re: Official Mario Kart 8 Thread: Tournaments WED/SAT/SUN

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1. Mario

I saw a therapist in college who once described love to me as “unconditional acceptance.” It was an inadequate but useful simplification. In the Nintendo realm, Mario is unconditional acceptance, defined by the things he won’t do: He’ll never judge you, and he’ll never get in your way.

Nintendo views play with an almost spiritual reverence. For the studio’s most influential designers—most notably Shigeru Miyamoto—play is a separate state of mind, one where your inhibitions fall away and leave you vulnerable to new experiences. So the real genius of Miyamoto et al lies not just in their ability to create fantastical worlds but also in getting players to lower their guards in the first place.

Mario disarms players by detaching the consequences of failure from judgment. When you screw up in the real world, it tends to reflect on you (fairly or not). But you can fail a thousand times in a Mario game, and the hero won’t scold you. Your missteps still have consequences—you lose a life, you go back to the start, etc.—but those penalties are meted out by processes that Mario doesn’t care about or understand. Mario’s presence gives you tacit permission to mess up without the fear that your failure will somehow diminish yourself.

One of my favorite details of Super Mario 3D Land is the game-over screen, which depicts your characters keeled over from exhaustion until you choose to continue, at which point they spring up and run back into action as if nothing has happened. This blithe spirit has been at the core of the Nintendo aesthetic for decades—look at the pose Mario strikes when you’re killed in the original Super Mario Bros.: He throws up his hands in an exaggerated shrug as he falls off the screen into oblivion. Before his body even hits the ground, he’s letting you know that everything’s okay.

In Mario Kart 8—yes, I do remember which game we’re supposedly talking about here—Mario is average. It has always been thus in every Mario game with an ensemble cast. Mario is never extraordinary in any respect, but more importantly, he’s never deficient either. If you’re a novice player who wants to get a feel for Mario Kart 8, you choose Mario, because he’s not going to get in your way. He’s a conduit to the fundamental ideas of the game’s design.

Most of the other characters come with trade-offs. The kiddie characters are easy to maneuver, but they have a low top speed. Bowser can haul arse, but he handles his vehicle with as much grace you’d expect from a steroid-addled turtle-dinosaur riding a child’s go-kart. You have to decide if those imbalances are worth it for your style. Mario requires no such calculation—he offers every aspect of a Mario Kart character in moderation. He’s the North Star of the bunch, and everyone else is defined in terms of how far they fall from him in the Kart cast firmament.

About the only knock I can make on Mario is the way he shouts the name of the game when the title screen appears. Charles Martinet’s voice performance of the Nintendo mascot is fine for incidental yips and yaps, but beyond that it can get pretty patchy. Mario’s announcement of the title sounds like it came after he had been tortured for hours by Koopa Black Forces who demanded to know the name of the next Mario Kart game. As the electrified nipple clamps are applied one more time, Mario finally screeches, “Mario Kart… Eiiiiiight!”

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