YMMV / Mario Kart 64

• Awesome Music:
  • The Staff Roll, such an amazing, happy and heartwarming song.
  • The theme for Rainbow Road is also pretty catchy.
  • Toad's Turnpike sounds like an equally catchy preview of the aforementioned Rainbow Road. It also sounds like the kind of music typically played on The Weather Channel's Weatherscan.
  • The Frappe Snowland / Sherbet Land music is extremely relaxing.
  • The theme for Choco Mountain (which is also used for Block Fort and Double Deck in Battle Mode) is upbeat and exciting. It's a shame Nintendo didn't put it on Mario Kart 64's Greatest Hits Soundtrack.
• Best Level Ever:
  • This game's Rainbow Road, being a marathon level with an iconic theme and beautiful visuals featuring hand-drawn artworks of the characters. It's considered to be among the best and second only to Mario Kart 7's Rainbow Road, which is an Even Better Sequel. It's also Adored by the Network, with Nintendo promoting it in Mario Kart 8 more than its own Rainbow Road (to the point where it appears on 8 Deluxe's cover art), perhaps due to coming after Mario Kart 7's Rainbow Road, though eventually it would get said Rainbow Road as well and be adored and promoted as well.
  • Kalimari Desert is a great Shifting Sand Land course going above and beyond what would be expected from one. It has an unique gimmick in a train that appears during various parts of the course, forcing racers stop before crashing with the train. It also has various unique shortcuts that let you drive in the rails or the tunnel the train uses. Its music is memorable as well and it even features railroad crossing sounds taken from real Japanese National Railway railroad crossing signals with electronic bells.
• Breather Level: Rainbow Road, despite being a ridiculously long course and having Chain Chomps, is far easier than the previous level, Banshee Boardwalk.
• Character Tiers:
  • Yoshi, Toad, and Peach are all top tier, due to lightweights having the best acceleration and speed.
  • Bowser is mid-high, due to being the only non-lightweight that can effectively use the triple tap A^note Pressing A three times after a stop makes you accelerate far better than just holding it.
  • Donkey Kong and Wario are mid-low, due to not being able to use the triple tap A as effectively.
  • Mario and Luigi are bottom, due to middleweights being a Master of None in this game.
• Common Knowledge: Most people believe that the thwomp nicknamed "Marty" is a unique green thwomp. In reality, this thwomp is blue like any other thwomps from the Mario games on the Nintendo 64. It just looks green because of the lighting in the cell.
• Crosses the Line Twice: The bomb pursuing your character in the bad ending for not making the podium, because of how absurdly cruel it is.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Believe it or not, a Thwomp got this treatment - the green Thwomp locked in Bowser Castle, actually a regular Thwomp with lighting in the cell that makes him appear green. Fans gave him the Affectionate Nickname "Marty" and posted hackneyed ideas about how to unlock him.
• Even Better Sequel: To the original SNES game, as this game improved upon basically every aspect of its predecessor and is considered by many players to be the part where the series began Growing the Beard thanks to it being the franchise's transition to 3D (although characters and items remain 2D sprites) allowing for much more ambitious track design and building on the gameplay introduced by the first game by introducing more items, less finicky controls and adding mini turbo boosts.
• Fan Nickname:
  • The Spiny Shell, which makes its debut here, is known by fans as the Blue Shell.
  • The seemingly green Thwomp locked behind bars in Bowser's Castle is popularly known as Marty the Thwomp among fans.
• Fanon: Amused by Wario replacing Koopa Troopa as a playable racer, many fans thought that Wario stole Troopa's kart. Even Nintendo Power got in on it by publishing some fan art that had Troopa reporting Wario's theft to the police:
  Koopa Troopa: Yes officer, it was a fat man in purple overalls who stole my cart!
