Mario Kart 8 is one of the best games on the Wii U, and through its DLC - more of which is due in May - has kept racers busy for many months. It's not entirely avoided the hacking fate of its predecessor on Wii, however, though widespread modding and cheating hasn't been a major problem to date.

YouTube channel MrBean35000vr has been at the forefront of modding the latest title, producing various humorous videos but repeating, in numerous interviews last year, that they have no intention of distributing the hack or helping others to affect the game. Mario Kart Wii was notorious for cheating online, and that's clearly not in the plans of these two modders.

With that out of the way, the latest hack on the channel is pretty entertaining. You can read about it and see it below - we'll warn you there's one very brief moment with an offensive word in the video.

This is a rather curious demonstration of modification of item behaviour and rotation. It was achieved by poking values at and around the active item ID, and observing the results. You may hear a lot of "jingle" sounds throughout the video; I paused the game many times to manipulate it, and cut the pauses out so the video runs smoothly. However, after cutting them out, that's what it sounds like. You can use them to keep track of when I alter something.

In the video's description the channel shares its surprise and Nintendo's failure to lock these exploits out, and reiterates that it won't be sharing code or methods with others.

I bet the question on a lot of peoples' minds is, "What's the point?" and "Why did you hack the items?! Surely that's asking for trouble!" My answer to both: I looked at the items because I wanted to see if there were an easy way to make the "classic" item system (able to hold two items, one in the box, one on the tail or spinning). On the way, I discovered all of this stuff, and it's just too epic to ignore, so you get a free video! Oh, and yes, if I do manage to make classic item systems, I will upload a video. I'm hoping there's some beta leftovers somewhere that can be used, as early E3 demos of MK8 showed a dual item system much like MKW, and MK7.

...So what's the upshot? I have no freaking idea why I can do any of this. This kind of thing would've been exceptionally difficult in MKW, and in MK8, it's easy. They're both coded very differently, needless to say, though just from what I've seen of MK7 item hacks, this system seems more similar to 7 than Wii. Maybe some of what I demonstrated here can be done on 7 as well? I'll leave that to the 3DS hackers.

Also, no, I'm not going to tell people how to do this. That would be silly, agreed? This video is already controversial enough.

We'll happily stick with the official item system, of course, but it's pretty intriguing to see Mario Kart 8 de-constructed like this. A crazy-16, as the hackers call it, would be absolute mayhem in a real race.