I’ve been thoroughly enjoying Mario Kart 8. Sure, the battle “arenas” are terrible and the lack of a mini-map is a little disappointing, but the HD is amazing and the tracks are well designed.

I’ve been watching ghosts to improve my track times and thought it would be fun to do a graphic on world records. Because there are going to be new records daily for MK8, this graphic looks at world records for Mario Kart Wii. Note that I’m using non-shortcut records – players have accomplished much faster times using some remarkable glitches.

Most of the time, the record holders use one mushroom per lap, and the consistency among lap speeds for a given track is incredible. The first lap is typically the slowest (24 of 32 tracks) and the last lap, the fastest (17 of 32 tracks). Looking at the graph, you can easily distinguish the tracks where the driver used all mushrooms on one lap (Mario Circuit and Dry Dry Ruins). On GCN Peach Beach, the driver uses one mushroom on the first lap, and two on the last lap.

Data source: http://www.mkwrs.com/mkwii/ (YouTube videos)