Mario Kart 8 Beats Stern Competition To Become Eurogamer's Game Of 2014

And not Smash U! Go MK8!

Well this is pleasantly surprising!!!!!

Well, there's a reason that Destiny and Advanced Warfare were beaten...

And they gave 3D World GOTY last year too (against much tougher competition too), but you still get a load of people on here dismissing them as biased against Nintendo, or bizarrely criticising Digital Foundry for going into too much detail.

Well it's certainly the game I played the most this year!

Excellent choice.

@whodatninja
I blame MK8 for my ever growing backlog.

Mk8 is just fun in it's purest form.

A well deserved victory. Nintendo simply is hard- and software developer of the past couple of decades to me. Sure, they had some low points here and there, but they have guts and vision, fun games that overflow with love and polish, original ideas, and they helped several third party studio's deliver some of their finest work ever.

Now, publish Project Zero on Wii U outside of Japan, and you're my publisher of the past few decades as well!

Mario Kart 8 is a wonderful and charming game and I've had TONS of fun with it, but in all honesty I'm quite surprised that it's winning as GOTY when it doesn't even have a proper Battle Mode. Mario Kart is more about racing, sure, but the Battle Mode has always been a fairly big part of the series as well, and with how screwed up it is in MK8 I am surprised with all this praise. Not to say that the game doesn't deserve it, though. For what the game offers, it certainly is excellent.

I'm thrilled that any Nintendo game won their GOTY for the second straight year. Both MK8 and SM3DW are very deserving.

And i totally agree with @Peach64 here. Well said.

@Peach64 Originally saw this in one of the comments on the EG article but it essentially said that the fact that a Wii U game has won EG's GOTY for two years running just goes to show that pure fun and perfected gameplay will always win out in the end.

And I totally agree with that.

What a joke. I can think of roughly 10 titles ahead of MK8.

I bought my WiiU to play Mario Kart 8 so it's definitely my game of the year.
This time next year hopefully I'll have a shiney new PS4 to play the new Star Wars Games on.

Though I feel Smash trumps it in every aspect I can certainly see why it would win. It is arguably the best Mario Kart to date!

@KillScottKill it's been almost forty minutes and you haven't named even one...

Yay MK8 ftw.

Nintendo could make a cross-over game combining Smash and Mario Kart.

It could be called Road Rage Kart.

Art imitates life. You get to smash into the other drivers and then beat them up at the scene of the accident.

I liked MK8, ponied up for the DLC, looking forward to the new tracks in May, but I dont see it as GOTY material. Sure its the best MK8, the Wii U is the best hardware a MK game has ever run on, but I dont see enough difference for GOTY. Maybe Im burned out after MNR, Sonic Transformed and LBP Karting. Its better thanthose, but its still just MK.

SSBU added 8 player and World Tour to change things up a bit, and the amiibo FP. So at least it tried (no Subspace Emmisary is still a bummer though).

My GOTY is Hyrule Warriors. I know mosou games are a dime a dozen, and it wasnt as story driven as a typical Zelda game, but they somehow managed to merge the 2 franchises into a deep and fun game, which keeps adding more every other month, even amiibo support. Its a great game, and just different enough.

@Sir_JBizzle

Child of Light

Dragon Age

Smash

SHOVEL KNIGHT

Stick of Truth

Sunset Overdrive

Dark Souls II

Rogue Legacy, if you count its Playstation releases

Bayonetta 2

DKTF

MK8 is great, but in all honesty, I don't think it's even the best racing game of 2014, much less the best game in general. The best racing game I played in 2014 was definitely Forza Horizon 2. MK8 isn't all that great solo in my book and the Battle Mode is frankly shoddy. The worst thing I can say about FH2 is that it's weather system is not quite as spectacular as Drive Club's (haven't played Storm Island yet). Aside from that, it's pretty much a perfect game and most of the time even more fun than MK8.

MK8 and Forza Horizon 2? Sure, they are both racing, but on very different spectrums.

Back on topic, MK8, taken as a whole, was the most fun I had in 2014......I'm happy it got the nod over Smash U.

On a sidenote, Super Mario Galaxy won Eurogamers "game of the generation" award for the 7th gen.

"The Wii U had a solid 2014 in terms of software, with titles like Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze, Bayonetta 2 and Super Smash Bros. all gaining high scores and securing plenty of admirers."

I don't think I'd call 2014 a solid year in terms of software for any of the console makers, especially Nintendo, despite large titles like Mario Kart 8, Bayonetta 2, and Smash Bros finally coming out, the Wii U lost almost all 3rd party support and we are left still wondering about the still unknown release dates of several games that, really, should've been out by the end of 2014. Honestly, they introduced Yoshi's Wooly World, Shin Megami X Fire Emblem, and Xenoblade Chronicles so long ago, it's depressing.

