Washington23 - Breaking News and Updates

Regular readers will not be surprised at my excited delight when I saw this Super Mario Kart board-game. Laid out in the shape of a race-track from the old classic SNES game, what could be more fun than shooting green turtle-shells at the stupid cheating Princess, only this time in the real world?
Everything, it turns out. While the premise is a great one, it fails in execution. The idea is that two players each have a separate, parallel track around the board, and around this track you must shimmy and coax your “kart” (a plastic ball). First to the finish-line wins.
The video of the game in action (non-embeddable, linked below) shows it to be way duller than that description makes it sound. First, there are far too many non-kart like tracks. It comes down, pretty much, to bashing buttons to make the ball hop to the next section. Second, it would have been way more fun, nostalgia-wise, to recreate an actual track from the game. Instead, we get a mish-mash of sections from the Rainbow Road, Ghost Valley and Donut Plains. The only really authentic element is the soundtrack, which has FX from the original, right down to the squealing tire sound when you get hit with no stars.
The game is on show at the Tokyo Toy Show 2010, so it’s unlikely that it will ever see the shores of the West. Good thing too. I’ll stick to my happy little emulated world.
Mario Kart and Super Mario Bross [sic] board game [Akihabara News via Oh Gizmo]
See Also:

Video: Super Mario Kart on Non-Jailbroken iPad
Video: New Blur Commercial Takes Direct Aim at Mario Kart …
Mario Kart Power-Ups Come to Indycar Racing
Review: Mario Kart Wii Skids Way Off the Road
Nike+ Mashup: Mario Kart Ghost Racers on Real Streets

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Fuente: Gadget Lab