Mario Kart 8

Welcome to the beautiful Yoshi Valley, a nature reserve dedicated to wild Yoshis. There’s lots of gorgeous scenery to admire here – a lovely grassy meadow, a cascading waterfall, and a rushing river can all be seen as you race around this mountain valley under the late afternoon sun. You might think that petrol-fuelled racing would pollute this idyllic sanctuary, but the Yoshis don’t seem to mind. In fact, spectating Yoshis of various colours can be seen throughout this course, waving and jumping and clearly enjoying the fun. To add to the Yoshi theme, there is a huge, mossy rock structure that forms the head of a Green Yoshi (seen above), and there are lots of coloured eggs within the valley.

Like the original version of Yoshi Valley on the Nintendo 64, the Mario Kart 8 iteration of this course features a network of routes winding through a wide canyon. This maze-like design features a series of weaving, interconnected paths; some routes are a little faster, while others have gentler turns, but they all eventually lead to where you need to go.

There are a couple of obstacles to note in Yoshi Valley. One of the many routes runs through a cave, where Swoops appear. These bat-like creatures aren’t too threatening, but they can fly low enough to hit racers and slow them down. Goombas also appear towards the end of a lap, although they’re relatively easy to avoid.

Perhaps the most noteworthy obstacle can be found near the end of the course, after all of the routes have converged, where a giant green-and-white Yoshi egg slowly rotates around a mesa, acting almost as a guardian to a bridge you need to cross to reach the finish line. The egg will roll over any unsuspecting racers, so drive around it to avoid being knocked over.

Yoshi is a friendly, rideable green dinosaur who appears throughout the Super Mario franchise as Mario’s steed and occasional ally. He made his first appearance in the 1990 SNES game Super Mario World, but his origins go back even further. Shigeru Miyamoto, the video game designer at Nintendo credited with creating the Mario series, had, in fact, wanted Mario to have a dinosaur companion ever since the first Super Mario Bros, released in 1985 for the NES. However, such a character could not be added to that game due to the limitations of the console.

But once the more powerful SNES was released, Miyamoto was finally able to implement the dinosaur character in Super Mario World, which would be set in a ‘dinosaur land’. Yoshi, as the dinosaur was called, was partially inspired by the green dragon Tamagon in the 1984 game Devil World. Miyamoto designed both Tamagon and Yoshi, which share several similarities: they are both green lizards that hatch from eggs and can eat enemies with their enormous mouths, and they both make similar noises when they hatch. The concept of Mario riding a dinosaur came from the game Excitebike, which featured people riding motorcycles.

The director of Super Mario World, Takashi Tezuka, asked designer Shigefumi Hino to draw a reptile-like creature based on Miyamoto’s sketches. Hino originally produced a design that Tezuka deemed too reptilian, and ‘didn’t really fit into the Mario world’, so he encouraged the designer to create a ‘cuter’ character instead. According to Hino, the design rationale is that when Mario punches Yoshi while riding the dinosaur, Yoshi is so surprised that his tongue leaps out.

Next time, Cloudtop Cruise takes players on a race through the sky, from a giant beanstalk to Bowser’s airship.