Mario Kart: Super Circuit

About This Game

Gameplay

Mario Kart: Super Circuit is a kart racing game featuring characters and elements from the Mario franchise. The player controls one of eight Mario characters and races opponents in karts around tracks themed around locales from the Super Mario platform games. Boxes labeled with question marks populate each of the 40 tracks; they give the player a random item based on elements from Super Mario games to help progress. Items can either be power-ups, such as a speed boost, or offensive, such as one that freezes an opponent's kart in place. Tracks are littered with obstacles that slow the player down, and coins that increase their speed once collected. Each playable character is sorted into one of three weight classes that determine how they play, with heavier characters having higher top speeds but slower acceleration. Princess Peach, Toad, and Yoshi are lightweights; Luigi and Mario are middleweights; and Bowser, Donkey Kong, and Wario are heavyweights. There are three difficulty levels themed after engine classes—50cc, 100cc, or 150cc—, with the harder difficulties' more powerful engine classes providing increased maximum speed and control difficulty.

History

Mario Kart: Super Circuit was the only Mario Kart game developed by Intelligent Systems. It borrows elements from Super Mario Kart and Mario Kart 64 (1996), and uses a similar graphical style to Super Mario Kart, particularly with its use of parallax scrolling and Mode 7-style scaling. Originally titled Mario Kart Advance in English, Super Circuit was announced by Nintendo prior to its annual Space World exhibition in 2000 and was unveiled alongside the GBA console itself. Gameplay screenshots published in an issue of CoroCoro featured a different super deformed art style, depicting characters with large heads. Items from early versions were also absent in the final release.