Their reactions weren’t a million miles away from what you’d hear playing split-screen at home, but there’s a sincere wholesomeness to watching young and old come together in the Mushroom Kingdom that warmed my heart. While eating I kept an eye on the machine as a series of families raced each other on the four linked cabinets, yelling in annoyance and whooping with pleasure as they nailed each other with various shells and bananas. You might be able to quickly figure out what the pin-shaped ‘Tack’ item will do to your opponents, but how about the ‘Flower Glasses’, the ‘Paper Mushroom’, the ‘Interrupting Frame’, the ‘Laughing Bag’ or the kinky-sounding ‘Mustache Rocket’? One other thing that we both loved was that there’s a whopping one hundred items in the game, and the only way you can find out what they do is by using them. I kept the machines fed with a steady supply of £1 coins and we made it through most of the tracks and modes – with a highlight the co-op mode in which two players can combine to create the ‘Fusion Kart’, a high-powered tank where one player controls steering and the other firing. He’s already a pretty experienced karter and though his feet couldn’t reach the pedals on the arcade machine (thankfully, the game automatically detects this and turns on auto-accelerate), we had some great races. This coincided nicely with me being put on babysitting duty for my five-year-old nephew, who wasn’t exactly complaining when I said I planned to spend Saturday afternoon at a London arcade playing Mario Kart. One of the things that made me pick this for the ‘Super Mario Multiverse’ writing project is that I love travelling somewhere specifically to play a game. At the core of Namco’s design sensibilities is the aim of distilling the series into one quick n’ easy package: if Mario Kart 8 is a fancy cappuccino in an over-sized mug, GP DX is a sharp and strong espresso.
Soon after you insert a credit you realise why GP DX goes down so well. The latter is about as omnipresent as an arcade machine can get these days and, judging by how busy the cabinets are, it well deserves its prime position. Step into a modern arcade and you’ll find at least one of these three machines: Raw Thrills’ shooters Jurassic Park Arcade and The Walking Dead, and Namco’s Mario Kart Arcade GP DX.
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