Redlining

So many games, so little time.


A video game collection that doesn’t look too dissimilar to my
own gaming backlog I had back in the day…circa 2010.

In a twist of irony, I finally have a day off in which to enjoy myself, though I do not wish to spend most of it writing. I feel as if pushing myself to continue such a consistent delivery schedule of creativity has me redlining it as of late; going as fast as I can to play games to gain more ideas to write about, so I will likely be spending most of my hours gallivanting hither and thither in search of my next gaming inspiration.


Nope, no gaming inspiration to be found under here, either.

A further irony is that my two most recently acquired gaming gets are Cadence of Hyrule, and Shadow of the Erdtree, both of which I have recently written about, so I’m not entirely sure if I’m going to be able to harvest much in the way of creativity from either title in the immediate. I’m not sure if there is a direct correlation in terms of hours spent gaming converted to words a minute that solidifies the formula of energy conversion involved in producing write-ups, but if my articles on Necrodancer recently are any indication of those metrics of quality, the rapidity of my output possess the qualities needed to sink the Titanic.


Kind of a Jack Sparrow Paradox: The worst gaming journalist
you’ve ever heard of….but you have heard of me.

I was going to riff about Mario Kart for a (brief) second, as it’s one of my go to titles I enjoy taking a few minutes with everyday. The particular iteration I’ve been enjoying is MK Tour, which is the mobile one Nintendo released awhile ago. I slept on it initially, mostly due to the fact that the Switch, being a hybrid console and therefore portable, already had an MK game on the go to enjoy, so the feeling towards Tour was one of a somewhat milquetoast apathy. While I was wrong about that assessment, MK 8 Deluxe’s online was still active, and there was new content in the pipe coming out, so the game was far from dead.


Not that a heartbeat was ever a great barometer
of possible success in the MK universe in the first place

The whole package just did nothing to compel me based on aforementioned relevancies, and it was some strange moment when I was enjoying said DLC for MK8 Deluxe that utterly compelled me to finally try the mobile version, and I wish I could remember why (super interesting story no doubt, one of which I’m sure I will never remember, no worries). Nearly around this time last year in fact, when I was attempting one of my many efforts in “turning the corner” in surmounting everyday struggles to get back to “being me”, I finally deemed MK Tour worthy of my time. I know all of that sounds very vague, and it’s because it veers too far off the path of discussing video games, which is partly what all of that involved in picking up a new MK to play. Which, I will say, judging based on the past year or so of forward trajectory, largely worked in the grand scheme of things. So…I’m going to chalk a personal victory up to Mario Kart for being so awesome.

Not that it was ever in question Luigi, sheesh! Calm down with
the death stare my guy.

Mario Kart Tour did turn out to be a wise investment of time, as Nintendo did a fantastic job of adapting the title to smart phones, more so than their other IP conversions, though Mario Run ended up being fairly serviceable. Fire Emblem seemed okay, but I was never a huge fan of the series to begin with, and Animal Crossing in a more minimal format kind of just felt like a menu-scroller on the phone, so MK really did come out on top as king amongst Nintendo’s best offerings. MK Tour is free, which may have some of you immediately side eyeing the game as a whole, especially based on some of my recent writings, but the game can be thoroughly enjoyed without dropping a dime, and as someone who has been riding along with the experience everyday for a year now, I feel like that’s a comfortably strong pitch of support to go by.


Maybe not as strong a pitch as getting Cat Mario on the big
screen kind of strong, but the bar was high

One can buy in-game currency for cosmetics, racers, and to beef up your status as a racer so to speak, but you absolutely never have to, and the game still feels fair across the competitive board, with me having racked up 100’s of wins both online and in single player as proof positive such is possible. I am really curious as to how much Nintendo is going to borrow from Tour when they release their next Mario Kart, presumably for the successor to the Switch, in whatever form that is going to take, as this is a rare moment of a lot to like that a mobile iteration ended up being responsible for. The focus on unlockables and leaderboards is a simple but welcome addition in beefing up the incentive to play online and general competitive energy of the title, and some of the games design choices, like shorter races at two laps, and the frenzy power up, do change the minute to minute quite a bit. I know Nintendo made it so you can’t fall off the sides in MK Tour so that the game was remotely tolerable in relation to being compatible as a casual, on the go experience, but whether or not they’re going to stick with it, or even include it as a mainstay on even lower difficulty levels would be another interesting prospect.


Also, is it about time to just open this baby up full stop and
take a page out of Smash’ book and just go all out with
cross over cameos?

If nothing else, I know everyone goes crazy for skins and aesthetics in online spaces, so I could genuinely see Nintendo adopting many of Tours elements moving forward on consoles, or at least justify creating a hybrid scenario like they did with Pokemon, as they still had their mainline series with untouched, classic gameplay, and then the Let’s Go! titles, which combined both classic with staple elements from the mobile series Pokemon Go, which I thought turned out exceedingly well. If nothing else, Nintendo hasn’t always been known to be the most proactive in terms of infrastructure innovation or online exploration in regards to moving the needle in a massive way without some serious time to let the ideas percolate, but the Mario Kart series is like crack to even the non-gaming casual crowd, and would be the ideal candidate to test the waters at implementing a lot of what works for modern gaming on the Nintendo front on a larger scale successfully. With all of that said, have some seriously confident hopes that whenever the next MK title drops on their next home console, I have no doubts I’ll be there day one.

~Pashford