It is both interesting and weird that Mario Kart 8 would be given such a high honor. I don't see what's so special about the game--it's no different than any Mario Kart that came before with the exception of some additional concepts stolen directly from F-Zero.

@Quorthon I know right? Now you can hit other karts and stuff to get boosts, just like in F-Zero...

I'm happy MK8 won another award, it's a great game mafe of 95% fun and 5% frustration. Almost pure fun

Distructoid gave it to Bayonetta 2 - Great year for the Wii U!

@BensonUii I'm exactly the same. I actually have barely touched Smash, I took a small break to finish NSMBU but I have yet to start NSLU, Steamworld Dig, Armillo been hardly touched, need to get back to DKC:TF... yet I can't resist ploughing more time in to MK8! I've been playing it since May, and more DLC to come?! What a game

I like this mario kart the best but smash wii u is my game of the year.

@KillScottKill I'm not a huge MK fan, but in no universe is Sunset better than MK, that game is the very definition of mediocre.

@KillScottKill Yeah, but by the time you thought of them MK8 sped up and zoomed pass them .

@Quorthon Really? I don't think 3rd party software was missed that much this year. ACU, Masterchief Collection, Destney, Watchdogs and Drive Club are just a few hugely disappointing games. Combined with serious online issues on both PSN and XBOX-Live brings a harsh reality to light. In 2014 3rd party games simply weren't ready! They where pushed out to door so companies could generate revenue from season passes and day one DLC.
2014 was a very poor year for Sony, MS and 3rd parties, in terms of actual product quality. The direction UBisoft, EA, Sony and MS are taking their games is an industry I don't want to be a part of. AAA games are moving towards always online which quickly brings in the question of ownership.
Also game delays happened across the board hence the countless remasters/remakes appearing last year and the start of this year.

Dragon Age is my fave game of 2014, but MK8 is pretty darn sweet too!

MK8 was a solid 9 for me. But not GOTY IMO.

I do keep going back to Mario Kart.

The clear winner in our household is Minecraft, though. Guess it didn't come out this year, so it can't win, but it kept drawing my kids back even in the middle of Christmas excess.

Super Smash Bros. is so impressive, but the dynamic isn't great for our family.

I'm really starting to yearn for a long adventure-style game like Zelda. Sure hope they meet that 2015 deadline. Meanwhile Hyrule Warriors is a pretty great diversion.

@originaljohn

2014 was disappointing in many regards, but this is also perfectly expected with the first year of a new console generation. Also, Halo and Driveclub are not 3rd party games, they are 1st Party games.

The rest of your comment is nonsensical bordering on straight ignorance. The rest of AAA gaming is moving towards always-online? Really? I haven't even played any PS4 games online yet. Assassin's Creed Unity ran into issues, but Far Cry 4 certainly did not.

Pushed out the door to generate revenue on Season Passes and Day-One DLC? This comment leads me to believe that you actually don't know anything about games outside of a the Wii U. Not every game has a Season Pass, and "selling Season Passes" is not a reason any game gets pushed out early. Yes, some games do get pushed out early, but that's more to seasonal burdens, which EA wisely avoided this year by delaying Battlefield to ensure that they avoid the mistakes of Battlefield 4.

Your post, unfortunately, runs the gamut of increasingly typical Nintendo fanboy rhetoric, and I sincerely hope that was not your intent. Dismissing all things 3rd party under a blanket statement, making assumptions about AAA gaming that demonstrate that you don't know anything about AAA gaming (and bizarrely indicating that Nintendo's games are not AAA-level), etc.

Game delays are not the reason there were so many remakes and rereleases in 2014. Remakes and ports of that ilk are a common practice when a new generation launches, as it is a fairly easy and cost-effective way to test new hardware and earn some quick revenue to better prepare for next-gen development. You seem to forget that the Wii U and Wii also featured a wealth of last-gen ports and remakes up on their launch and first year. This is an industry norm that will continue as long as we have "hard-set" generations rather than a unified platform that evolves gradually like PCs.

By the way, consider this: MS and Sony's online both had issues, which is unfortunate, but having a crunch on their online tends to occur when there are a lot of people getting on-board at the same time, which both consoles saw as both had huge numbers of new users and online games. Two things the Wii U did not receive. Let's try not to brag or boast about some fabled "sturdiness" of Nintendo's online when there's nothing happening on there anyway, and no one using it.

