MARIO KART SUPER CIRCUIT

MARIO KART: SUPER CIRCUIT is the black sheep of the family, the first handheld entry that everyone kinda forgets that exists until someone brings it up in a worst MARIO KART game debate but honestly, it's better than its reputation suggests. You've got 40 tracks, which is insane for a racing game on the GBA, 20 brand new courses and the entire course roster from SUPER MARIO KART hidden away as unlockables. That's a lotta content, even if some of those old tracks haven't aged like fine wine.

Let's get straight to the elephant out of the room: the controls are horrible, the karts slip and slide everywhere and drifting takes some serious getting used to. At first, you'll hate it, you'll crash into walls, spin out on bananas you swore you dodged and wonder why anyone thought this was okay, but here's the thing, once it clicks, it feels pretty rewarding. You learn to feather the gas, tap the brakes on sharp turns and suddenly you're pulling off drifts like a pro. The game demands precision and that's refreshing compared to later entries where you can kinda just wing it, the item balance leans old school too. Coins are back, which means you're not just racing opponents but also scrounging for them. Blue shells exist but they're rare, so you won't get constantly screwed over like in modern games.

Graphically, the sprite work is hella charming with colorful karts and characters that pop against the backgrounds, the sense of speed is decent and the track designs are genuinely clever: Ribbon Road, Sky Garden, Cheese Land and Sunset Wilds ooze personality. The music absolutely slaps too, that soundchip produces catchy upbeat bangers that'll get stuck in your head. Shy Guy Beach's bossanova vibe and Rainbow Road's epic synth melody are standout highlights.

The AI is still tough but not a ridiculous rubberbanding like in MK64 or the SNES game, they'll respect your lead if you drive clean. Unlocking the SNES tracks requires getting 100 coins and a gold trophy in each cup, which is a grind but gives you something to chase. Battle mode exists but since we can't replicate GBA multiplayer on 3DS, you'll be ignoring it.

Also, I patched in some cool stuff that completely changes the experience. First off, there's a music restoration mod that digs into the game's sound engine and kicks the mix rate up to 22khz, meaning it already makes those bangers sound cleaner with the mix rate plus a 60 FPS track rendering code. Yeah, you read that right, another patch that locks the game at 60 FPS. The game was already updating the scaling parameters at that rate but the code only read them at 30 FPS, so now everything feels more smooth.

Then there's a Better Colors mod that overhauls the character sprites, the dude manually edited palettes while staring at an original GBA screen in direct sunlight to match the art style perfectly. And speaking of editing graphics, someone restored the original Sunset Wilds title card and sprites, so those Shy Guys rock their war bonnets again like in the original version.

Then there's the No Bumpy Ice patch which just removes the shake by swapping the terrain type to Sunset Wilds' slippery ground, but the absolute game changer for me tho it's the localized voices patch that swaps in Charles Martinet's Luigi and Wario, Leslie Swan's Peach and Isaac Marshall's Toad to match the MARIO KART 64 voices, even the announcer's congratulations becomes Charles as Mario. Some clips got trimmed or sped up to fit but who cares? It sounds right. With all these fixes, SUPER CIRCUIT turns into something way more digestible. You're welcome.

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And yeah, SUPER CIRCUIT isn't the best MARIO KART, that's not even a debate, but it's not that bad either. It takes the same foundation of SUPER MARIO KART, polishes it where it counts and crams it into a new game. Yeah, the slippery controls will frustrate you and some obstacles are straight up mean, yet underneath all that jank is solid racer with some killer tracks and creative courses. If you're willing to adapt and meet it on its own terms, you'll have a really good time.