban clone, but there's a lot more to BOXBOY! than mere switch-pressing. There are conveyor belts, cranes, portals, circuits, gravity lifts, and lemming-like enemies that you must guide safely to a device (which happens to be a compactor that crushes them, ironically). Each mechanic has its own "world" devoted to it, gently introducing you to the gimmick one puzzle at a time. Only at the end of the game will they combine together to form more devious stages, the worst of which are entirely optional postgame content.

That means for the most part, BOXBOY! is a cakewalk. Occasionally you'll run into a stiff challenge that might seem physically impossible on first glance, but your options are always surprisingly limited due to the set number of box permutations you can produce. That means the solution is never far from hand, as reckless experimentation can often net you a lucky victory. BOXBOY!'s difficulty curve reinforces its laid-back nature too; expect less of an uphill climb and more of an EKG monitor, where any spike in difficulty is often followed by bafflingly simple stages you can puzzle out at a glance—even in the postgame levels. While I have no qualms against easy puzzle games (Hook and Zenge can be quite meditative), BOXBOY! treads a fine line between being clever and dull, with its easier stages often sliding into the latter.

One optional goal that adds a decent challenge to BOXBOY! is collecting crowns. Each level has one or two crowns that the player (usually) has to go out of their way to snag, with the catch being that you have a limited number of boxes to reach them under. That means that if you come to a spot where you need four boxes to reach the crown but only have three, you'll either have to puzzle out an alternate pathway or restart the stage with the aim of being more efficient with your box placement early on. While this sounds like an interesting limitation to play around, this is unfortunately the start of the dreaded fiddliness.

The first problem with this is simple: just where is the crown? A single stage will stretch across multiple screens with the crown often hovering near the end, but you won't know precisely where it is until you physically get there. That means that you won't know if you're using too many boxes until you reach the exact screen with the crown, and the only way to reset the limit is to restart the entire stage. And since you can be given you a limit of 30 boxes or more (one stage gives you 45!), you have no clue at all if you're being efficient with your boxes until it's often too late.

This might sound like an annoying problem for the game, but a good 80% of BOXBOY! is extremely generous with its box limit. Sometimes I would reach the crown with three boxes remaining, or six, or even double digits. Most of the time the limit adds no pressure, but that makes it far more noticeable when you run into a punishing level that's easy to solve but absolutely brutal with its box limit, requiring perfect play from start to finish. Like the difficulty curve, the box limit is unpredictable in that it occasionally spikes out of nowhere and then doesn't matter at all in the next level, giving some bizarre whiplash to an ostensibly quaint game.

Which brings me to the next fiddly issue, and arguably the bigger one: BOXBOY! is weirdly reliant on execution. Having a challenge about using as few boxes as you can sounds like a logistical conundrum, but you'll soon realize there's ways to bend and manipulate this limit. Boxboy can only jump one square high and two squares across—but you can actually make it three squares across if leap from the edge of a ledge. While occupying a one square wide platform you can't create boxes on the same ledge with you—but you can drop them next to you, effectively creating stairs and bridges where there shouldn't be. There are unlockable costumes later on that change the speed you move and height you jump at, further bending what's possible in both box limitations and puzzles. Lastly, and weirdest of all, is that boxes that extend out of boxboy don't count towards the box limit until you let go the Y-button, allowing you to interact with certain stage gimmicks without generating "real" boxes.

That last point—which I call "phantom boxes"—is a weird quirk among many that BOXBOY! expects you to understand and utilize by its end. Another that always bothered me is that boxboy is technically 1.5 squares tall because he possesses legs, meaning you can't enter into a 1-square high corridor—unless you use boxes to push yourself in there, at which point you can shimmy in and out. Another is how "snaking" works: at first it seems intuitive—it's kind of like a grappling hook where you pull yourself to the location of your final box—but like shimmying, it only works when you're stuck. That means if you want to get atop a high platform, you have to come up with a contrived way to get boxboy stuck so that the snaking prompt pops up. Note that none of these problems are game-breaking or too niche to comprehend; they're just unintuitive skills that feel like they follow arbitrary logic. They don't feel like new rules as much as they are bizarre edge cases that you're forced to learn—they're fiddly.

Nothing captures the problematic quirkiness of BOXBOY! better than an experience I had in one of the postgame levels: there's a group of spiked conveyor belts boxboy needs to ride to the exit, while also keeping a box above his head to block a laser on the ceiling. So I extend boxes out from boxboy's right side and curve them up around his head, creating a little dome where he can safely ride across the spikes to victory... except that since boxboy's legs dangle, they interact with the spikes and kill him! So you might assume I have to put a box below his feet to stop that, perhaps turning the dome onto its side... except that one time I was able to get across the spikes unharmed with the original configuration. Why did it fail five times in a row but work on the sixth? I don't know. And saying "I don't know why I won" is something you never want the player to admit in a puzzle game of all things.

It's so strange how BOXBOY! expects you to solve puzzles with a degree of platforming finesse—I mean, what was the last puzzle game you played that had unlockable time trails and marathon runs? Catherine? Portal? Yet if you play BOXBOY! that way, it begins to creak and jitter, too imprecise to be a platformer yet too demanding for a box-placement puzzler. I might just be overcritical; BOXBOY! remains plenty of fun, offering about thirty minutes of playtime per dollar spent on it. But I'd hesitate to call it a must-play, or even smart. It's cute—true—and occasionally clever, but it's just too frequently fiddly for my tastes.

