![]() ![]() ![]() That brings us to Team Sonic Racing, Sumo Digital’s third outing with SEGA’s branding and ditching the wider scope of the company’s history entirely for a game focused on one franchise and one franchise alone, Sonic the Hedgehog. SEGA had tried bringing Sonic into the racing genre with earlier titles such as Sonic R and Sonic Drift on the SEGA Saturn and Game Gear, respectively however, Sheffield-based studio Sumo Digital had instead perfected bringing their IP into an excellently designed kart racer. Thankfully, as they continue to prove, SEGA does what Ninten’don’t’, or in this case ‘didn’t’, when they released Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing in 2010, a multi-platform marvel that acted not only as a brilliantly competent and fun kart racer but a wonderful love letter to SEGA’s history, including characters from titles such as Shenmue, Jet Set Radio, Virtua Fighter and strange guest characters, like Banjo and Kazooie, depending on the platform, and later building upon it with Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, an even better sequel that cut down on the broader SEGA fanfare in place of tighter design and focus and the introduction of transforming vehicles and stages, re-contextualising just how versatile the team at Sumo Digital are. Mario Kart 8 is a masterpiece and easily the best game in its genre-defining franchise, so beloved that the Nintendo Switch port (released three years later) currently remains the highest-selling title on the platform. The reasoning for this is fairly simple: Nobody does kart racers quite like Nintendo. Since the release of Nintendo’s Mario Kart 8 in 2014, the genre has more or less remained quiet, with the odd shameless tie-in, such as Nickelodeon Kart Racers or Garfield Kart, peering its head out as easy space within a fairly basic and fundamental video game genre.
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