Mario Kart: The Agony And The Anguish Of The Blue Shell

gamespot.com:

Mario Kart is celebrating its 30-year anniversary today, August 27, 2022. Below, we take a look at one of the most controversial power-ups in video games, the infamous Blue Shell.

There is no single item in all of video games as hated and feared as Mario Kart's Blue Shell, aka the Spiny Shell. Though it didn't debut with the original game on the Super NES, the item has become a recognizable icon and a part of the series' identity. It is the ultimate equalizer, representing not just a single mechanic in a single Mario spin-off, but Nintendo's entire philosophy of play. Naturally, some people just really hate the damn thing.

The original Super Mario Kart was essentially a pure test of skill, rudimentary as it was. The tracks were flat and it approximated the idea of 3D by rotating and scaling the map around the player's kart. The items were mostly recognizable, aside from a few oddities like the Feather to jump over obstacles, and specialized items that would only appear for CPU-controlled versions of Bowser or Yoshi. There was no spiny blue shell in the bunch. The most powerful item was the Lightning Bolt, which had an extremely low probability of appearing across the board and only slightly higher if you were trailing behind the pack. It was an equalizer, sure, but its effect was distributed more or less equally. It hit every racer except the one who triggered the item, so whether you were in first place or fourth place, you were impacted.

Then came Mario Kart 64, a massive improvement over Super Mario Kart in almost every way. The tracks were bigger and more varied, a new power-slide and dash maneuver raised the skill ceiling for serious karters, and there was a real sense of 3D space. Plus, there were new items like