Reviewed on SNES.

One of my childhood regrets was not owning a Super Nintendo. I personally owned a Sega Genesis, so any of the Super Nintendo games, I was only able to play at my cousin's house, whether it be the weekend, or holidays, or summertime when school was off for two months. Aside from that, I only started to truly enjoy a lot of the Super Nintendo games in college, or actually now with my Raspberry PI 3 that I have hooked up. I had a ton of fun with Sega Genesis games, but at that age, no way would I be able to convince my parents to buy both.

During the times I went over to my cousin's house, this was our number one game that we played. Everything about Super Mario Kart is just so good for its time. It was challenging enough but still manageable. The stages are awesome, special abilities, you name it. Even finding ways to get ahead of the track, just to defeat the CPU, and most importantly, defeat each other, it was always full of fun.

Personally, I was always a Koopa Troopa fan. Every character has their own strengths and weaknesses and he was the perfect fit for me and even till today when I re-play this game. It's a hidden stats that aren't visible to the player which is unfortunate as future games do add this in but everything about Koopa Troopa just felt right. Smooth controls, very good acceleration, turning, it felt like you had full control of the d-pad as you used Koopa Troopa.

It was always unfair that the CPU gets special abilities whereas you don't but it was the only way they programmed it at the time to give you a challenge. Looking back, it is a bit of a letdown that the race order generally is the same when it comes to which player is first to last from a CPU perspective. Sure you can wait until the very end and use a red shell or green shell, but that's about it. The CPU generally falls a similar pattern or order rather and it's up to you as the player to see if you can defeat them or not.

Aside from the racing, the battle mode kept us busy for many days as it was just so fun, especially throwing green shells and letting them bounce. It was the good old days of seeing each other since it was only local play, but even still it was so fun and that's what I enjoyed about the older games. Local multiplayer. The feeling of being together and playing a game together, is much more exciting than playing online, even with a camera, microphone, etc. That atmosphere, sharing snacks, ordering pizza, and playing games like this, truly makes memories like Super Mario Kart special.