Mario Kart Arcade GP DX (Arcade)
While the Mario Kart series has continued reliably on Nintendo consoles ever since it kicked off with Super Mario Kart, an odd splinter franchise has existed within it over in the arcades. The Mario Kart Arcade GP games are created by Bandai Namco with the Mario Kart license, the Nintendo teams responsible for the regular franchises not involved in how it is produced. While these arcade-only titles don’t stray from the basics much, the inclusion of Namco characters, unique items, and a different track design ethos has certainly set them apart, and after two GP titles, Mario Kart Arcade GP DX was released, retooling old tracks and including extra content released in online updates in what was perhaps meant to be the final form of this branch of the wildly popular kart racing series.
Depending on how many arcade cabinets are connected at a specific arcade, Mario Kart Arcade GP DX is a kart racing game that can be played by up to four players simultaneously, computer controlled opponents only appearing in tournament races. Races are a straightforward effort to finish first, although based on which of the 12 courses you are playing the amount of laps will vary and some levels don’t even have a circuit shape, instead relying on end of track teleportation to get you back to the starting line to kick off a new lap. The arcade cabinet features a steering wheel, gas pedal, brake pedal, and two special buttons, one utilized for confirming menu selections and deploying items to impact other players during the race while the button with the Mario symbol on it provides an alternative to using the brake pedal for drifting. The cabinet may also have a camera active to take photos of the player’s face that will appear in place of their racer’s for certain indicators and even item effects. Mostly the driving is pretty straightforward and responsive and it’s not hard to get a feel for drifting after experimenting with it for a bit, although how good your individual character and their kart options are vary so your speed, acceleration, and how well you can take turns will vary.
The cast of Mario Kart Arcade GP DX isn’t consistent across regions, mainly because Japan received far more content and updates for a version of Mario Kart Arcade GP DX that played into a special Banapassport system where players could level up and acquire new unlockables tied to a physical card. However, the final U.S. update at least ensured many Mario Kart classics are present, heroes and villains from the Super Mario series present with some decent design variety like the schemer Wario, the adorable dinosaur Yoshi, and a pair of baby versions of Mario and Princess Peach who are also playable themselves. Most of the expected racers from the series are present plus a few extras like the main villain Bowser’s son Bowser Jr. also along for the competition, but Namco’s Pac-Man is selectable as well as is the living drum Don-Chan from Namco’s Taiko no Tatsujin drum games. The base stats of these racers does certainly impact the race, but while you can pick whoever you please from the cast, in multiplayer your cart is completely randomized, usually providing some sort of boost to a stat or two that you can’t anticipate. It seems to add in a bit of a random element as a few things are taken out of the player’s hands in terms of selection, although while the karts are only minor boosts to your capabilities, the way the game handles items is a lot odder.
On every track in Mario Kart Arcade GP DX you’ll spot clusters of colorful hexagons with question marks on them. These provide items when you pass through them, characters able to hold one item at a time and use them at their discretion. However, rather than every racer pulling from the same set of items, before a multiplayer race you will have three items chosen for you randomly. One of these will be an item you are able to throw forward, another will be an item that will be placed behind your kart when activated, and the third is a bit of a grab bag of ideas but with quite a few representing the idea of briefly altering your own or another racer’s abilities. The items you throw forward are the more straightforward options, these typically offensive items like green shells that will bounce off walls, wash tubs that will flatten foes from above if they hit, or clouds with different elements like rain or snow that impede how well the opposing racer drives. Admittedly quite a few of these items are small variations like the player potentially getting a set of three green shells or getting black shells that don’t bounce and just explode on impact, an ethos carried over to the items you throw behind you like the bananas that other karts can slip on that come in variants like a giant banana or golden bananas. Admittedly, a lot of items have conceptual overlap, tacks on the track still something that make driving a little harder in a slightly different manner than how inflicting square tires on another kart will, and since the game has around 100 item variants there’s likely going to be plenty of work learning what an item does. It’s hard for some to intuit as well, Magical Ball over in the special item class for example a smirking orb with no clear purpose until you try it out, but some items can have rather underwhelming effects as well. Seeing someone get the Star that provides brief invincibility for their special item but you get Pesky Frame that will just impede their view of the race for a bit can certainly seem unfair since the items given are independent of performance or skill level, but the fact many have conceptual overlap also means often there is at least some balance in that everyone has similar but slightly different tricks for the game to randomly select from once they grab an item pick-up.
