Mario Kart: Super Circuit

Mario Kart: Super Circuit arrived in 2001 as the third game in the series and the first designed for a handheld. It is also the only one Nintendo did not build in-house - development went to Intelligent Systems, the studio behind Fire Emblem and Advance Wars, and no other entry has come from them since.

The technical approach is a deliberate step backwards. Courses are single large bitmaps rotated and scaled beneath flat sprite karts, with the camera low to the road, which is exactly how Super Mario Kart worked on the SNES in 1992. Early demos looked nothing like this. The upside is a stable frame rate and clean, readable art on a small screen. The downside is depth perception: corners arrive with very little warning, and the handling is loose enough that recovering a bad line is genuinely difficult. Powersliding, sparks and the short boost that follows are not an optional flourish here but the central skill.

Content is where it is unusually generous. Twenty new courses spread across five cups sit alongside all twenty tracks from Super Mario Kart, released gradually as unlockables in exchange for coins collected during cups. Coins also matter mid-race - carrying more raises your top speed, and taking a hit scatters them across the road. Grand Prix runs at three engine classes, with time trials and a balloon battle mode beside it. Multiplayer requires link cables, and single-cartridge play is heavily cut down.

Retrospective opinion has landed somewhere sensible. It appears regularly on lists of the best Game Boy Advance games and sold close to six million copies, while ranking low within its own series precisely because it innovated nothing technically. Things worth knowing before starting: the difficulty is sharper than the franchise's family-friendly reputation suggests, the grade requirements for full unlocking are demanding, and the top engine class punishes mistakes harder than any Mario Kart made since.