Mario Kart World: SNES Courses

Yesterday Nintendo has released version 1.8.0 of Mario Kart World, right after the Nintendo Direct. And it comes with another neat feature: VS Mode and Time Trials will now treat the ten classic SNES courses that you can find in the open world, which sometimes were used as roads, as individual courses for you to play on.

• SNES Mario Circuit 1
• SNES Mario Circuit 2
• SNES Mario Circuit 3
• SNES Ghost Valley 1
• SNES Ghost Valley 2
• SNES Ghost Valley 3
• SNES Choco Island 1
• SNES Choco Island 2
• SNES Koopa Beach 1
• SNES Vanilla Lake 1 

You can select these via Mario Circuit, Boo Cinema, Choco Mountain, Koopa Troopa Beach, and Sky-High Sundae. Unlike the normal courses, they retain the SNES prefix. It will also play music from Super Mario Kart and the item boxes are replaced with question mark panels, which makes this a true celebration of the first game.

They are also played in five laps each, and some of them feel like Baby Park with how short they are. But if you enjoy short courses, where you can potentially lap the opponents in the back, then this update will be a blast.

Technically, none of this is new. The courses have been already part of the world and you could even race on them via the P-Switch missions in Free Roam mode, though it wasn't exactly the same. And whoever is still developing Mario Kart World has proven to be very resourceful. They are making the most of what the game already has to offer. This is true for the Bob-Omb Blast mode added in 1.6.0, using stickers for the photo mode in the previous update, and of course also the new Knockout Tour Rallies.

Speaking of, two more of these got added, the Propeller Rally going from Acorn Heights to Airship Fortress, and the Turnip Rally, going from DK Pass to Shy Guy Bazaar. 

So, two of these updates are going to follow and the last one will likely add 200cc. Would be awesome if they made this version 2.0.0 at the same time, as in version 200. It's the perfect conclusion for this line of updates that have mainly utilized what's in the game already. 200cc will make everything in the game fresh again.

However, they could go a step further and add more Kamek transformations, which become playable drivers. There are a variety of different enemies and animals they haven't use for this yet, e.g. the Buffalo, the Bully, the Camel, the Crocodile, the Hermity Cone, the Ostrich, the Skeeter, Spike, and more. All of these could become new drivers, where the game already has the models for them. People absolutely loved playing as a cow or whatever, so adding more of the same will certainly be received well.

But this would be more work than what has been done so far, because all these additional drivers would require new animations and such. And it looks like Mario Kart World is getting updated by a skeleton crew, where the main resources of the development team are going elsewhere... Maybe they are making ARMS 2?