198 words about Mario Kart World

Discourse-impervious, Mario Kart World (anecdotally) enraptures a room of people of mixed age, background, and interest level like no videogame since Wii Sports, straight up. It’s a pleasure machine, the sort of product you can design when your previous iteration held up for a decade of abuse, 80 million times over. More than most videogames, I think its appeal is visual: a case of artifice, of curvilinear vaults into cotton-candy skies and soaring backflips off a cartoon canyon into rush-hour traffic. Like recent Monster Hunter games, it delights in a sacrilegious automation — streamlined, sinuous, it plays itself — while the animations grow more preposterously and generously interactive. The car squishes, the marshmallow cow wahoo!s, the wheels flip out, the turtles hoot, you nudge a joystick and confetti pops into your face, smelling of vanilla. Nowhere is this clearer than in the brief passages when the road dips into water and your car turns into a jetski and some of the best waves I’ve ever seen deform the landscape into a serious of tactile, ever-rising ramps. Nintendo has a history of designing generational games in parallel; we have not seen the last of these waves.