Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit
Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit can be a great game, but it can also be boring. The factors that determine how you experience the game are not on the inside of your Nintendo Switch. The game stands or falls with your own creativity and imagination in designing tracks, and with the availability or not of other people racing with you. The latter is a bit difficult in these corona times, but that will probably be fine in the long run. If you then take the time and effort to build a nice, beautifully decorated track in his or her house and then tear over it with friends, Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit has a unique product. However, those who have limited space and mainly play the game alone will get much less fun out of it. In addition, Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit has technical limitations that occasionally get in the way, but deal breakers are not. The latter probably applies to the price. The package costs 119 euros, which is quite a considerable amount for something that has yet to prove that it does not enter the history books as a gimmick that got out of hand.
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Turning your living room, office or kitchen into a Mario Kart circuit that you can race over with friends in radio-controlled karts: it’s definitely a fun idea. But as fun and innovative as the concept behind Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit is, it is also the worst possible timed game ever. In this time of corona, a game that you can only play with others when you come together physically is not exactly one step ahead. That’s a shame because like any Mario Kart game, this game is at its best when you can play it together with friends. The fact that you are driving on self-built tracks with obstacles that you invented yourself only adds to the hilarity. However, we are getting ahead of ourselves a bit, so let’s start at the beginning.
Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit is a game for the Nintendo Switch. Buy the game and you will receive a box containing all the necessary hardware. The software is free to download. Logical, because that software is of no use if you do not have the corresponding car. That is the only way to play the game, so there is no variant that lets you race around without using the physical kart. In addition to the kart, you will also find a number of cardboard objects in the box. These are two signs with arrows indicating the direction and, more importantly, four gates with a number on them. They will be on the track to be made by you. The game uses the gates as route markers, so that it can be monitored whether everyone – you and any friends present – are taking the correct route. Those gates have already been assembled, you just need to unfold them and place them on the route.
Making a track is related to those gates, but starts with connecting your kart to your Switch. You do this by turning on the kart and filming a QR code on your Switch screen with the camera on the kart. A few seconds later the kart and console will be connected and from that moment you will see the live feed from the camera on your screen. Then you place the kart in front of the first gate and start making a track. This is very simple: you drive through the four gates in the correct order and end again at the starting point, at gate one. At that moment you are already driving through your living room, looking at your Switch, which shows where your kart is going. So you don’t necessarily have to look at your kart to be able to drive.
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