There are as many arguments about which the best Mario Kart entry is as there are laps of Baby Park in your average grand prix. Which is to say: too many. The same goes for other popular series. Pokemon. Smash Bros. And the answer is nearly always the same: the first one you played.
My first Pokemon game was Silver. My favourite? SoulSilver. My first Smash? Melee. My favourite? You guessed it – SoulMelee. But Mario Kart bucks the trend, for me at least. The first time I ever set my tyres down on the track of Mario Circuit was Mario Kart DS. I had a lot of fun with it, and spent countless hours playing with friends, mastering every track forwards, backwards, and any other which way that took my fancy.
This was followed by Mario Kart Wii, which had the great gimmick of utilising the Wii remote as a steering wheel but otherwise did little to invigorate me further. I love Coconut Mall as much as the next person, but Mario Kart Wii always felt like driving up the down escalator.
And then I played Mario Kart 8. It was a strong entry at launch, offering a great selection of tracks both new and old as well as the smoothest karting gameplay to date. The absence of Funky Kong is almost unforgivable, but Nintendo soon rectified that. Nintendo kept updating Mario Kart 8 with more tracks, more characters, more stuff until it was unequivocally the best Mario Kart game ever produced. The final product is astonishing in size and scope, and we could play that for decades without needing another entry or any more DLC.
The same goes for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is clearly the best Mario Kart game, and anyone who tells you otherwise needs to remove their nostalgia goggles before uttering another word. But it’s not my favourite Mario Kart game.
Mario Kart: Double Dash Hits Different
Somewhere in the period post-Wii but pre-Switch (was there a Nintendo console then? Who’s to say?), I went to university. Here, I picked up a GameCube with my housemates and we made our way through a backlog of classics. Ocarina of Time, The Wind Waker, and Majora’s Mask were first up. We played some Metroid and helped rid Luigi’s Mansion of its pesky ghost problem. But mostly we played Smash Bros. Melee and Mario Kart: Double Dash.
I could recite a dissertation of fond memories from this too-short year of gaming in our shared basement. Yes, the landlord had converted the living room into another bedroom, the kitchen into a bathroom, and the bathroom into, you guessed it, another bedroom so our living and cooking quarters were subterranean. Not ideal if you were keen on seeing the sunshine, but perfect for long gaming days and post-night out Smash seshes. Wait…
Double Dash was our bread and butter. Mario Kart is a game anyone can pick up and have fun with, no matter how strange the controller is. But Double Dash adds so much to the action. The second character, the second item, the animations of having your tag team of driver and thrower. It’s like racing a Warthog in Halo, only the machine gun fires green shells and is manned by a sapient mushroom.
A Mario Kart: Double Dash Sequel Would Be Perfect For The Nintendo Switch 2
Double Dash is the game with that nostalgia factor for me, even more than my first Mario Kart. That’s why I love it dearly. But it’s also perfect for the Switch 2.
Firstly, you’ve got the naming convention. We don’t know if the Switch successor will actually be called the Switch 2 yet (in all likelihood it won’t), but there are thematic parallels between game and console. A sequel and a sequel. Double Dash on the Nintendo Switch Double, perhaps? Switching between your two characters could form some kind of console-name pun a lá 1-2 Switch. Mario Kart: Double Dash 2: Switch ‘Em Up, anyone?
Okay, I’m stretching there. But how do you follow up Mario Kart 8 Deluxe? Mario Kart 9 wouldn’t work, how do you better perfection? So you have to make the follow-up unique. Adding a gimmick, such as a second driver, is perfect for that. You get an exciting development to call players over from Mario Kart 8, and you get that blast of nostalgia for anyone who had a GameCube. Double Dash is the perfect answer.
The same goes for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.
I also think that the double rider idea offers so much room for creative iteration that Nintendo can eschew all of our expectations with a sequel. Multiplayer will definitely be a strong component of the game, so let’s look there first. Players controlling each character on a kart is a no-brainer to take from the original; one driving, one shooting shells. But could Nintendo change that up for a modern audience? Could the double-driver gimmick offer more opportunities for a Zelda-esque reinvention of the series?
We could have a host of new power-ups for new character combinations. We ended Mario Kart 8 Deluxe with 42 characters, so achieving the same roster in 2 Double 2 Dash would offer 861 unique combinations of characters. Maybe that’s too much work to come up with nearly 1,000 individual power-ups for one game, but I really want to see what happens if Isabelle and Dry Bowser team up.
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe didn’t reinvent the wheel, it perfected it. But when you’ve got a perfect circle with exemplary traction and pristine hubcaps, don’t you get an urge to mess it all up? Make it a hexagon, give it a rainbow sheen. Or add another driver. Let chaos ensue.
Next
The Switch 2 Needs A Completely Different Strategy From The Switch
The failure of the Wii U set the Switch up for massive success. The Switch 2 can’t run that playbook.