The Wide World of Dirt

Let me just clarify before going forward that this track has grown on me and is a good track. Its low ranking in this wave is ONLY because this wave is fantastic, not because this track is bad.

Now, on to the review!

After watching the trailer for this wave of tracks, New York Minute was easily the least excited I was for any track in the wave. Tokyo Blur was my least favorite track of the previous wave, so I figured this would fall in the same vein.

New York Minute managed to exceed my low expectations!

To start, the track looks really nice visually. While the background is very busy, it takes place in New York City, the city that never sleeps. With LED lights shooting rays of light through windows for miles on end, I can imagine why it’s hard to sleep.

The track manages to remain visually interesting through its three-lap runtime, taking you from Times Square to (what I can only assume is) Central Park to the red carpet before emptying out into a coiled tunnel that takes you back to Times Square.

The folks at Nintendo threw in some Goombas in the Central Park area to Mario the track up a bit, which I really appreciate as someone who feels these Tour tracks are a bit divorced from the main line Mario games.

One thing I would have liked to see is the cars and buses moving along the road while the karts raced by them. The taxis and buses being stationary doesn’t add anything to the stage other than “This is New York where people ride the bus and take taxis!”

I feel like if the vehicles were a more active part of the track, it would be ranked higher.

Enough about aesthetics. Let’s talk about how this track drives.

New York Minute recently watched a rainstorm blow through, so the entire track is saturated much like Neo Bowser City before it. This makes handling come at a premium on a track with not a whole lot of straight sections.

Funny enough, the dirt roads through the park sections don’t have a different handling feel to them. Since dirt acts much differently than asphalt when wet, I hoped this section would mimic that. Perhaps I expected too much.

The rain mechanic makes this track much more technical and harder to tackle, separating players by skill level and repetition.

A familiar drawback of this track shows up here as well: lack of shortcuts.

You can cut through the grassy sections at the beginning of laps 1 and 2, but you’d have to be lucky enough to get a mushroom to go through them. There aren’t any shortcuts for the remainder of those laps. On lap 3, the park section ends with a split path you can access with a mushroom, but you only save a little bit of time by taking it.

Again, it’s not great that these tracks don’t allow players that are behind to gain time.

Overall, this track is good. It’s a step below Paris Promenade (visually amazing and fun to race), but it’s leagues ahead of Tokyo Blur (visually bland and okay to race on.)

Grade: B-