@Jahir

I would put the frustration percentage much higher (like 40%) for Mario Kart, but this franchise has frequently been my nemesis for a reason. I do not find luck or chance to be appealing game concepts, and Mario Kart relies as much on blind luck as it does any amount of skill. Someone with no skill can still finish a race pretty successfully if they just end up with enough game-breaking power-ups. I view the game as 60% skill and 40% luck, and that's just too much margin for being screwed over for not being lucky.

I had some fun with Mario Kart 8 (I tend to ignore the franchise more often than not due to the aforementioned nemesis status), but it got old quickly and in the end, didn't really feel like anything new or different. I'd have much rather had a new Excite Trucks (not Bots) arcade racer that uses analog sticks over tilt controls. Actually, what I'd really like is another Burnout game.

@Quorthon @originaljohn The Sony and Microsoft online game networks were hacked by the Lizard Squad, while Nintendo's wasn't. That was the issue, not new subscribers or the resilience of Nintendo's network.

@Slayer61

Lizard Squad claimed, but Microsoft and Sony did not back this up. The only thing that can be said for certain is that MS and Sony's networks conveniently went down right when a new holiday rush would expect it to be likely.

There appear to be a couple of arrests possibly related to Lizard Squad (honestly now, what are we, living in a bad 90's cyber movie? Lizard Squad is exactly the kind of name a hack Hollywood writer would come up with), but for the most part, there is no confirmation that they actually did anything. and the two individuals arrested in Europe may have been picked up for other reasons--you know, like credit card depth as hackers are increasingly not doing anything good for the world.

@Slayer61 @Quorthon @originaljohn I think what happened with PSN and Xbox Live on Christmas is awful. I think the only reason it didn't happen to Nintendo also is that we are in dead last in the current generation, and most of our games are not online dependent. Plus, our online is free, whereas a disruption of service would cost more of the other two since they have paying customers for the opportunity to game online.

But stuff like this is bad for everyone. I've seen some Nintendo fans (on other sites) being smug and bragging and we should in no way be that way because something could just as easily happen to us as well. I'm a Nintendo fan but also a gaming fan, and when this kind of thing happens, it makes me mad as a gamer. And it should make everyone mad regardless of where it happens or who does it.

@ericwithcheese2 I agree with you on all points.

@Ralek85 why are you comparing those tow?

@KillScottKill sunset overdrive, the most traded in game? And Bayonetta 2 that doesn't improve on anything that has gone before and can also be referred to as "Crotch Shot: The Game"? If you seriously think those two are better than MK8 then not many will trust your opinion.
Dragon Age and Smash are on par, but is only personal preference that separates them.

@Slayer61 @ericwithcheese2
General schedule maintenance is fine and I agree outside attacks are really bad for everyone, but PSN was randomly down a lot in October and Halo's matchmaking was simply unacceptable.
@Quorthon
I'm aware Halo and Drive Club are 1st party games, which actually makes things worse. Sony and MS will happily release broken games just for the sake of having products on store shelves. What message does it send when they release sub standard products? And what must they think of their customers?
I have little doubt these issues will appear again next year as I think netcode in games will be more refined and general services will be much more stable. Fanboy no, cynical yes. Nintendo have many many faults and a lot of work to do, but you can't argue their product quality is still top notch and Mario Kart 8 is testament to that.
As for AAA games, production costs are so high publishers have to sell a multitude of millions to see investment return. Remember games typically launch at high and quickly fall in the matter of weeks/months, their market value is greatly reduced. Methods of reducing this high sales number, which would be different for every game to be fair, are DLC or season passes (multi-player themed known as having the highest success), micro transactions, pre-order bonuses/pre-purchase incentives, multi-platform releases and the new toys to life. Not all AAA games feature all of these but compared to smaller titles (the amazing Child of Light etc) and Indie efforts the market is undeniably top loaded. Nintendo don't have production teams the size of Ubisoft or EA and they don't use motion capture for animations like Uncharted and may more titles, and I'm not saying that's negative in Naughty Dog's part. When I first played Uncharted I was blown away because well it's a fantastic game. They also don't drop the price of their titles which retains the market value of the game and the IP in as a whole. Personally I'd like to see more price drops in 1st party IP. And yes it's becoming more frequent high production cost games are shipping with online co-op sections, which will lead games into a service as opposed to an single complete product. Publishers know they can make more money more frequently when games run as a service. looking at MMO's and smartphone businesses it's clear they can. I'm not saying this will happen to every title released but I think it will hit the long standing and high profile titles first.

@Nintendobro Why not, I admit it's a strech in many ways, but as far as Forza goes, FH2 is arcade. MK8 is as arcade as it gets. Both are racing games are they not?