• Game-Breaker: If you happen to have a Spiny Shell and hold Z, you'll trail the shell behind you. As long as you don't release Z and shoot it, it will stay behind you, providing yourself a pretty wicked shield. Since the shell only destroys itself when hitting the racer in first and has priority over all other items, it will not go away no matter how many items (or racers) hit it. Just don't shoot it once you're in first place.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Literal bats in Banshee Boardwalk. They slow you down if they hit you, and are pretty hard to avoid. You can't spin out by hitting them, but it's small comfort.
  • The cars on Toad's Turnpike. Running into one of these things will bring any racer who so much as clips them to a dead stop, as the cars cause the racers to crash. The cars are even worse in mirror mode, where they become oncoming cars.
• Good Bad Bugs: Smack a CPU-racer hard enough on the spiral tower in Bowser's Castle or Rainbow Road and they'll fly off the track, effectively putting them out of commission for the entire race; depending on how hard you hit them, they'll re-spawn but their AI will glitch up, making them unable to move from the location you hit them off the course as they believe they're on the upper level when they're still on the lower one. A Star will usually accomplish this.
• Growing the Beard: While some Early-Installment Weirdness is still afoot in this game, this is where the modern Mario Kart formula really begins to take shape. This establishes many of the common series tropes like reusable item boxes, 16 tracks per game at four per grand prix, the eight mainstay characters, drift boosting, less sensitive and touchy controls, and the item rebalancing that would soon become the expected item roster at the minimum in each game (minus the five bananas being reduced to three).
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Luigi is the pope!" ^ExplanationIn the Japanese version, Luigi's "Luigi is the top" is misheard as this.
  • Most of Toad's English dialogue in this game is known for its very vocal and enthusiastic delivery, from his "YAHOO!" and "I'm the best!" to the long shout Toad emits whenever he's hit.
  • "BUP"^ExplanationA short, reversed, and sped up sample of Toad's "AWOWOWOWOWOWOWO" voice clip, popularized by Super Mario 64 speedrunner SimpleFlips and commonly invoked in reference to Toad's N64 appearances.
• Moe: Yoshi's neon light picture in the background of Rainbow Road. It's a shame they placed it on the hairpin turn, meaning you'll only have a couple of seconds per lap to appreciate it.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • The victory theme coupled with your character celebrating its victory. The whole credits song counts as well.
  • Among the racers' voices, Yoshi's "spin out" sound is uniquely satisfying and silly.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Bowser's Castle can feel uncanny with its laughing Thwomps, tight corridors, and dark sky only lit up by melting lava. Bowser's creepy laugh launching if you fall off tracks also gives the impression that a dark presence is watching you, expecting you to lose for some reason. The music consisting of an ominous percussion, sinister synths, and loud choirs amplifies this sensation.
  • Banshee Boardwalk is the game's Big Boo's Haunt, and 3D graphics make it even creepier than the previous ghost levels: the narrow boardwalk gives a claustrophobic feel, the dark night sky makes the track even harder to practice, and the bats slow down your progression. The creepy xylophone music is a great ambient track as much as it gives the impression your character is panicking.
  • The music that plays when you reach 5-8th place which sounds like something out of a horror movie: just listen to it.
• Nintendo Hard: 150cc and especially Extra, mostly for the computer drivers.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: A very strange example in which it is ludicrously difficult to get 8th Place as your final placement in the 1-Player Grand Prix, due to the game not letting you progress unless you get at least 4th place each race. This means you are required to get 1 point every race, and as a result, it is impossible to complete a Grand Prix with less than 4 points. In order to place 8th overall, you need to make sure that all of the computer-controlled racers have at least 5 points at the end of the cup since tie goes to the player. And this means that, out of the four races in the cup, all seven other racers need to either get first or second place (9 or 6 points respectively) at least once, or third place (3 points) at least twice (they will never get fourth because you will always be occupying that position yourself, and all places below fourth give 0 points). Achieving this requires being extremely good at manipulating the A.I. and preventing any racers from hogging all of the points. The YouTuber Captain Forest Falcon is one example of someone who has successfully completed the challenge.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: This game is much easier to play and beat than the original Super Mario Kart, even in 150cc mode. This is mainly due to the improved drifting system, more responsive turning, larger tracks, and more exploitable computer-controlled characters, even with the Rubber-Band A.I.. It helps that unlike its predecessor, it eschews Video-Game Lives, meaning if you fail to place 4th or better, you can retry as many times as you want.