One thing that makes this chaotic and random item system a bit more interesting is a frankly ingenious idea involving drifting. In Mario Kart Arcade GP DX, a drift can be built up to three levels as long as you maintain it without hitting walls or pulling out of the slide. These determine how powerful a speed boost will be after the drift is ended, but what makes this drifting more interesting than just a way to gain speed on turns instead of losing it is the drifting shield. Once you’ve drifted long enough a bubble will wrap around your character similar to some of the shield items, and as long as you are in this bubble, most items will fail to impact you. What this means is even if an opponent gets something much stronger than your item set like a homing red shell, they can’t just throw it and be guaranteed success. They’ll need to time it right or you can drift and invalidate their attack, and while there are wide straight portions of the track, you do need a good amount of room to drift so you can’t just activate this shield all willy-nilly. In more complicated tracks with many turns players really need to plan when the best time is to unleash an item and might even have to hold onto one longer than they’d like to wait for a safe moment to let it fly, so while the high level of randomness in your item set is a bit off-putting, the extra layers of strategy in how they can be used help achieve a better degree of balance so that someone stuck throwing pies that only smear cream on the screen won’t necessarily be outclassed by someone with the wheel virus that will force random turns left or right if it manages to hit the opponent.
In fact, the drifting and the associated shield is pretty key to keeping Mario Kart Arcade GP DX’s racing interesting since the course design rarely allows any sort of shortcut, corner cutting, or even path choosing. The interplay of timing drifts to protect from items and planning your moments to strike on top of just trying to get the most speed out of a drift will determine your placement in a race more than anything else. The intensity of the competition thus ends up pretty dependent on the layouts of each race track then, and usually the more you can drift, the more complex and involved that competition will be. This does lead to an unfortunate truth about Peach Castle and Kingdom Way though, 2 of a fairly small batch of 12 stages that are in the U.S. release (there are two Donkey Kong themed courses but they are Japanese exclusives). While each track is marked with an expected difficulty level, these two Easy courses are light on turns where drifting is an option and have quite a few moments you’re driving forward without much to do besides keep moving. If you have an item still you can use it but then there will still be quite a stretch of just moving forward after, and the other racers don’t really have the drifting defense that gives the normal racing its interesting texture. Luckily the other courses make up for these two duds, straightaways becoming shorter or having unique hazards and becoming less common as more bendy track designs get a bit more intricate or have clever ideas. For example, the Bon Dance Street course is just an oval, but its small enough that you’re constantly hitting the outside turns in a race with many short laps evocative of the classic Mario Kart course Baby Park. The interplay between drifting players and items is able to take root in most every track besides those two weak starters.
No matter the track though, a lot of attention was given to the appearance of every race course, many intricate and moving decorations in colorful and elaborate settings making up for the tracks not often having much to them besides a few big jumps you glide after or a brief underwater stint. Bon Dance Circuit is a bright traditional Japanese festival at night. Tropical Park is a beautiful beachside amusement park with a portion where you go through a shipwreck and coral-filled underwater cave. Bowser Castle features magma-powered machines, an eerie green smiling device, and a Magikoopa teleporting around as you race and projecting himself as an enormous hologram. NAMCO circuit stands out quite a bit with its retro gaming inspired decor with characters from games like Dig Dug and Tower of Druaga on the walls and even dipping into the course, but even a level without much conceptual energy to it like the green field raceway of Kingdom Way has plenty of Mario series touches like floating blocks to the side that almost make it look like a course you could play through in a Super Mario Bros. game. There is even some pretty good music playing in the background, but you’ll unfortunately struggle to hear it over the announcer who is constantly calling out basic racing updates that are fairly mundane.
