I don't know how good Mario Kart World's Free Roam actually is, but it's perfect for me

A caveat here first, explaining why my thoughts on this are probably irrelevant, and then some thoughts on this. Caveat: I don’t think I’ve ever truly loved Mario Kart since one magical evening at university in which a bunch of us played Mario Kart 64, then newly released, on split-screen all night long and into the morning. I loved that game so much – each moment was such a hectic joy. And it used me up a bit. I haven’t really been able to engage with the series with quite the same thrill since.

I appreciate that makes me a terrible person, and an idiot, since I gather Mario Kart 8 is a game for the ages. (The last Mario Kart I properly got to know, incidentally, was the GBA version, so again, please feel free to write off everything I’m about to say.) Anyway, I fired up World and played a few races, and they were pretty and imaginative and gently non-thrilling to me, and I thought again: what’s wrong with me, idiot? Everybody loves this. Why don’t you?

Then I dropped into Free Roam and suddenly? Well, suddenly I was genuinely in love.

Here’s the thing: I don’t know how good Free Roam genuinely is, but I do know it’s absolutely perfect for me and all my personal weirdnesses. Free Roam positions every Mario Kart track on a kind of open world, with lots of gaps and spaces between them so you can just take off and do whatever you like. You ride around, brush up against tracks, lose your way, skate down the back of a dinosaur, rush through a few temples and generally zone out.