We have some festive news for Mario Kart 64 fans.
The popular fan-made Mario Kart 64 mod, Mario Kart 64 Amped Up, has just received a brand-new update (version 3.20), bringing with it a bunch of new Christmas-themed skins for Mario & company.
This includes an optional Santa-suit skin for Mario, an elf costume for Luigi, a reindeer outfit for Yoshi, and other holiday-inspired looks for the rest of the game's racers.
So, if you've been looking for something Christmas-related to get you in the festive spirit this holiday season and have been coming up blank so far, this could be just the thing you're after.
Remarkably, Amped Up is a mod we've been aware of for a while, but one we've surprisingly not covered before on the site. It is essentially an unofficial expansion for the original N64 game, created by the fan developer Litronom, and features a range of new additions such as 16 brand new courses, 5 additional game modes, fully animated 3D racers, costumes, unlockables, music, and more, and is playable on both emulators and on real hardware.
It was originally released in September 2020, but has continued to get updates over the past five years, with the last major release version 3.0 hitting back in July of this year. If you're a Mario Kart fan and haven't checked it out yet, we recommend giving it a look. Just bear in mind, you'll need a copy of the original game's ROM, and either flips.exe or ROMpatcher.js to apply the downloaded patch file.
Here's a full list of what's changed in Version 3.0:
- Added 8 Holiday Themed Costumes, which you can toggle with Z on the Player Select screen when 3D Racers are enabled.
- Added 8 Alternate Color Costumes, which you need to unlock first, by playing any Grand Prix with that selected 3D Racer.
- Added a new screen under Unlockables, inside the Extras Menu, displaying progress on unlockable costumes.
- Implemented proper Mini Portraits for the selected 3D Racer (respectively costume), when your system has Framebuffer enabled.
- Changed N64 coins to give you a boost, similar to using a Mushroom, when being collected.
- Some smaller tweaks and improvements to the code.
You can grab the latest version of the mod from the website GameBanana or from the MegaNZ folder linked below the latest trailer.