Wednesday, June 21, 2023

Booster Course Pass: Monster Trio!

artwork of Petey Piranha, Kamek and Wiggler

Here we go! The latest Nintendo Direct offered us a teaser trailer for the fifth wave of the Booster Course Pass for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, which will come with three character additions this time, all of them enemies from various Super Mario games:

  • Petey Piranha (Mario Kart: Double Dash!! & Mario Kart Tour)
  • Wiggler (Mario Kart 7)
  • Kamek (Mario Kart Tour)

The biggest surprise here was probably Wiggler, because this is a character not yet featured in Mario Kart Tour, which is where everything in the Booster Course Pass is coming from. But they have most likely prepared this character for both games already, so Wiggler will appear in the mobile game in the near future, just like with some of the new courses, like Yoshi's Island.

Wiggler is already present in the game as an obstacle, and also via the Wild Wiggler kart, but that's not much of a criteria. You can play Yoshi on the Yoshi Bike, after all. Ideally, they will also bring back the Magikruiser from Mario Kart Wii, where Kamek is the first character addition that only has been present in Tour so far. But this opens the doors for Pauline and alike, not that they ever were out of question.

In any case, those are some really good additions and if they put them on the roster in the announced order, Petey Piranha will sit right next to his Double Dash!! buddy, King Boo, which is great. Maybe they will swap Kamek and Wiggler to have Kamek next to the Bowser villains, which is even the same order as in the above artwork, but it's not terribly important...

What's more important are the insinuations for the final wave and its character additions. It will only have two now and this means that a "Kong Pack", consisting of Diddy, Funky, and Dixie Kong, would be out of the question. I can't imagine that they would go for two of them and then leave out the third, that's just not right. Maybe they will only bring back Diddy Kong and add Pauline alongside him, but I'm staying strong in my belief that they will just keep doing this thing and there will be a Booster Course Pass 2.

As for the new course, called "Squeaky Clean Sprint", I can't say that I'm excited about this. This was probably the least exciting thing found in the Mario Kart Tour data-mines and it looks like one of those trash maps made for an old Arena Shooter. Why didn't they go with the Piranha Plant Cove here? It's Petey Piranha's course after all!

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