Great visuals and course design marred by some baffling changes for the worse. It's too easy to dismiss the Mario Kart series as a past-its-prime throwback that's holding Nintendo back, a family friendly nostalgia-fest that becomes more of a pale echo of the company's golden era with each passing year. I'd argue instead that Nintendo has done a great job keeping the franchise fresh over the years, adding enough new ideas and tweaks to the solid core with each release to make Mario Kart a must-play rite of passage for each new piece of Nintendo hardware. Sure, some games in the series have been more revolutionary than others, but Mario Kart games are far from the phoned in, more-of-the-same, semi-annual sequels that they could be.

Mario Kart 8 keeps this pattern going for the, um, eighth time, providing a deceptively solid racer beneath its candy-colored exterior. The changes might be relatively slight this time around, and some of the alterations have bafflingly made things worse, but all in all, this is still the kind of game that gets people to buy Nintendo consoles.