Only last month, as part of its plans for the Super Mario series' 35th anniversary, Nintendo announced a new entry in the Mario Kart series. While it's not the Mario Kart 9 many may have hoped for, Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit still garnered attention for being an augmented reality racing game which uses an RC car and allows people to turn their living rooms into a race track.
At the time, we only had a brief trailer to provide a general outline of how Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit works, but today Nintendo released a more in-depth look at the game to show off and explain its features.
For starters, the controls are no different to the ones players are used to in Mario Kart 8: the A button accelerates, the left stick moves the kart, and the R button drifts. And if Mario uses a Mushroom item or is hit by an item or obstacle in the game, the real life kart will react in kind, either picking up in speed or coming to a stop respectively.
How to create a course is also demonstrated. The car comes with four gates that can be placed anywhere in a room. To create the track layout, players must drive their car through each of the gates in numerical order, giving players the freedom to make courses as simple or tricky as they want.
As for modes, the classic Grand Prixes are available, with eight cups consisting of three courses each. Depending on the course, unique obstacles and visual effects are added. In Cheep Cheep Reef, for example, the course appears submerged in water. There's even a World 1-1 course meant to reference the original Super Mario Bros. game, complete with 8-bit Goombas. And of course, plenty of classic items from the series, like the Red Shell and Bananas, can be used to mess with opponents.
Aside from Grand Prixes, Time Trials are back as well and there's a Custom Race feature that allows players to add their own visual flair to their tracks and even choose what music will play on them. Races can be played in one of four classes, with the higher ones making the car itself go faster. 200cc from Mario Kart 8 is also included and there's even a Mirror Mode option, which reverses the layout of the tracks.
And while the car only comes with one look, Mario and his kart can have their looks changed in-game, with multiple costumes and karts available once they've been unlocked by collecting coins. Although the video mostly focuses on single-player, there is a multiplayer option too, but it does require everyone to own the game itself, which is download-only, and their own RC car. At least it's there from day one, unlike the mobile Mario Kart Tour game.
In other Nintendo news, the company has been hit with another leak, with formerly never-before-seen information hitting the Internet, including a cancelled Game Boy Advance successor called the Iris.
Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit will release on October 16th for Nintendo Switch.
Source: Nintendo