That was not my recollection of how it was supposed to work or how it worked in practice, but I found an archive of the original guidebook, and it says exactly what you said. Interesting. I got passed up by Donkey Kong and Bowser on straightaways all the time, but maybe that’s more of a mirror mode challenge thing than a size of the karts things.

My recollection was big characters had a higher top speed, but slow acceleration. Small characters were the opposite. Medium characters didn’t excel or suck at either.

That’s awesome! I have 3 N64 controllers in great shape. Not sure I’m looking to invest $70 into an N64 controller, but it does sound amazing. I’m going to save your comment in case I change my mind.

What’s the N64 wireless controller and do you really like it? I might play mine more if I didn’t have wires for kids to ensnare themselves.

Yes, the pattern matching is important. There was a sequel to Contra on PS2 (I think) that my friend and I found pretty hard. We learned the patterns of where to be and where/when to aim. Then, we kicked butt. We turned it up to the hardest setting and didn’t really need to adjust much. So, it ended up being really easy at that point. We loved playing that game after we learned the patterns.