Long before Mario Kart World was announced, I theorized what Nintendo’s next spin on the franchise would be. Mario Kart 8 introduced anti-gravity, and Mario Kart 7 brought us hang gliders, so I was curious what angles were left to explore that would keep the core kart racing experience intact. As we know now, that turned out to be one giant interconnected map that players are free to explore with no boundaries or time limits.
As interesting as that idea was on paper, I remained a little skeptical due to the lack of details Nintendo gave about what exactly I would be doing in this world. The last trailers showed off a few challenges and collectibles, but I wasn’t convinced that was enough to justify the new open-world design. My first week with the game only reinforced that feeling. However, I realized my own expectations were at fault — not the game — and have come to appreciate Mario Kart World‘s world for what it is.
Modern open-world games have trained me to expect a million things to do and some little reward hidden under every rock. Even though most of it amounts to busywork that may actually hurt the overall experience (and is a big reason why I have been training myself to be less of a completionist), it feels like a disappointment when a game like Mario Kart World launches with a world that is almost completely empty.
It isn’t fair to compare them, but I can’t deny that Zelda’s masterful take on open-world design didn’t influence my expectations as well. Nintendo typically isn’t a developer that does things in half measures. We have plenty of examples of franchises it is willing to leave dormant until it comes up with a way to evolve it. If it was going to transition Mario Kart World into a fully open-world game, it must have something there to justify it, right?
I wanted to believe that Mario Kart World‘s world would be something it wasn’t, which set me up for disappointment when I finally took my kart off-road to explore. Despite being told what to expect in all the footage and previews, I was still deflated to find only scattered challenges and some basic collectibles around the world that gave me lackluster rewards. After an hour or so puttering around, I abandoned the mode for the much more interesting Knockout Tour.
A few days later I found myself reminiscing about older Mario Kart games and dusted off a fragment of a memory from decades ago. I never owned Mario Kart 64 but have a distinct memory of playing it at a friend’s house. We were playing on Royal Raceway and noticed that one part of the track had us driving by Peach’s Castle. The next lap, I broke off the main road and realized I could approach and explore the grounds around the castle just like in Mario 64. There’s no way to get inside the castle (trust me, I tried), or anything to do at all here, but it still felt like I had discovered something special — like I found something the developers didn’t expect me to.
That memory made something click when I returned to Mario Kart World. Instead of treating the open-world as a delivery method for tasks and rewards, I started viewing it as a space for exploring. I started to find its laid-back approach to activities refreshing in an era where games constantly bombard me with checklists and dopamine loops. Instead of expecting some unlockable or collectible at the top of a hill and feeling like I wasted my time when there wasn’t, I let myself appreciate the sense of discovery I was afforded. It brings me back to that time when I believed that if I could just get beyond that wall or over that cliff in a video game, there would be an entire world beyond waiting to be explored.
I can understand why many may be disappointed with Mario Kart World‘s world — I certainly was. Once I started looking for intrinsic rewards rather than extrinsic, the very act of exploring became my motivation to drive up that mountain or across that body of water. I still don’t see myself spending hours here now that I’ve been almost everywhere I felt compelled to explore, but just shifting my expectations allowed me to enjoy exploring for its own sake.
Mario Kart World is out now on Nintendo Switch 2.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.