So, about the Mario Kart ride. You enter via the impressive facade of Bowser's Castle. When we entered, it said "wait time 15 minutes". Most of that time was spent walking, nonstop, to the actual ride's start. The holding queue is just INCREDIBLE. Huge room after huge room after huge room of snaking queue. We didn't have to actually walk the majority of it because they had huge parts of each room bypassed, but it was just AMAZING how many people could be funneled in there. I have no experience in judging crowd sizes, but I guessed that the queue could hold 2,000 people. My friend's guess was 3,000 people.
Before you get to the huge holding-pen rooms, you walk down a wide hallway (made un-wide by railings to keep you at most two abreast, likely a COVID thing) with the trophies seen in the video.
There's a lot of Mario-world detail to enjoy along the whole queue, though perhaps in the big holding-pen rooms, where you're snaking back and forth and back and forth and back and forth for likely a big chunk of time in each room, the views would get a bit stale until you moved to the next room.
Eventually you move past the big holding-pen rooms and into some much-more-elaborate areas with less queue-snaking, with some really amazing ambiance. I don't know the details of the game, but it was really nicely done and I found myself wanting to go slower to try to take it in. (Remember, we weren't waiting in a line, we were just walking there.) I remember a large Library area that was super interesting. Again, very, very well done.
I can imagine that on a busy day, when you've waited an hour or two just to get to this point, it'll really get a fan's heart racing.
Then the queue moves downstairs, where again, you're enveloped in a really-well-made vibe. You're in some big kind of reactor room, with glowing lava rocks. (It felt to me like Half Life meets Minecraft). The lighting is subdued to perfection. Adrenaline will be flowing.
At one point you're given a rubber-and-plastic visor thing. This was at a set of doors, prior to entering whatever came next, and this was the first time that we had to actually wait. I inspected the visor thing carefully.... just rubber (to make it fit painlessly) and plastic. No electronics of any kind. We finally decided that it was just an accessory to help people feel the part.
When the doors opened, we went into a room with a lot of monitors on them, showing stuff. I didn't realize it right away, but eventually realized that they were instructions. No words, just language-neutral presentation (like Lego instructions, but without instilling the desire to kill yourself).
What I got from the instructions is that when we got to the kart, we would be given AR goggles that snapped onto the visors we already had. We could look around in three dimensions and see things to shoot at, and shoot at them with two buttons on either side of the steering wheel. (I imagine that the two buttons had identical function, but not sure).
Also, at times, we'd see an indication in the AR goggles that we should turn right or left, and if everyone in the car did, you'd get some coins. [After having actually ridden, I got the feeling that the steering wheel had no influence on the kart's actual movement... just on your kart's score, but it's not impossible that if all four people did the turn correctly, the kart's movement would be impacted... perhaps made smoother?]
The karts seat four. The rear seats are quite a bit higher than the front seats, so nothing is blocking your view. You sit down, pull the safety bar to yourself. It has the wired AR goggles sitting on them... they snap into the visor on your head via magnets (so I guess they have metal as well as rubber and plastic). It was quite dark and things were moving fast so I didn't have a chance to really inspect them, but the lenses were attached only at the top to the unit (that clicked onto the headband), and had no side or lower rims. I seem to remember that they were a bit yellowish, like the goggles of an X-Wing pilot.... but mostly flat... just slightly curved.
There are two separate tracks, and so you face off in some kind of competition with the kart opposite you.
Once you start, the AR kicks in and you are OVERWHELMED by stuff for a short while. Things flying here and there, all kinds of stuff I couldn't really understand, and can't remember. It was overwhelming only for a short while, I guess until the competition actually started, then it seemed to calm down to normal game-play level. Maybe they wanted to impress you with the AR via shock and awe? It worked.
If you look down, you see an AR dashboard with two numbers, one being your coins, and the other your ammo. If you looked out and about and up, even behind you, you saw all kinds of AR stuff (things you're supposed to shoot, or that are supposed to startle you, or just entertain you, I guess)
The head/AR accuracy was very good, as was the spacial awareness in the entire space. Your shots were aimed via where you pointed your face, and if I looked at the kart next to us (~5-10 meters, depending) and shot, the shot would splat off the car. But a little up or in front and it would go off into the distance until it hit the wall or some AR item.
It took me a while to realize that I had to aim my *face* and not eyes. This came naturally for everything except the dash board, which I soon forgot about because it wasn't there when I *glanced* down. I had to actually bow my head down to see it. Once I did, I saw the ammo count and realized why sometimes I could shoot and sometimes I couldn't.
I don't quite understand the ammo count. At one point I noticed that it was in the 30s, but 10 shots later it was zero. It could be that each shot takes more than one unit (?), or maybe you get new ammo for each sub-section of the ride, and I looked at it when it had just reset to zero? Dunno.
Besides the AR, there's a lot of practical stuff as well, and at times some HUGE screens covering the walls that make some incredible visuals.
The video that Sam mentioned in his reply to me suggested that there were sections of the ride based on different parts of the game. I have no idea whether this was true because it was all the same to me. And things were going very fast, most of which I didn't understand. And I was shooting everything I could look at.... I didn't have time to try to understand it. Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor, not a game reviewer.
I imagine that if I tried it a couple more times, and learned exactly what I'm supposed to shoot and not shoot, it'd be quite fun in a competitive way, but as it was, it was just fun in an overwhelming way. I suppose it'll be like that for most people the first time.
Near the end, the cars align and you stop for a moment at some screens and apparently they showed our scores, and you could presumably compare your car's four people's scores with that of the car you were playing against. But by the time it registered what I was looking at, we were whisked away so I never even figured out which display showed my car and my score and the scores of my friends. Again, a few more times through and I'd probably have it down pat.
In looking at the ride-specific video that Sam shared, a few comments come to mind. Yes, it's a tracked ride. I don't think "Nintendo Characters in other cars will ride up beside you" happened, unless it was in AR. A lot of stuff was happening in AR.
The kart ride was the only AR that I noticed in Super Nintendo World.
While the karts where moving, I don't recall any feeling of going faster than we actually were. (If there were any of the visual tricks that were mentioned in the video, they didn't work on me, but I don't think there were). There was lots of spinning and sudden lurches and bumping and stopping, so it's throwing you around quite a bit. Maybe if everyone's steering a the right times, it goes smoother?
When you're back at the loading dock, you exit via a gift shop.