• That One Level:
  • Yoshi Valley is a huge labyrinth on narrow cliff sides and no fencing, which makes it very easy to fall off the track. If you fall off, unlike other courses where falling takes a few seconds and Lakitu picked you up, falling in Yoshi Valley will take a long time before Lakitu picks you up. This no doubt severely hurts you and puts you back several positions. Worse, there is a huge egg near the end that can crush you. Finally, there's some Interface Screw with just this course, where the positions and rankings of everyone is hidden. The only way you can find out what place you finished in is by crossing the finish line. It's somewhat easier in its return in Mario Kart 8, which not only evens out the routes, but also adds railings to many of them, and also shows the racer positions.
  • Banshee Boardwalk is easily the hardest course in the game, lots of very sharp turns and drop offs, with very little room for error. Literal Goddamned Bats really don't help, as they can slow you down by bumping into you.
  • Toad's Turnpike. The course itself is pretty straightforward, but the course also has various-sized cars that share the road with you in traffic, ranging from a small four-door to a huge double-decker bus. If you so much as touch one of the cars, you're wiped out to a dead stop every time, no matter what size the car is. And there can be cars blocking both lanes, requiring you to squeeze through a narrow gap to avoid getting wiped out. On Mirror Cup, not only are the turns reversed, but the traffic is now oncoming traffic, making it much harder to avoid it. Even the high-level CPU racers have trouble getting out of the way of the cars on Mirror Mode, and it's not uncommon to get hit by two or three cars in a row before being able to keep going. Expect to retry this one a couple of times if you're going through it in Grand Prix.
  • Wario's Stadium has a huge jump in the middle of it which if you manage to fall in the middle by screwing up or getting hit by something while jumping, Lakitu doesn't carry you back to the other side and instead you're forced to race back into the ramp to do another jump. It'll screw you up so badly in the rankings that you've pretty much automatically lost the race.
  • If Banshee Boardwalk isn't the hardest track in the game for someone, Bowser's Castle will be. It has a massive array of hazards in the first half of the track up to the short lava bridge. Get hit by any of them on 150cc or Extra while racing computers will easily allow one of them to not only take the lead, but stay in the lead thanks to the inhuman top speeds they can reach when you can't see them.
  • Royal Raceway has many narrow turns that are easy to fall off and one of them leads to the water. Thankfully made much easier in the update for Mario Kart 8, albeit the 200cc update made this track a bit of a headache to some players.
  • Choco Mountain, and mostly due to the very last part with a set of three hills before the finish line. Using a Mushroom incorrectly or getting hit by something like a Red Shell can spell the difference between first place and fifth place (being in any place below fourth meant you would have to try the track again), especially in the final lap. The AI also gets an unfair speed boost over the camel humps right before the finish line, allowing them to easily scoot by while you lose speed driving over them.
  • Among the Battle stages, Skyscraper is far and away the hardest course to navigate through, no thanks to the narrow pathways and almost invisible bottomless pits without guard-rails. It's entirely possible for players to completely lose without ever managing to get an item, let alone use it.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The Japanese version features race sponsors that are obvious parodies of major Formula 1 sponsors of the time, including ones that are now banned from advertising in sports ("Marioro" as a parody of Marlboro, a cigarette brand), or which haven't been involved in F1 in years ("Luigip" as a parody of Agip).
• Woolseyism: The audio changes in the menus from the Japanese version to the International version^note Namely the Title Scream being changed from a group of children screaming "Mario Kart!" to Mario screaming "Welcome to Mario Kart!" and replacing the generic male race narrator from the menu with Mario himself. are widely considered to be superior to the original.

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