So I'm kind of feeling like an idiot this morning. When I bought my PS5 last month it was the Astrobot bundle, and when I saw that Astrobot's playroom was already installed, I figured, "oh okay, that's the game they included". And while it was technically just a tech demo, it was an absolute goddamn delight so I was thrilled to have it.

Fast forward to this morning as I am finally getting around to throwing out the PS5 box. I did one last sweep inside to make sure there wasn't any warranty information that I should keep, and then I found it. A small quarter sheet of paper with a download code for the actual Astrobot game. I was about 5 ft away from the garbage can when I made the discovery, so I'm happy, but I'm also kind of cringing and shaking my head at myself.

And on a related observation, when I went to scratch off the download code, it took me about 5 minutes to find a coin in this house. Gone are the days when I can just open up a junk drawer or stick my hand in the couch to find a penny or quarter or whatever. Money is a changing.

Mario Kart World interview bits:

“We were thinking about what to do for the next Mario Kart game even during the development of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, and we began prototyping in March 2017. It was at the end of that year when we officially started work on it as a project. I felt that in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, we were able to perfect the formula that we’d been following in the series up to that point, where players race on individual courses. That’s why, this time, we wanted the gameplay to involve players driving around a large world, and we began creating a world map like this.”

“In previous Mario Kart games, after finishing a course, you’d move on to the next course. However, I thought that with modern technology, being able to seamlessly transition between courses and realize a single, vast world wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility. So, with this in mind, we set out to create a new kind of Mario Kart….And that’s when all our troubles began. (Laughs)”

Mario Kart World was originally planned as a game for the current Switch, Nintendo has revealed.

That piece of information comes from an official interview that went live today. The team was finding it a challenge to incorporate everything it wanted to do, including ramping up from 12 racers to 24 players. Programmer Kenta Sato said various sacrifices were considered, including “toning down the visuals, lowering the resolution, and we even considered dropping the frame rate to 30 FPS in some cases.” However, the move to Nintendo Switch 2 allowed for everything to be kept intact.

Producer Kosuke Yabuki added: “We worked on it while kicking the can down the road in terms of deciding what to give up on, so at some point, we knew it was going to get messy. But as we’d decided to release Mario Kart 8 Deluxe – Booster Course Pass, we thought that would give us a bit more time to continue development. That’s when the conversation of moving it to the Nintendo Switch 2 system came up, and this suddenly opened up a bunch of possibilities on what we could do. It was truly a ray of hope.”

Yabuki would bring up the idea of moving the game to Nintendo Switch 2 in 2020. Sato said “our worries to evaporate all at once” once the decision was made.

"When we were developing for Nintendo Switch, we often worried whether we could find the right balance between planning and performance. Of course, the Switch system’s performance is sufficient for developing different kinds of games, but if we had included everything we wanted to in this game’s vast world, then it wouldn’t have run at 60 fps and would have suffered from constant framerate drops. I think there were a lot of people on the team who were worried about whether we could really manage it. But once we decided to release this game on Switch 2, we expected our worries to evaporate all at once. I remember being overjoyed when I discovered we could express even more than we’d originally set out to.”

Art director Masaaki Ishikawa also shared:

“Of course, the graphics needed to be more detailed. But like Sato-san, I also felt like it was outweighed by the sense of relief. From the beginning, the designers were saying they wanted to make the art richer, so I thought we could achieve that now. For example, team members who were creating the terrain in the scenery were really happy because they could now place more trees, which were key to giving the world a more natural look.”