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Mario Kart World takes Nintendo into another open world | hands-on gameplay

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 2 min

Nintendo is betting that gamers will believe that Mario Kart World will be worth playing on the new Nintendo Switch 2. But it may be hard to convince them to put their money down for an $80 game and a $450 game console.

Those prices were probably impacted by Trump’s tariffs, but they represent a big hurdle for players. So is the Mario Kart World worth it? For sure, it represents a generational change in improvement over Mario Kart 8, which has been showing its age. The Switch 2 Mario Kart Open World game, which I got to play a few times yesterday, is certainly impressive. The title has up to 24 human drivers speeding around a track.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.