1. Real-life Mario Kart on the streets of Tokyo sounds really annoying

    Posted December 14, 2017 in comment, Uncategorized  |  No Comments so far

    I’m a huge fan of Mario Kart and have been since its first incarnation on the SNES back in 1992. In fact it’s fair to say that Mario Kart was a major obsession throughout much of the 1990s.

    I wasn’t ready to move on to the N64’s expanded vision of the Mario Kart universe — to me, it was like trying to breathe life into the game of chess by introducing an array of gimmicky new pieces or growing the board to a 12×12 square — but by the time Mario Kart DS came out I was back on board.

    Despite being such a big Mario Kart fan, though, I found myself cringing when I learnt that foreign tourists cruise the streets of Tokyo attempting to have a “real life Mario Kart” experience:

    real-life-mario-kart

    It’s one of Japan’s hottest attractions amid a tourism boom—to the frustration of some locals… Indeed, it’s all fun and games until a tourist drives her go-kart onto the sidewalk and crashes into a police station. Or until another one manages to hit a parked car. The Times reported in May that in the span of two months, Tokyo police have recorded a dozen such incidents, 10 of which involved foreign tourists and none of which involved any fatalities.

    I can only imagine how annoying it must be to be trying to get around Tokyo and then come across a mob of tourists bumbling and bumping along the road in bootleg “MariCart” go-karts, dressed as Nintendo characters. Probably even more annoying than the shrieking pedal buses that crawl around here in London sometimes: at least there’s only one pedal bus to deal with instead of ten of them veering all over the place, and I’ve yet to see anybody on one of those things throwing banana skins on to the road.

    And besides, I can’t help thinking that these tourists, as well as being annoying, are missing the point of Mario Kart altogether. If you believe that trundling along in a glorified golf buggy is in any way a replication of the Mario Kart experience, then I’m sorry to say that you don’t understand Mario Kart, and don’t know what it feels like to play it properly. Sorry if that sounds harsh but there you go.

    Thankfully, Nintendo has sued MariCart for copyright infringement and is in the process of building its own real-life Mario Kart experience in its forthcoming Super Nintendo World theme park. That’s something I wouldn’t mind having a go on.