LO1 - Game Analysis: Mario Kart 8

Mario Kart 8 - Wii U

Genre

Mario Kart 8 is a go-kart style game in the racing genre. It shows stylistic conventions of the racing genre by offering customisable vehicles and lots of different fun and exciting courses. It is unique in comparison to other titles, as it includes features like flight and upside-down driving and underwater racing.

Narrative

There isn’t a solid story to the game, but each time the player chooses a grand prix the ending counts on what place the player comes in each race. Each character you can race as has different strengths and weaknesses, so players can play to their own by choosing the best character for them. It’s good for people who don’t want to play an ongoing game, and would rather play a more laid-back style narrative.

Production process

This game was produced by one of Nintendo’s development companies. Elements of production like a good soundtrack and bright graphics make the game more entertaining.

Game physics and mechanics include how the cars would change and move in water as well as on land, and how they would work when driving upside down. The game has features like a form of magnetism when part of the track turns upside down. This makes the game much more exciting to play.

Characterisation

This game manages to appeal to quite a large target audience, as well as the small audience of previous fans of the franchise. It appeals to people who are already fans of the franchise because it features the same characters. This also allows a large target audience because there are many different characters to choose from, which would appeal to different people. For example, girls may prefer to pick the character Peach and boys might prefer the character Donkey Kong.

The characters are all very distinct in appearance and mannerisms, which matches the conventions of this genre because the player can choose what they prefer. As a first time player of this game, the player wouldn’t know any sort of back story of the characters from the gameplay. Because the game revolves mainly around the racing, it doesn’t take too much time in making strong characters.

Gameplay

Challenges that are present in the game include the main aim, which is to win as many races as possible. The game rewards the player by opening up new tracks and characters as the player continues to win races.

The game has all sorts of different features which make it exciting to play. It has features like items which can affect other racers or the player’s racer, which are almost a trademark of Mario Kart games. This, along with the new features like flight and underwater racing, is what makes the game exciting and therefore successful.

There isn’t much of a narrative as there is no ongoing story. This means gameplay is generally only based on racing different cars with different characters. The gameplay changes to keep the player’s attention by introducing new characters and tracks as rewards.

Target audience

The target audience includes families, people who like racing games and people who are previous fans of the franchise. They would be within the ABC1 social category as these are the type of people who would own the game and console. We can tell it’s for families because of the variety of characters and tracks which keeps children entertained, and its ESRB rating of E (everyone). It appeals to people in this audience because there is always a lot happening, for example the music, items and environment are all exciting to keep a young audience entertained.

In comparison to games like Sega All Stars Racing Transformed, there actually aren’t that many differences apart from the fact they are different franchises. All Stars has the items, different characters and different courses, but slightly different dynamics. It’s up to a person’s personal tastes as to what they would rather play.

Platform

This game is only available for the Wii U platform. Other versions, however, have been made for other platforms, such as Mario Kart Wii and Mario Kart DS.