Mario Kart 8 Review

Mario Kart 8 is the point where the series stopped iterating and started showing off. Anti-gravity sections let tracks fold over themselves into loops and walls, which sounds like a gimmick until you notice it also removes the dead time from a lap, because bumping a rival on a vertical stretch now hands you a boost instead of a spin. Handling is the tightest the series has managed, with drifting that rewards commitment and a fire hopping technique the community found and Nintendo eventually patched out.

It runs at sixty frames in high definition with a lighting model and an anti-aliasing pass that made the Wii U look better than it had any right to, and Mount Wario remains the best single track Nintendo has designed. The problems are structural rather than mechanical: battle mode shipped gutted, without proper arenas, and blue shells still decide races you deserved to win. On a console almost nobody owned, this was the one everybody agreed was worth it.