The most common powerups are hedgehogs that litter the track, which you fire out of your kart like a green shell. There’s a few powerups you can collect, although not quite as much of a variety as Mario Kart. This does take away one of your three lives, so you’ll want to avoid having this happen if possible. If you hit a solid obstacle while going too fast, your animal will fly out of the cart and hit the screen, cracking the monitor. What’s odd about this game compared to other kart racers, however, is that there’s a way to lose a race before it even finishes. The only real hazard on the tracks is deep water, which will heavily slow you down until you get out. There’s a little more than 30 tracks in all, but aside from their basic layout, they all tend to be a bit same-ish. The actual racing itself does decently, and the programmers did a good job of replicating Mario Kart’s Mode 7 effects, although the scrolling isn’t quite as smooth as on the SNES. Pretty impressive, especially once you consider that Mario Kart wouldn’t actually get an official online mode until the Wii incarnation, 14 years later. Remote Ridicule would show up again in Apogee’s other multiplayer games, such as Rise of the Triad and Duke Nukem 3D, but with voice clips instead of graphical taunts. This will cause a little demon to pop up on his screen and either moon him or insult him with a giant sign. You can even taunt your opponent online or off with the function keys, a little trick called ‘Remote Ridicule’. Surprisingly enough, there’s actually a mode for online play, although good luck getting it working through DOSBox or an authentic DOS-era computer. Of course, if you load up the game to play with a friend, you’ll want to make sure you have a decent gamepad that DOSBox will accept so that you don’t end up crowding the keyboard. Two players drive around a small arena, blasting at each other with weapons found on the track until somebody scores a certain number of points. Or you can get into a ‘Shoot Out’, which is basically the Battle Mode from Mario Kart. You can have a single race, either with the AI driving against you and your opponent or just head to head. Of course, there’s no denying that most people played Mario Kart for the multiplayer, and Wacky Wheels does a nice job of bringing that experience to the PC. The most interesting single player mode is the ‘Wacky Duck Shoot’, where you pick an arena and try to shoot at as many ducks as you can before time runs out.
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There’s also a Time Trial mode, where you race across a track and try to beat the best time on it. You have your standard Grand Prix mode, where you race against the AI on five different tracks to see who can earn the most points.
There’s actually a pretty decent variety of modes available, even compared to the original Mario Kart. This was long before the days Diddy Kong Racing gave you a reason to sit in a tiny cart and drive around in circles, so a lack of plot is acceptable.
A bunch of zoo animals have escaped, and the first thing they do is… get in go karts and start racing each other. So a little shareware company named Beavis-Soft wrote up one of their own. Super Mario Kart was a pretty popular game when it hit the SNES in 1992, although the flood of licensed and mascot-based racers wouldn’t start until after its N64 sequel.