As far as GOTY in general goes, any game is a potential candidate so any game can be compared to any other ... If you don't like the comparison, blame the idea of a GOTY, not me.

@originaljohn

"Sony and MS will release broken games for the sake of having something on the shelf."

Again with the special pleading that Nintendo is magically better than everyone and they never release poor or broken products.

Mario Party games excel at mediocrity. Wii Music, FlingSmash, and Wii Play instantly come to mind as "crap on shelves." Game & Wario did not review well, and the less said about Pokemon Rumble U, the better.

By they way, while Sony and MS are just releasing crap to "fill the shelves," apparently you've been busy ignoring the staggeringly huge number defective and badly packaged Amiibo figures. The numbers of which are apparently so high, that Nintendo Life's last article on them had to clump them all together.

By the way, and I've pointed this out before, but in 2012, both Sony and Microsoft had higher average scores than Nintendo, and EA was literally the best game publisher (http://www.metacritic.com/feature/game-publisher-rankings-for-2012-releases) and in 2013, while Nintendo managed to squeeze ahead of Sony and MS, they were bested by Take Two, EA, and Ubisoft. (http://www.metacritic.com/feature/game-publisher-rankings-for-2013-releases).

The best you can say about Nintendo is that they are perfectly average, but clearly not the best. Everything you're doing is special pleading, you magically pretend that Nintendo is some special flower in a sea of terrible games and that literally everyone not called "Nintendo" is terrible and trying to screw over customers, but that's flatly, factually, totally wrong.

Nintendo also releases broken products.
There are also Nintendo games with game breaking bugs. (As hilariously seen in Other M, which was already plagued with other problems.)
Nintendo also releases poor-quality games.

Get over it. Nintendo isn't special. They're totally normal. It's fine for them to be a favorite, but take off the blinders and face reality. Nintendo is not different from any other video game developer or publisher.

By the way, The Last of Us routinely tops "best of" game lists, not just for the PS3 or PS4, but for the entire last generation. Clearly, Sony is capable of much more than what you have mindlessly chosen to believe. Head over to GameInformer and check out the lists from the writers--the Last of Us appears quite regularly. About the only Nintendo game that reaches that height is Super Mario Galaxy, and I don't think it's as often.

I love Nintendo, too, but I'm at least rational and a realist, and I certainly don't spend my time angrily badmouthing other companies in some desperate attempt to make Nintendo look good.

@ericwithcheese2

Indeed, and as I linked in other articles, Nintendo was also hacked in 2013, specifically Club Nintendo. http://kotaku.com/in-japan-nintendo-was-hacked-675798797

These things are not fun, and the people doing this are all among the worst of the worst as they live just to make life terrible or a nuisance for other people.

I share you disdain for the fanboyism that runs rampant when another company is hacked. It sickened me when MS and Sony fanboys were doing it after Sony was hacked (and at the time, I was a huge X360 gamer), and it's annoying now.

If the outages over Xmas were indeed the doing of hackers, and not just typical holiday strain (which is typical with all the new accounts and users and gift cards people with time off and such), then they are truly horrible human beings. I was trying to download Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris to play with my son, but of course, the outage put a hefty kink in those plans. Eventually we got it and he and I played through about half the game over the break and that was fun.

Companies shouldn't have to waste their time trying to make up for outages and placate fans that can't use the consoles over expected busy periods, and if it was hackers, well, they should just be better people all around. Somewhere along the line, they turned into criminals who live only to make life worse for others. It's a lofty, utopian ideal, I know, but if I can go about my life without actively trying to ruin things for other people, so can they.

It makes sense, when you factor everything, not just sales or hardware power. Sorry, but aside from the teen male demo, not everyone from every sex and age group can pick up and easily play Destiny, COD, Dark Souls, etc (not to mention the brutal bugs on some of those multiplat games)

@MadAdam81 lmao, criticizing Bayo 2 for not improving on its predecessor (singular) but championing MK 8 - literally an HD rehash of 20 years worth of the same idea compressed into a weekends worth of new gameplay and months worth of doing the same thing over and over and over again. lololololol

The aggregate opinion on Bayo 2 shadows Mario Kart 8 hands down. It's really not that close.

@KillScottKill I never said it's a rehash of Bayo 1, I said it's mostly about crotch shots and basic level action gameplay, much more basic than Kingdom Hearts or FF X even without their RPG aspects removed.
Also, MK8 is much more than a prettier version of previous ones, otherwise it's like saying every shooter is no more than a rehash of what's gone before or the same with any game of any genre.

