Oddities: M&M's Kart Racing

Welcome to Oddities, a regular feature in which we plunge head-first into the bargain bin of gaming history to extract a single game that you’ve either never heard of, or probably wished you hadn’t. This series follows some of the strangest, most obscure and most incredibly awful games that have ever appeared since the invention of Spacewar!. They won’t all be bad games, but we’ll make it our mission to find the really, really weird stuff. Saying that, we’ve got a straight-up bad game in line this week. Sorry, but it’s a good one... at being bad.

Mario Kart is very good. M&M’s, they’re not Smarties, but they’re pretty good too. Blend the two together and you can imagine how great the outcome is.

That’s right. Damned awful.

Mario Kart is apparently only good when developed by Nintendo, and M&M’s are best enjoyed as an actual physical piece of food, as opposed to little digital men. In all seriousness though, who actually likes those annoying M&M’s men? Their adverts are awful. So it was unlikely that a game centred on these horrendous mascots would succeed, and succeed it did not.

The game, simply titled M&M’s Kart Racing is indeed just a shameless rip-off of the Mario Kart formula. That’s not naturally a bad thing, of course, as various amazing karting clones can attest, it was just executed very badly. A limited selection of vehicles combined with a limited variety of tracks with a gentle sprinkling of terrible mechanics. The in-game vehicles handled infamously badly, especially when using the motion controller on Wii.

Indeed, the game was released back in 2008 for both the Wii and Nintendo DS. Both versions were as bad as each other and were both critically panned. Gamespot awarded it their “Flat-Out Worst Game of 2008” award, which we like to think is on someone’s filing cabinet somewhere (digital awards didn’t exist all the way back in 2008 right?). The game “could put you off M&M’s” wrote Justin Calvert in a hilariously deadpan review.

The fact that it’s an awful game somehow isn’t even the worst thing about M&M’s Kart Racing, it’s the shamefully overt nature of the advertising effort. It’s astonishing to even think that the costs of developing a game of this nature are actually worth the advertising space. It must be cheaper than we’re led to believe - or, well, Mars are awful at setting an advertising budget. To be fair they haven’t tried anything of the sort since, but one can assume that the guy who came up with the idea is long, long gone.

Here’s another rather comical little detail for you: the game’s packaging claimed that 10 different racing environments could be ‘enjoyed’ while in actuality there were 15 on offer. Yup, somehow they actually managed to under-sell the game on the very packaging in which it was presented. It’s difficult to think how the whole thing could’ve been done worse - it worked, so that’s something.