So, as I am sure you have surmised, I am also really enjoying the new courses that are steadily arriving as part of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe’s DLC. Last night, with a pizza in the oven and the snow falling softly outside, I curled up on the sofa and tried my hand at the newly released waves. It was fun. I collected lots of coins. I left a trail of destruction in my wake. My son joined in. He blew himself up with his own bob-omb. My daughter asked me why Peach let Chain Chomps roam through her gardens. Like I said, it was fun. But I couldn’t help thinking, wouldn’t it be great if, along with these new waves, Nintendo also introduced a way for players to curate their own, bespoke, Mario Kart tracks in the style of its Mario Maker series. That would just be the cherry on top of one of Peach’s freshly baked cakes, in my opinion. I can picture it all now. A catalogue of Mario Kart assets, waiting for us to pick and choose from at our will, enabling us to create the ultimate, and needlessly chaotic, courses to share with the world. For me, Maple Treeway (it first debuted on the Wii) is the greatest track of all. I love the autumnal piles of leaves that you can skitter through. I love negotiating a path that avoids the advancing Wigglers. I love the overall cosy vibe it provides (something that was especially welcome last night as it was bitingly cold here). But, what would a course like that be if, say, we threw in a few extra warp pipes and a couple of fake item boxes that have fallen off the Mario Kart bandwagon of late here and there. To change up the once genial atmosphere, we could instead perhaps add a haunting melody to oversee the course. Why not drop in a hazardous penguin waddling along behind those Wigglers, just because we could? Ok, that last one maybe isn’t the best idea, but you get the point. When I played Mario Maker 2 a couple of years ago, I loved discovering the community made levels. It was a great way to give an ongoing series a fresh lick of paint. Some of these homebrew levels were fairly straightforward. A piranha plant here, an ascending vine there. Others, however, were a law unto themselves. I can not count the amount of times my poor Mario ended up engulfed in lava. The whole Mario Maker experience provided bombastic and unpredictable layers of enjoyment and I was there for it… and I would happily be there for it again, but this time in Mario Kart.
