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For his 6th birthday, Lyons Cub got the Hot Wheels Mario Kart Track Set Deluxe as well as two extensions (the piranha plant and the stone monster tracks). We started assembling the big track set first and dealt with the extensions at a later date, after having watched a video of how to integrate them. It wasn’t super easy to assemble, but it wasn’t rocket science, either. After a few trial and errors, mommy got it done 😉
But let’s start with the Mario Kart track set. It’s a circular track with a high tower holding two loops. Right in front of those loops are the accelerators that make the die-cast cars race through the curves. We’ll admit right away that this track set makes a lot of noise (you can hear it in the video below), but Lyons Cub’s other track set, the Hot Wheels corkscrew crash race, does as well. The latter is more violent and hard to follow with the eyes, because the cars go so fast that you sometimes don’t know where each player’s car is at the moment, or whose car has been knocked out already.
We enjoy the Mario Cart track set because 1st, the Mario Bros. figures in the cars are really cool,
and 2nd, it is a bit more playful and childlike than the corkscrew set. The Mario Cart race track came with one green car, a Yoshi die cast car (the one on the right in the photo). The other characters we already had accumulated before, and they run equally well on this track.
Two players can race against one another, one on the inner and one on the outer track. Each track has a flag (a blue and a red one), and once a car has managed to complete a lap without getting ejected, the flag will sink one notch deeper, until it has arrived at its lowest position. The player whose flag hits the lowest position first has won. The good thing is, you can just insert your car into the game again, once it has been chucked out off the tracks.
The cars race past gold coins and a mushroom (toad) house. The big red button and the big blue button launch the cars, and the small red and blue buttons can eject the opponent out of the track. The toy itself is great fun already, but with the extensions of the piranha plant (which knocks out the opponents by rotating and hitting the cars) and the stone monster (which comes down like a guillotine, making the cars crash into it if they don’t manage to slide beneath it in time), it’s even more worthwhile.
You just need to disconnect the dark green part from the piranha plant track and the loop with the launcher from the stone monster track, and then the remaining parts can be inserted on opposite places into the Mario Kart race track. They have the same length. Alas, the plant always knocks the cars off the track, so they stand no chance of completing a lap when it’s on and rotating. At least, we never did get past the meat-eating plant. Maybe you have more luck… The stone monster was easier to fool; some cars were able to get through before it crashed down and hit the following car 😉
Hot Wheels are the favorite toys in our house at the moment 😉