Back in the dark days of my childhood, a huge hole opened in the sky and Mario Kart was brought to humanity, basked in a holy yellow light. Finally, racing games were for everyone. Looking up at the heavenly glow above, I threw my copy of Al Unser Jr’s racing in the trash and ran to beg my parents for racing game salvation. What we didn’t realize, as TV has shown us many times, is when there’s world peace and we lower our defenses, something will ALWAYS swoop in to try to take us over. With the joy Mario Kart brought, humanity also inherited a cesspit known as the Kart Racing genre. And so we were befouled by the horrors of Crash Team Racing or anything bearing the Cartoon Network title, but it was a tolerable nuisance for a time. But now…NOW, it’s just gone too far.
Welcome to M&M’s Kart Racing, quite possibly the most miserable racing game in existence. A bastion of how not to make a racing game, MMKR is yet another example of someone trying to make a quick buck off of outsourcing some half-wit development team. What blows my mind the most isn’t the thrown together interface or the fact that the devs fished the game font from 1001freefonts.com, it’s that every track in the game is designed in a way that it’s just impossible to race anything; but I’m running ahead of myself here.
Trouble is already in the cards as the game boots up. The game takes forever to load and there’s no way around it. Once you get to the main menu, you’ll have to realize what it was all for since you’ll be greeted with some inexplicable room with a bunch of cardboard stand-ups of M&M’s clipart and trinkets that make you wonder if the Polish dev team’s only idea of the western world are from old episodes of Romper Room. The game is divided into two main modes: arcade and tournament mode. There are also options for quick race and a horrible local multiplayer mode too, but you’re not going to care about that in about five minutes anyways.
You can choose from five different M&M’s, though each one is the same as the last. It all really depends on whether you want to play as the horny one, the one who looks like someone is about to discover his porn collection, the dumb one, the blue one who wishes he was Tommy Lee Jones, or the gender confused red M&M that wears old women’s gardening hats and calls himself the Duchess of Tea Time. Once you’ve chosen a character, it’s time to choose a kart. At first, you have the option of grabbing a kart, a bike, or a hovercraft. If you have the patience to collect more coins, you can get your hands on a monster truck, an Indy car, or the “super jet racer” that’s only fast because it has six wheels apparently. The game is balanced in such a way that the starting vehicles you have will become worthless in a few races, all but the two most expensive karts have issues going up hills or ramps – effectively crippling your chances of just getting this damn game over with.
The falsely advertised “arcade” mode is nothing more than driving each of the game’s tracks solo and picking up all of the coins lying around before time runs out. This is an absolutely awesome time to jettison any logic that racing games have put into your head over the last twenty-plus years, because they mean nothing here. Since you have no competition and obviously no pressure from the super forgiving clock, you’re free to cruise at your leisure to pick up all of the coins. Only if it were that easy. It’s here that you’ll learn that the tracks must have been built by indentured servants working for a cure for their dysentery, because there’s just no effort put into them. While racing games actually encourage actual r-a-c-i-n-g, the claustrophobic tracks have other plans for you. For instance, the first track called the “Chocolate Factory” is a spaghetti web of twisting turns that you mostly have to coast through. Strategically placed before every turn is a coffee cup that’ll give your cart a boost….into the nearest wall thanks to the lack of straight-aways and the two-foot clearance you have to aim yourself into.
Thanks to the super efficient draw-in, coins won’t appear unless they’re about five feet away from you. If they’re not placed in the center of the track, you’re going to have a bitch of a time trying to find any of them. You’ll realize this the first time you cross the finish line thinking you’ve picked all the damn things up, only to find out you’re about nine short…but you never saw them. M&M’s KART RACING STRIKES AGAIN. When you’re not coming up with phantom coins, you’re constantly turning around and backtracking to pick up coins you’ve missed thanks to those wonderful coffee “power-ups” placed right in front of the next turn into a wall. Thanks M&M’s™!
Tournament mode pits you against 5-7 other racers as you race through the game’s tracks to the end. I really mean it. You can’t just play a few tracks here and there and expect your game to be saved. You start from the beginning every damn time. But wait, there are only five characters but you sometimes race against seven? Yup. The extra hidden super secret bonus characters are a fox, a robot, and a grasshopper. Try to fit those into the magical M&M’s canon.
Tournament mode is the way to get the most out of your MMKR experience for sure. Its here you’ll realize the almost dire limits of the game first-hand. Like that, every track is a hopeless labyrinth of hairpin turns and coffee boosts into walls or off cliffs. Sliding down a hill will make your kart involuntarily “jump” which means you can’t control the damn thing as it slides down the slope. You’ll also come across groundbreaking level design tricks like putting a series of hairpins that lead into two-foot wide doorways where you’ll either hit the wall, or get cock-blocked by mindlessly pounding into the AI as it desperately tries to find its rubber band path. It’s a mess, it’s frustrating, and becomes an all-out cluster when it all plays out. There’s no sense of speed other than the indicator at the bottom of the screen. I don’t know what measurement they’re using, but the damn thing is almost constantly pinged at “220” in what I can only assume to be centimeters per minute.
Graphically, this thing is a mess – aside from the last couple of tracks which look decent. The little hats and sunglasses that the characters use to distinguish themselves only float above their heads or right off of their faces. It’s really funny to see the red guy’s hat haphazardly sit on his head like it was heavily starched then super-glued on because I’ll be damned if the thing doesn’t even move…even at a breakneck 300 centimeters per minute! Everything is low res and blurry until you come right up on it, only at that point do things look a little less muddy. On some levels, you can see the “pre-destiny” line where everything goes from low res to not-so-low res. It’s pretty amazing to behold, that’s for sure. The characters’ stupid sound bites will also get on your god-forsaken nerves. Pretty soon, you’ll start hearing “look, a nut” and “APPROACHING SOUND BARRIER!” to the point where you’ll want to hang yourself from your shower curtain rod with a garden hose if you even hear an anagram of those phrases.
M&M’s Kart Racing makes as much sense, by design, as saying that we have an awesome beat-‘em-up game but it takes place on a race track. It’s like the devs had some game with a house, a factory, and for some reason an alien HQ in the last couple of levels and didn’t know what to do with it until they landed the M&M’s license. Add a couple of tracks into their current levels and plaster a ton of M&M’s paraphernalia all over the place and the game’s gold. This shitwreck is just another example of the Wii becoming shovelware for anyone who can get something running on it. Thankfully, M&M’s Kart Racing received its fair amount of boos, jeers, and tomatoes once it was released. Just goes to show there is SOME good left in the world after all. Just go to your local Costco and pick up a box of M&M’s for ten bucks. You’ll have a ton more fun and come out of it feeling more fulfilled.
Since 2007, Gamescrap has brought you the the worst video games, game commercials, game merchandise, and gaming moments ever to grace the industry. No matter if it's a beloved classic or the next hot thing, no bad game is safe from the horrors of the Gamescrap heap.
Since 2007, Gamescrap has brought you the the worst video games, game commercials, game merchandise, and gaming moments ever to grace the industry. No matter if it's a beloved classic or the next hot thing, no bad game is safe from the horrors of the Gamescrap heap.