Let’s Play Mario Kart 64! I just noticed I went from my first SNES game to my first N64 game the very next week. Mario Kart 64 is easily one of the best multiplayer games of all time. I don’t care what year it is whether it’s 1996/97 when it came out or it’s hundreds of years into the future and we’re all wearing silver suits and eating moon pies (what a time to be alive), if you have three friends in the same room then this will always be a party starter.
Let’s Play Mario Kart 64:
The original Mario Kart for the SNES is still considered a classic even though it looked blurry as hell and was virtually unplayable, but Mario Kart 64 was a complete makeover. The gameplay is tight, powersliding is fun as hell, the music is catchy and reflective of whichever course you’re driving, and there was plenty of replayability between the various cups and different difficulty levels/CCs.
But again the real value of the game was in multiplayer. You could just straight up race with up to 4 player, two players could do the cup together, or you could do my personal favorite of battle mode (used to love selecting and deselecting battle when playing with friends just to hear Mario repeat “battle” with whatever accent that was over and over and over, annoying them to no end) where you had to use projectiles or just the thrust of your kart into someone to make them lose a balloon.
I haven’t played it in years, the last time being when I was living in NYC and it was a friend of mine’s last night in town, so we drank heavily and played dozens of games of Mario Kart 64. Don’t drink while playing this game, or if you do then don’t set the rules to take a shot after every win in battle mode (the idea being that it levels out the playing field), I can’t remember many instances of being sicker from the drink than that night, heh.
This was still in the heart of my Nintendo obsession. I subscribed to Nintendo Power and even entered their Mario Kart 64 challenge as I salivated over one of the top prizes, a gold painted N64 controller. The contest was basically to get a sub 2 minutes 30 seconds time or something like that on Mario’s course. It wasn’t fastest time, you just had to beat the time they picked, take a photo of your screen which in those days meant a Polaroid, and send it in to NP to be entered. Anyway, I’ve got my gold controller at home, and even got a 5 minute Mario Kart 64 themed phone card which I never used (what the hell is a kid supposed to do with that, anyway?).