Mod Showcase: Mario Kart

Hello. I’m Brickinator. This is Mod Showcase. The end is coming.

Today we’ll be having a look at Mario Kart, the worst custom Team Fortress 2 map ever made. There are no objectives and the level is a horrific, blocky landscape covered in rainbows. It basically looks like a Lego set covered in pixie jizz. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

At first glance, Mario Kart appears to be a sugary bit of children’s drizzle where you can piss around, but the more you play it the more you realise it’s actually a stonehearted exposé of everything that’s wrong with our faltering so-called civilization.

Even from the server browser you get your first taste of the grim reverie that awaits you. ‘MARIO KART’, the map title reads. The capitalised title tears its way out of the map list, screaming and squealing like a caged animal. ‘100% CRITS’ cries the description. ‘24/7 MARIO KART’ it adds. Permanent Mario Kart; surely there is no greater punishment. People are doomed to be stuck on this one horrific puddle of wank forever. A fitting epitaph to humanity.

I connected to the server, only to witness a stream of sounds and textures being downloaded with the map. A thousand tiny memories fleeting past my eye before disappearing into that candy-coloured shithole. ‘doitfaggot.vtf’ one reads. No sooner have I spawned ingame than I am assaulted with the mission objective. ‘EAT A BOWL OF DICKS’ it commands. I wonder how many poor, unsuspecting players have followed those harrowing words.

The match was filled with shrieking children; the nightmarish remains of once sane individuals. They howled and squeaked to their shitface friends, trading crap and discussing their favourite Pokemon. I fell to my knees and prayed for the nuclear holocaust.

The soundtrack to this horror was a delightful selection of ear-rape music presumably conceived as a form of torture in the fourteenth century. It’s almost as if you’re supposed to hate it. Maybe the purpose of this map is to make you hate things. Maybe it’s intended to incite your rage towards the society you live in. Maybe it’s Al-Qaeda recruitment material.

It was like being pinned to the ground while an angry dishwasher shat in your face for two hours. Any human dumb enough to voluntarily sit through a second helping of that unremitting fecal spew really ought to just get up and leave the planet via the nearest window before their continued presence does lasting damage to the gene pool.

I can’t wait to have another go.