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Mario Kart 8 fills each course with a cavalcade of rich colors and crisp incidental details and runs everything at a silky-smooth frame rate even during split screen matches. Without that limitation this time around, though, the designers have really been able to go to town. It's a credit to Nintendo's visual design chops that games like 2008's Mario Kart Wii didn't look completely awful for the time with just 480 lines of vertical resolution.
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That might seem like an odd thing to stress as a vital new feature for a series in 2014, but loading up the game for the first time, it's easy to wonder how the series got by without the increased resolution for this long.
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The most striking improvement this time around, truth be told, might just be the HD graphics. 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. Mario Kart 8 keeps this pattern going for the, um, eighth time, providing a deceptively solid racer beneath its candy-colored exterior. 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. 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. 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.