Handhelds and racing games. They're a pretty good combination. I'd certainly not shudder at the thought of playing one, and when the one you need to play is Mario Kart: Super Circuit, and the handheld is the Game Boy Advance, you can expect to have yourself a pretty darn good time.
Merging elements of Super Mario Kart and Mario Kart 64 together, Super Circuit is more of the same game that you know and love, squashed into a handheld that you were probably taking everywhere. How does it stack up to those two earlier games?
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| Peach, are you... are you alright to drive? |
Fun Times
You will find yourselves at home within seconds if you're at all familiar with Mario Kart games. Races, Time Trials, speed classes, character selection... there's nothing new and revolutionary here, allowing you to just get on with the racing.
I hop into a 50cc Cup to get my bearings, having not played this game at all, and find it to be as it has been described: a mix of Super Mario Kart and Mario Kart 64. The tracks are all Mode 7-esque flat affairs, like Super Mario Kart, and the characters are all sprite-y versions of models that look like they've been plucked from Mario Kart 64.
The game plays identically to the earlier titles. Power-ups can be offensive or defensive in nature, mainly depending on what the game things you need in your current situation, and tracks include speed pads, jumps, and stage hazards to slow you down at the worst moment. Going off-road is like sliding into glue, so don't do that if you can help it.
The Cups have you race for points, with the faster players scoring more of them. End the Cup with the most points to win. You know this. I don't know why I'm going over it again.
Frustrations
With it being so similar to that which has come before it, any irks you may have had are likely found here too. I'm not too sure on the rubberbanding, but the same characters are always found at the top of the table, race after race, which makes each track a tale of two races, in a sense, those that can drive and those that can't.
A minor niggle, to be sure, but it feels programmed, as though Wario and Toad can never, ever win, despite this being Mario Kart, where chaos is its middle name, and all sorts of nonsense can happen.
Some races feel like a formality, as you coast to victory in a couple of minutes at most, but others are, thankfully, more of a challenge, owing to track layout or obstacles or whathaveyou.
In the end, my warm-up Cup was nothing to write home about, but I learned a little of the game. The mechanics are the same, the tactics too, the controls are simple, I just need to get my timings right with sliding around the corners and hopping out of danger.
Instead of grinding through the stages to slowly work my way through Super Circuit, I dove right into a 150cc Star Cup. What's the worst that could happen?
Well, I think I need a bit more practice before trying that again...
Final Word
If you want a kart racing fix on the Game Boy Advance, Super Circuit ticks all the boxes. It does nothing wrong because it doesn't try to do anything drastically different. It plays it safe and gives you a game that is well worth spending your time with, as a single player or against friends.
I prefer the look of Super Mario Kart to the point where I don't like the look of the characters in this game, but the merging of graphic styles isn't terribly jarring or anything like that. Everything still looks a little garbage at a distance, because it's a teeny tiny portable game with a limited number of pixels to play with, but it doesn't look awful by any stretch of the imagination. Super Circuit is a safe racing game.
But that's it. Why must I play this one? What makes it stand out? That it combines two previous games into one? That it was a popular series? That it was a top seller for the Game Boy Advance? It was a Mario game on a Mario platform, of course it was going to sell.
I'm not trying to put you off playing Mario Kart: Super Circuit at all, I'm just wondering why it's a must play game, and I think I might be wondering that for a while.
Fun Facts
Multiplayer modes didn't require each player to have a copy of the game, though it would be a watered down offering unless you did all buy in.
Mario Kart: Super Circuit, developed by Intelligent Systems, first released in 2001.
Version played: Game Boy Advance, 2001, via emulation.