Mario Kart 8 Deluxe's Coconut Mall gets fixed, and now it's better than the original

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"Hilarious how they now just do donuts with the sole intent to harm"

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
(Image credit: Nintendo)

After months of requests from fans, Nintendo has made a minor update to fix the Coconut Mall course in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe - and it's arguably made the track better than the original Wii version.

In the original Wii Coconut Mall (and the version that appeared in Mario Kart 7), the end of the course featured a number of cars driving back and forth across the track. When Coconut Mall returned as part of the first wave of Booster Course Pack DLC for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, the cars were still there, but they were turned into static, unmoving obstacles - a change that prompted a minor but loud community outcry.

But alongside the second wave of the Booster Course Pack, the 2.1.0 update for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe brought one standout detail in the patch notes: "The cars that the Shy Guys are riding in in Wii Coconut Mall now move from time to time in all modes other than the Time Trial mode."

Saying that the cars "move from time to time" really undersells what's happening, though. The Shy Guys now maniacally twirl their cars around in a sort of death donut, spinning out anybody unlucky enough to get smacked by the murderous tail whip. It might be the most egregious bit of fictional vehicular violence since Steven Spielberg's Duel. Nintendo was happy to provide a clip on Twitter.

Rather than being traumatized by the automotive assault, however, fans are lapping it up. "Better than the original car sequence from the Wii now," Waluigi_Gamer_Real says on Reddit. "That's awesome," LonelyGoomba says on Twitter. "Also hilarious how they now just do donuts with the sole intent to harm."

Mario Kart 64 could've given us a vision of Mario Kart without items.

Dustin Bailey
Dustin Bailey
Staff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.