While multiplayer is the most interesting mode for the mind games involved in timing drifts and item use, there are two more modes to be had. Single player has you tackling cups with four races each and six characters in the running, but since each cup only has two courses to its name the tracks are lightly altered and presented in alternating order. It seems the U.S. version has been denied various difficulty levels per cup and in the Japanese version you were even able to pick karts and items that you gradually unlock by playing more, but at least the item and kart roulettes mean every tool is potentially available without the unlocking process. A bit stranger is the cooperative racing mode where you go up against game controlled racers with another player who might sometimes join together with you if someone gets the Fusion Kart item. Here one player drives while the other fires green shells from their cannon, but otherwise it’s mostly just both players earn a certain amount of points based on their placement and want to have a bigger sum than any of their opponents. These are both fine options to tinker with if you either can’t find more players or just want to try something a little different and there are at least Mirror versions of tracks available that flip the turns for some more variation, so while not every element is as compelling as the versus mode, Mario Kart Arcade GP DX is still usually going to keep its interesting drift and item relationship across all forms of play.
THE VERDICT: While leaving things like kart choice and your racer-specific items up to a roulette can lead to some skewed balance, Mario Kart Arcade GP DX manages to still provide exciting races all because of its intriguing approach to drifting. Drifting not only already gives you a skillful way to get speed boosts if you can pull it off, but the shield that pops up once you’ve drifted long enough means item use ends up a bit more calculated to avoid wasting your chances to tip the scales. Other than two weak tracks that don’t often involve this entertaining interplay, most courses provide many moments for the racers to engage with this element while also having impressive and detailed backdrops for the racing. For the most part, most races in Mario Kart Arcade GP DX, be it alone or with other players, will have the opportunity to be close contests with some interesting room for strategy on top of the contest of driving skill.
And so, I give Mario Kart Arcade GP DX for arcade machines…
A GOOD rating. Course design that was compelling in ways beyond elaborate background details would put Mario Kart Arcade GP DX closer to its console game counterparts in offering many more interesting decisions on how to tackle a course, but the drifting makes up for the lower focus on things like track hazards and a broad set of possible items. Were it just a means of getting the speed boost needed to assert your better driving it would at least ensure that there’s more going on than lucking out with whatever items you were given by the roulette, but the item shield while drifting makes that roulette a more tenable system that doesn’t disrupt the chance for close contests and interesting turnarounds. Players of lower skill level will still have to think about when to deploy an item that can shift their fortunes, but it’s not like drifting is such a hard counter that they won’t have the opportunity to turn things around with a good item. Making it require some thought also ensures being hit by an item is often less upsetting than it could have been if people could more easily fire and forget to gain an advantage. This heavy emphasis on drifting being the deciding factor on how interesting a race will be does undermine two courses heavily since they’re too basic to get much use out of it, but the other levels have little to complain about in how they play into this core system. There are definitely areas the game could be more robust in, partially because Japan got quite a bit more than the U.S. as a cost for the long unlocking process the Bananpassport entails, but for quick action once you understand the basics of drifting, Mario Kart Arcade GP DX still provides a good deal of entertainment with some room for more than just turning the wheel and hammering the item button the moment you can.
Perhaps some more balance in how the item roulettes turn out, maybe the option to pick your kart, and some courses with at least a few more ways to go than the same path every lap could spice this experience up without molding this into the more traditional console Mario Kart game mold, but it does at least have its own standout idea that couldn’t be found in those games and one that could even be interesting to see implemented in future console titles in some form. Mario Kart Arcade GP DX accommodates its shortcomings and avoids the complexities that arcade games often can’t afford to indulge in for fear of scaring off repeat plays, and while just a traditional Mario Kart in an arcade would probably still do incredibly well, it is nice that this specific twist on a familiar racing format actually turned out enjoyable and distinct.