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need for speed...

~ an ode to the MARIO KART 8 DELUXE ~

during the COVID lockdowns of 2020, i basically had next to nothing to do. i was in my junior year of college at capital university at the time, and they had sent us home for the semester to do classes online. that meant i had to pack up all of my things from columbus and go back to pittsburgh and leave all my friends a few hours away. with not a lot to do aside smoking weed, attending online classes, and working at my parents' recently opened restaurant (timing is a bitch), i wanted to do some fun stuff. music was definitely one thing, but i also got really into speedrunning mario kart 8. it was the first game i had ever gotten for my switch because i had loved the wii version back in the day, and i knew that i wanted to go as fast as i could. and that i did.

behold my speedrun.com page. you'll have to turn on obsolete and misc. runs to see most of them, and i have done other games since then (subways surfers (lol), donut county, mario marker), but mario kart took up a ton of my time around then. the peak of this hobby was around the time of the first wave of DLC tracks dropped, so there was a lot of renewed interest in the game. i decided that when those came out, i would grind and grind to try and be on top.

in some of the smaller categories i was in the top ten for a bit, but most of the categories these days are either obsolete or no longer heavily ran. it's more in favor of the longer runs - which i couldn't do at the time since my switch's fan had died. that meant that it would overheat in the dock after so long, and it would shut down in the middle of long runs that i would screen record with my capture card. very trying times.

my favorite tracks...

we all have some favorites! here are mine:

baby park


MAXIMUM FAST!!!!!!! you turn, you cut corners by jumping through the grass, and it's a true test of speed in my opinion. there's next to zero margin for error in this track, especially when you're doing a mushrooms only run, so it really separates the good from the great. i was known as the "baby park champion" for a long time.

wario's gold mine


i loved this one in the wii version so i was so happy when they decided to revamp it for 8dx!! i basically have the track down to muscle-memory, and it's just a fun trick-filled track with lots of little shortcuts to impress!

mario kart stadium


i know, i know, it's the first track of the game technically, but it's so fucking fun. i love hopping through the grass and catching the glide just right on that last ramp to swoop past everyone else. a real treat to play.

honorable mentions...

i also have to shout out my wife's favorite track, cheep cheep beach, because that is the only track that i have truly never beaten her time trial on. there you go, kenzie.

my not so favorite tracks......

with every good thing there's also a bad thing, i think? idk, heres's some of the tracks i don't like for one reason or another:

bone-dry dunes


no cuz why is this one so hard for me? the turns are kinda hair-pin sometims which you'd think i like but it always catches me off guard and sends me flying. might just be a lack of familiarity with the course but i don't think i ever want to get familiar.

dry dry desert


i guess i don't like any of the dry tracks. i'm just always hitting the wrong angles on my drifts, knocking into pokeys, and that quick sand black hole will always be the death of me. hard pass here.

tick-tock clock


this one isn't the worst to play, but i found it really annoying to do when i was trying to complete all of the unlocks and get all of the trophies, especially at higher speeds.

honorable mentions...

the meta build...

some argue that the meta has evolved past this from 2020, but my tried and true combo is still:

that's it. that's my build. it pretty much has never let me down. sometimes i swap out characters depending on the track situation (tighter turns i'll probably jump to a baby, long fast straightaways i'm jumping to a heavier character like bowser) and sometimes i'll do diddy kong just for fun, but waluigi has been my guy since the wii days.

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