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Images obtained from: wikipedia.org, theverge.com, modernwarfare7.com, nintendolife.com, nintendo-europe.com

Mario Kart Wii - Thoughts

If Mario Kart DS tested my patience, Mario Kart Wii almost snapped it in half like a twig. Wii takes the punishing ranking system from DS and mixes in more chaos, adding four additional racers and some annoying new items. Prepare to be bombarded by blue shells, lightning bolts, POW blocks, mega mushrooms, stars, and bullet bills—all of which can jump out at any moment and sabotage your lead, especially if you're hit mid-air. Although Mario Kart Wii looks like a lighthearted racer with a goofy control scheme, it hides a callous ranking system that's impossible to please.

Just so you know, I've had my fair share of doubts about aiming for three stars. Why intentionally frustrate myself over Mario Kart of all things, a series most folks would agree is more fun than balanced? Three-starring every cup is a meaningless, time-consuming accolade, akin to platinuming a mediocre RPG. Except instead of completing sidequests and exploring different classes, I'm running the same cup over and over until the planets align and I finally clinch a victory. Anyone that's played Mario Kart Wii knows just what I mean—blue shells will ruin races more often than not.

But without focusing on the star ranking, what else is there? The online for everything but 8 Deluxe is defunct, Mario Kart DS is the only entry with a mission mode, and neither battle mode nor time trials are my cup of tea. Netting a gold trophy in every cup has always been the traditional goal of Mario Kart... but that's hardly a challenge outside of SNES title. Even on 150cc/Mirror most of the cups are conquered on your first or second try; hell, it's mathematically possible to place 2nd in every race and still come out on top. That's why I thought it would be fun to get three stars for each game (sans the terrible Super Circuit), as it would familiarize me with the courses better than filling the digital trophy case would. And for the most part I'd say this endeavor has been an enjoyable experience... but that's largely because I'm thinking of my time with 7 and 8.

Without question, I found Mario Kart Wii to be the nadir of my three-star journey. It's a really cool, colorful, approachable game, but Mario Kart Wii has absolutely zero qualms with treating the player like garbage. The added racers and POW block crank the game's zaniness up way too high for its own good, transforming your suffering from "frustrating" into "nihilistically comical". My thoughts on the DS game were sprinkled with personal examples of misfortune, but there were too many for me to count for Wii; I think the worst example is when I took five blue shells in the final two laps of a circuit. On top of that I've been blue shelled before the finish line, sent helplessly careening into a pit, and walloped by consecutive red shells, each a dozen times—or more! At one point I got so thoroughly thrashed in a single lap that I felt as though I had achieved rage nirvana, stoically realizing there was nothing inside of me save for the solar-hot ire of contempt.

I suspect this blog post reads like an indictment of my own obsessive nature, so let me reiterate that Mario Kart Wii is still plenty of fun, especially if played casually. The tracks featured in both the nitro and retro cups range from decent to phenomenal, with the standouts being Toad's Factory, Coconut Mall, Grumble Volcano, and Moonview Highway; Wii's Special Cup is definitely one of the best cups in the entire series. Motorcycles are also an interesting addition, giving you the option to go faster on straightaways at the cost of control and balance, causing a single bump from another racer to fling you off course. This happens more often than it should due to the CPUs zipping all over the road (without a drop in speed, irritatingly) but I appreciate being able to do something on long stretches of empty road. Wheelies serve as a good compromise between the dynamism that coins provide and the high-stakes nature of classic drifting.

I want to like Mario Kart Wii more—I really do!—but when I think back to it I'm instantly caught up in the misery of the three-star swamp. It hit early on in 50cc too, where despite being twenty seconds faster than my closest competitor I was still receiving a humiliating two stars. Not even Mario Kart DS had the nerve to waylay me on the easiest setting! Because of this I likely learned Wii the best out of all the games, which isn't too bad since it has some of the best courses... but what stymied me the most were the boring and short tracks! Shell Cup in particular was a nasty experience, as the races are so brief that a single shell or slip-up can doom your run. Even when I won I didn't feel like it was due to smarter or snappier play as much as it was just dumb luck; escaping the CPU conga line of death always gave me the best shot at 1st place, a task that hinged entirely on early item RNG.

Between the Wii and DS titles, I'm not sure which I ultimately prefer. They both provide similar but asymmetrical experiences: DS has tougher CPUs that frequently boost ahead for no reason, but Wii arms them with stronger weapons (most of which rob you of your defensive item). Wii includes better retro tracks that gel nicely with the new aerial boosts, but it lacks the quirky mission mode from DS. DS has a player item tally on the bottom screen which lets you be on the lookout for blue shells, but Wii offers more methods to play. The Wii looks better but the DS is easily portable and can be played with friends that own the console, but not the game. I think personally what gives Wii the edge in the end is that it's simply easier on your thumb, introducing a boost system that's easy to comprehend and perform but no less engaging than the ol' left-right-left-right.

Look—I can handle being blindsided by a blue shell. I can endure several of them per cup! I readily tolerate lightning bolts killing my momentum, bananas lurking behind massive ink blotches, and untimely POW blocks hurtling me into the depths of Mushroom Gorge. My problem is that when I overcome these perilous trials, managing to recover from catastrophe after catastrophe, I'm rarely rewarded for the effort. Most of the time—despite finishing first in every race!—I walk away with one or two stars, which leaves me to pour over my failings, both real and imagined. Was I not fast enough? Bounced against one too many walls? Should I have waited for the red shell to hit me before going over that jump pad?

Mario Kart Wii and its nasty DS cousin care not for your excuses; you play by their rules, get judged by their metrics, and take a blue shell whenever they damn well want you to. It would be foolish to argue that they're not fun racers, but I find their ranking system to be rude, capricious, and indecipherable. It never tells you what you did wrong and blames you for mistakes beyond your control, forcing you to run clean races in a messy racing game. A good ranking system adds nuance to a victory; Mario Kart Wii makes you feel bad for winning.

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Images obtained from: wikimedia.org, gamefaqs.com, nintendolife.com, wired.com