@Quorthon Other M was a Team Ninja game, and it wasn't a buggy game at all, never heard of any bug nd I know a few people wh completed it. A bad game in all aspects, but not buggy.
Yes The Last of us is a very good game, but to say whether its better than MK, Smash Bros, Skyrim, Mario 3d World or other GOTY worthy games is just a matter of opinion.
Also, Mario Kart 8 is considered the best game of it's genre, as is the new Smash Bros and Mario 3D World, but you can't say The LAst of Us is the best of it's genre, let alone sub-genre.

@MadAdam81 Oh my God you're way out of line. LAUGHABLY out of line. For one, it sounds like someone has an axe to grind at Bayonetta for it's adult themes. Calling it basic action play is so bush league. You clearly don't know your action games. Bayonetta is top of its category and that's why each titles has been HIGHLY acclaimed.

And no, MK8 is not much more than it's previous iterations. It's Mario Kart Wii in HD, but minus wonky tilt controls being its primary control style. I've said before it's even watered down, compared to say Double Dash which was far more imaginative. MK8 is essentially the franchise's equivalent of NSMBU. The same old bull but in HD. But hey, doing the same races online over and over are fun, right? So obviously, GOTY.

Finally, questioning The Last of Us. Lol, just stop. That game, the original and its re-release, crush every game you named except for maybe Skyrim, which was arguably the best game of the 7th generation (as was TLOU). The Last of Us was a masterpiece. MK8, Smash, and Mario 3D World are great, but they're certainly not masterpieces.

@MadAdam81

Other M game breaking bug: http://www.joystiq.com/2010/09/18/game-breaking-bug-found-in-metroid-other-m/

That literally took 3 seconds of research.

Now onto this lofty nonsense: "Also, Mario Kart 8 is considered the best game of it's genre, as is the new Smash Bros and Mario 3D World, but you can't say The LAst of Us is the best of it's genre, let alone sub-genre."

You can't say The Last of Us is the best of it's genre?? You sure as hell can, why, just about anyone can as much of that is pure opinion based on varying metrics from person to person! Hell, in the first half of your post, you seem to recognize this, but then by the second half, you are saying you magically can't say something great about one of the most celebrated games of the last generation.

To say Super Mario 3D World or Smash Bros 3DS/U are the best games of their respective year in their genres, at a point when there is almost literally nothing to compete against them? That's a little like saying oranges are the best fruit in the world if the only other fruit in existence is the durian or nothing.

What other major fighting game came out in 2014? Guilty Gear Xrd is about the only one I can think of. I can pretty much guarantee that if Smash were released in a year up against, oh, say Street Fighter V, Mortal Kombat X, and Tekken 7 (all due this year), it wouldn't be so easy to just act like it's the best of it's genre for the year. Granted, the Tekken series has been on a steady decline ever since part 3, but Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat are stronger and better than ever, and have been experiencing a quality and golden age that recalls MKII vs SFII in arcades back in the day.

By the way, most of the suckiness of Other M, came from Sakurai--the very guy who wants to keep dragging the franchise back to the past to relive Super Metroid over and over again until the whole world learns to hate it: http://kotaku.com/5843159/blame-nintendo-for-metroid-other-ms-sucky-story

@MadAdam81

You obviously did not play either Bayonetta game, and if you did, it wasn't for very long because you maintained empty misconceptions clearly adopted without knowledge of the game.

@KillScottKill I played the Bayo 2 demo after hearing only praise and I thought it was okay, not as basic as God of War, but also not as fun as Wonderful 101, any LEGO game, FF-X, any Diablo game and other action games, but the crotch shots were clearly the selling point. Maybe its because I'm not 13, but I thought it was weak and it wasn't fun.
I still am yet to play Last of Us, but it's hard to say that it's better than Left 4 Dead 1 & 2 or Walking Dead S1 or Dead Rising series - Dead Rising 1 and Walking Dead have hard to beat stories, Left 4 Dead has probably got the best action gameplay and the best enemies, and I haven't played anything like Resident Evil so it's hard to say that Last of Us is the best Zombie Action or Shooter of the last gen. I would say it's better than Killing Floor though.
Yes it's better than most shooters and most action games but is it undeniably better than these games I listed?
Also, I meant they were the best games of thir sub-genre of all time. with Mario 3D world possibly the best platformer of all time.

@KillScottKill "You clearly don't know your action games".

No need to be such a hipster snob now sonny, I'm sure like every other bandwagoner suddenly clinging to Bayonetta, you never paid any attention to the original game when it was released 5-6 years ago on PS3 and 360.

TLOU is overrated. The whole zombie apocalypse thing has been done time and time again.