Review: Mario Kart Fan App
What It Is:
I want to begin by saying that I am a huge fan of Nintendo’s Mario Kart franchise. I didn’t play it until Mario Kart: Double Dash came out for the Gamecube, and when Mario Kart DS came out for the hand held, I was hooked. Even now I play at least a few times a week with my friends over wifi, and have been eagerly anticipating Mario Kart Wii. Mario Kart Wii was released earlier this week and I thought it would be neat to have an app review that corresponded. What I found was the Mario Kart Fan app developed by Mario Velasquez.
The Attempt:
The app provides many things, but the main feature, and the one that we are going to focus on is the flash game. The game is the main reason a person would want to install the app. What you would expect to be a Mario Kart port, or at the least a Mario Kart themed racer, is actually a, well, I don’t know what to call it.
What we’re looking at is a few background screens from Double Dragon for the NES stitched together to form an endless loop of the same back ground, if you watch, you can see the seam. The bad guys from Double Dragon have been mostly replaced with various Mario henchmen that walk from the right side of the screen to the left. These range from 8-bit goombas to 2.5D Diddy Kongs with Thwomps falling from the top of the screen. All of which appear to have been lifted out of Nintendo games. Your choice of protagonist is either Mario or Luigi in a small go-kart.
The controls use the arrow keys for movement and the “A” key as your only attack, a nitro boost that speeds you forward to ram enemies. And that’s the point, ramming enemies. There is no racing in this game, just gut splashing collisions. There are several abundant graphical glitches that are rather annoying. For one the thwomps that fall from the top of the screen can not be rammed through, which I get, but it’s nearly impossible to know how far above or below them you have to be to avoid them because the item collision sub-par and often you will clip through part of a thwomp one time and not another. In addition to the visable seams in the background that a mentioned earlier is the fact that when you are nitro boosting you can not see the only other enemy that can impede you, the spike shelled beetle things. The games end when you have taken enough damage to reduce your health bar to zero. There is a tiny box in the upper left corner of the play screen that displays how many enemies you have hit and missed, and your score. These numbers are so small that they are pretty unreadable.
There is more to this app than the game though. Accessing it through your left sidebar you can get to the forums and high scores if you manage to be able to read it. Now the next three almost could make the app worth getting and in my opinion should be the meat of the program. There is a button for photos and videos that stream for Mario Kart tags from Flikr and YouTube respectively. If you are into the franchise and like media on the subject, this is actually pretty cool. There is also a button to see other people running the app and leave them a message and a button to see a list of other apps. The whole app seems pretty ad intensive and I was not able to excess the game portion for the whole day yesterday.
The Wrap Up:
Here’s the thing, as a Mario Kart game the flash game fails to deliver in any way. It is obvious that Mario Velasquez has some kind of programing ability, but wasted it on a sub-standard attempt to get attention from a popular franchise. Instead of shoe-horning the idea to make Mario Kart even remotely involved, why not make an original game? The idea of the game is a good one, the execution of the game is not. Grab an artist friend if you can not make the background/sprites on your own, call it Crashman or something and give developing this app another shot. There may be a good idea in here for a social media sharing app, and maybe some energy towards that would be rewarded. All in all the game, as is, is not any fun and I recommend staying clear of it. If you insist on giving it a try, it can be obtained free of charge from Mario Kart Fan.
4/10 Some Wasted Good Ideas
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