The courses seemed like they offered a lot of different paths for those that are willing to spend time investigating them. The whole hover aspect is pretty nifty, and it opens each course up to new short-cuts and such. Apparently, items and hazards can affect your hover abilities, but in the two courses I raced, I wasn’t hit while upside down, so I can’t quite comment on how that works, exactly. Some other courses automatically shift upside down, as well. Hovercraft mode kicks in automatically when you find an area on the course in which a speed ramp allows you to climb up the side or ceiling of a course. The most interesting new feature was the hovercraft ability on the karts. Everything is vibrant and the character models and courses look fantastic. The first thing I noticed is that the game looks really gorgeous in high definition. They didn’t have a Wii Wheel on-hand, but it seems like a safe bet that it’ll easily work with the game if you were a fan. Not wanting to delay the demo, I decided to stick with the default and chose Koopa Troopa as my racer. The default setting for the Wii remote seemed to be motion controls, but the Luigi hat adorned Best Buy rep told me he could change them if I wanted. Once more, I was given a Wii Remote to use, rather than the GamePad, so I can’t comment on the functionality of that particular controller. I’m not sure if this was simply changed for the demo, or if this will be a running change for the series. Rather than the traditional three-laps, the courses I played only had two.

One thing that stood out to me was the length of the races, though. Like the previous game I’d played, this demo was limited to two “levels” (races). Unlike Super Mario 3D World, this demo seemed to only support two players, so I was lucky that some people had started to filter out at this point. They asked for a volunteer challenger, I raised my hand and I was in. Sure enough, a short while later, a single player was called up to play Mario Kart 8. Having found my way into a play session of Super Mario 3D World, I was feeling confident that if I hung around a bit more, I might get lucky enough to play another game.

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