But after about an hour or so of power-sliding my two-dimensional kart around Donut Plains, Ghost Valley, and the seizure-inducing Rainbow Road, I picked up on another difference--one that wasn't initially apparent to me until after years of playing modern-day racing games.
Super Mario Kart was incredibly difficult.
I'm not talking about the 'fake difficulty' that comes from graphics or physics glitches. The game itself punished mistakes and lack of car control quite severely. Steer too hard into a corner, and you'll watch yourself go spinning into the wall. Forget to use your brakes, and you'll scrub off too much speed through a turn and get overtaken by three or four AI racers. Overreact to an item and swerve off-road, and you'll lose a ton of time. Bash others around, and you'll lose your coins and in turn the elusive top speed that keeps you in the hunt for the win.
The karts were fast and out-of-control, the items were basic no-nonsense weapons, and the tracks were narrow, precarious, and punishing. Fast-forward to today's Mario Kart Wii, and instead we have wide-open tracks, slow and easy-to-control vehicles, and computer-controlled gimmicks like stunt-turbos, Blue Shells, and Bullet Bills (autopilot catch-up for those behind the leaders) to spice up the racing.
I think you can tell where I'm going with this.
Super Mario Kart came out in the early 90's. At that time in sportscar racing, the incredibly-powerful Group C monsters were still running at Le Mans, and F1 was in the midst of the Senna/Prost rivalry coming off the back of the turbo era (Ayrton Senna is actually mentioned in the game's instruction booklet). The cars were fast, the rules were a little more relaxed, tracks were loaded with gravel/grass run-offs that punished mistakes, and the cars had more power than was probably suitable for them.
Mario Kart Wii came out in the late 2000's. Around the same time, we have increasingly tight power regulations in sportscar racing, and the implementation of KERS, DRS, and artificially-degrading tyres in Formula One to make the racing 'more interesting'. The races take place on wide tracks with plenty of asphalt run-off, the cars are essentially glued to the road, and contact of almost any kind is often punished.
Isn't it funny how arcade-style racers--more so than sim racers, in my opinion--give us a hauntingly accurate-yet-unintentional picture of how racing has changed over the past few decades?
Back in the day, even arcade racers reflected the demanding nature of motor racing--you had to put in some effort to keep the car on the road, let alone win, and the pace of the vehicles and nature of the tracks were fast and difficult, respectively. Nowadays, in favour of this, we've moved to slower vehicles, wider tracks, and arguably artificial gimmicks to improve the racing.
If you're an avid player of racing games in general, as I am, I would suggest to you, as an interesting waste of time, to look at the sort of racing games that have been released to the market over the past twenty years. The entries in the Mario Kart franchise alone provide an interesting slideshow of how racing has changed. Somewhere along the line, the qualities of 'fast', 'unpredictable', and 'difficult' were eventually phased out, in favour of 'slower', 'controlled', and 'forgiving'.
In a way, this saddens me. I remember when arcade racers served as that sort of surrealist escape into a world where the consequences of the dangers found in real racing didn't exist. The high speeds, the sharp turns, and the inevitable wrecks were all okay, because the only thing they hurt when things went wrong was the player's ego. Now, even this fantasy playground is disappearing--if you want the high-octane, out-of-control excitement of days gone by, you can't even find it in most arcade racers produced these days, with only a few exceptions.
The point of this rather long-winded post is quite simple: has the safety/entertainment crusade in the racing world actually become so vigorous that it has managed to alter even the layman's perception of racing by manifesting itself in games targeted at casual audiences? Is the invasion of this mentality into arcade racers a sign that we've forgotten what it means to push the limits of willpower and technology in machines built on the cutting edge of what we're capable of--that we've forgotten why this whole racing thing started in the first place? What does all this mean for the longevity of motor racing itself?
I'd love to find out if anyone other than me has ever noticed this before, and to hear everyone else's opinions. Thanks for reading, if you have.
) dinosaurs this goes back to the late seventies!! One particular game mentioned is called night driver. This game was ab-solutely nails! The easiest setting lasted for 50 seconds and it would take literally weeks of diligent practice to last 50 seconds!!
