After spending a bunch of time thinking about not having any ACTUAL Switch 2 games and having a weird experience trying to both play the upgraded Breath of the Wild on the Switch 2 while using my brand new 4K TV for the first time, I decided to cut to the heart of the matter and just buy Mario Kart World. For a decent part of my youth, I was a big fan of Mario Kart games. I played tons of Mario Kart 64 and Mario Kart Double-Dash, but I never really got into any of the games past that. I’ve played a few of them and might even own one or two more (I genuinely don’t remember), but most of the magic faded after the those two games. Once they started adding performance variability based on character mass and kart size and wheels and stuff like gliding and wall riding and all that, I just stopped feeling as invested in the game. They became just one more series of games that came out with incremental changes, slightly new features, and a whole load of new mechanics for me to learn. All of which is kind of antithetical to easy multiplayer games or party gaming, which was how I’d been playing all Mario Kart games since I started high school. They weren’t bad, ever, but they just didn’t feel like the experience I’d grown to know and love as a kid. They were closer to other racing games instead, all of them with an optimal strategy for winning based on the mechanics of the game (even if those mechanics could still be upset by the random items you’d get). The looseness and goofiness of my childhood experiences was gone, as was the days of firmly believing that green characters were faster and that yoshi had a slight advantage because of how far forward his face went.