mario kart world

Mario Kart World review: Getting there is half the game

While that kind of item-based back-and-forth isn’t new to Mario Kart, it feels like it has been taken to a new extreme by World‘s more crowded race track. If you’re in the middle of the pack, every tranche of item boxes you pass can lead, in short order, to a flurry of near-unavoidable projectiles and item-enhanced opponents cluttering your immediate space. That’s especially true in online races, where human opponents tend to be much more ruthless with their item use than even the hardest computer-controlled opponents.

That blue “Kaboom!” can send you from first to 17th in a hurry.

The change ultimately rewards defensive driving, where you do your best to avoid other racers and utilize protective items until you have a chance to rocket into the relative safety of the top few positions. Sometimes, though, there’s simply no avoiding a maddening series of bad breaks that can literally send you from first place to 19th in an instant.

It’s not the destination, it’s the journey

Once you’ve adjusted to the more crowded field of racers, you’ll then have to get used to the odd structure of Mario Kart World‘s main racing modes. Rather than racing multiple laps around the game’s well-designed tracks, you’ll spend the bulk of your race time in most racing modes trekking between those tracks across the great expanses of Mario Kart World‘s, uh, world.

Get used to seeing very straight sections like this in most of the game’s racing modes. Credit: Nintendo

These inter-course interludes offer a decent variety to the structure, which will see you traveling through desert wastelands, down traffic-clogged highways, along the surface of tiered waterfalls, across frozen tundra, and more. What’s unavoidably similar about most of them, though, is their unbearable straightness. Players used to the undulating, crisscrossing curves of a standard Mario Kart course will marvel at just how rarely they have to powerslide around turns while shuttling between those courses in World.

These long straightaways aren’t boring, per se. The designers have done their best to dress them up with plenty of obstacles (of the stationary, vehicular, and livestock varieties), as well as jumps, dash pads, and frequent item boxes to make sure you’re still paying attention. But it can still be a jarring transition to go from two or three minutes across one of these mostly straight interregnums into the usual twisty wildness of the game’s more familiar pre-designed courses.

Mario Kart World’s $80 price isn’t that high, historically

gaming, inflation, mario kart world, price inflation / Kris Guyer / April 9, 2025

We assembled data for those game baskets across 21 non-consecutive years, going back to 1982, then normalized the nominal prices to consistent February 2025 dollars using the Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI calculator. You can view all our data and sources in this Google Sheet.

The bad old days

In purely nominal terms, the $30 to $40 retailers routinely charged for game cartridges in the 1980s seems like a relative bargain. Looking at the inflation-adjusted data, though, it’s easy to see how even an $80 game today would seem like a bargain to console gamers in the cartridge era.

Video game cartridges were just historically expensive, even compared to today’s top-end games. Credit: Kyle Orland / Ars Technica

New cartridge games in the 20th century routinely retailed for well over $100 in 2025 money, thanks to a combination of relatively high manufacturing costs and relatively low competition in the market. While you could often get older and/or used cartridges for much less than that in practice, must-have new games at the time often cost the equivalent of $140 or more in today’s money.

Pricing took a while to calm down once CD-based consoles were introduced in the late ’90s. By the beginning of the ’00s, though, nominal top-end game pricing had fallen to about $50, and only rose back to $60 by the end of the decade. Adjusting for inflation, however, those early 21st century games were still demanding prices approaching $90 in 2025 dollars, well above the new $80 nominal price ceiling Mario Kart World is trying to establish.

Those $50 discs you remember from the early 21st century were worth a lot more after you adjust for inflation. Credit: Kyle Orland / Ars Technica

In the 2010s, inflation started eating into the value of gaming’s de facto $60 price ceiling, which remained remarkably consistent throughout the decade. Adjusted for inflation, the nominal average pricing we found for our game “baskets” in 2013, 2017, and 2020 ended up almost precisely equivalent to $80 in constant 2025 dollars.

Is this just what things cost now?

While the jump to an $80 price might seem sudden, the post-COVID jump in inflation makes it almost inevitable. After decades of annual inflation rates in the 2 to 3 percent range, the Consumer Price Index jumped 4.7 percent in 2021 and a whopping 8 percent in 2022. In the years since, annual price increases still haven’t gotten below the 3 percent level that was once seen as “high.”

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