Speaking of my previous post, my son is watching a "long play" of Super Mario Kart, and it's amazing to me how much better designed it is than the modern games in the series-- because it's purely functional!

The Mode 7 tracks are colorful and pleasing to look at, but not any more complex than they need to be. There are eight-- and only eight-- characters from which to choose; it's enough to have variety, while any more would cause the characters to not feel differentiated enough in how they drive.

The map on the bottom has giant (relative to the map) representations of the characters, so it's easy to see the ordering of the characters out of the peripheral vision. There is a perfect-volume, easily identifiable "skid" sound effect when someone gets hit or runs over a banana peel. Racing is prioritized over combat, so you don't get the totally maddening "chain hit" effect of the modern games. The game also shows you your race time, unlike Mario Kart 8-- novel idea! Unlike the contemporary games, there is a full-fledged combat mode, with its own custom-designed arenas. This mode has such depth and fun factor that it could be a whole game in and of itself.

People talk about the diminishing returns of video game graphics, and while that sentiment is totally accurate, the thing that bothers me is the diminishing returns in video game design.

The Super Nintendo had a 3.58 MHz CPU-- and that's when it was run in maximum power mode!-- along with 128 K of RAM and a primitive DSP for audio. A modern computer has a 4 GHz, many-core processor, 16 gig of RAM, can do Dolby 7.1 audio over HDMI, and a utilizes a many-teraflop GPU. Yet not only has the quality of game design not kept pace with the increasing technology available to developers. but it's actually gone backwards!