Well, I can't really number them, but I can tell about my personal opinions on them.
Super Mario Kart doesn't handle like anything else in the series, but it's enjoyable once you get the hang of the controls. I never really got into this, and the rubber band AI is really something else.
Mario Kart 64 has aged pretty well; plenty of new features over the original, the courses are varied, and the AI, while simplified, isn't cheapened with the ability to pull
impossible feats, but rather serves to simply shape the gameplay; this is one of the few games where computers don't have access to red, green, or blue shells, which I think is a nice way to balance out the single player campaign and make up for the computers' auto-catch-up tendencies. Has one of the best battle courses in the entire series, and one of (I think) two games where the blue shell fucks everybody up, and not just the first placer.
Super Circuit - Haven't played extensively, don't have much of an opinion on it.
Double Dash - Great course designs, fun items, okay soundtrack, brought in a lot of things I don't like. I prefer the short-hop drifting, not the over-simplified method introduced here. The shell shield is gone, which is bullshit, and it's extremely easy to lose your items this time around. I guess it's almost made up for the fact that you can hold twice as many shells as usual, except computers are much more realistic now and have access to ALL the items. It's irritating as hell to have four blue shells hit you in the same course, and on the higher GP levels, this will happen plenty of times. At the very least, Bob-omb Blast is a great multiplayer gametype.
Mario Kart CT doesn't even deserve mention. The picture taking is cheesy and unnecessary in my opinion, the courses are bland rehashes of each other, and in the arcade I see this at, the damn thing swallows up a dollar when you start it up, plus an extra fifty cents whenever you decide to continue. I could be spending that kind of cash on Metal Slug.
Mario Kart DS - The dual screen opens up a completely new depth of strategy into the game. Not only do you have a map that tracks obstacles and players around you, but you can
see what item everyone has. This is a great feature because it allows smart players to anticipate what their opponents are going to do, which in turn becomes the only real way to counter-act the new blue shell. Plenty of times, another player and I would sit beside each other because one of us had a blue shell and/or were planning on getting a superior item; a bit flow-breaking, but hilarious nonetheless. Snaking is definitely a problem; it's not fun due to it being a sore on your fingers, but there's a good chance that the next person you'll be playing online with wants to snake. Certainly upsets the kart balance. The item-losing mechanic has been lessened from Double Dash, but I'd still just rather not see it at all. Once again, though, the bottom screen allows you to decide more easily when you should use your items, so you never have to leave your success to luck.
Mario Kart Wii - Does a lot of nice upgrades, but ruins a lot of other aspects. Wheelies I can do without, but I love the mach bike because of its sharp, instant turning in comparison to the other karts and bikes; most of the other vehicles are nicely varied as well. As far as balance goes, this game is communistic. Thanks to the "twelve players" gimmick as well as the flood of new invincibilifying items, five players at a time will be wrecking anything the item decides it wants to wreck, and the leading players can only defend themselves with shit like banana peels and green shells, neither of which work on mega mushrooms or blue shells. Since getting wrecked results in the victim losing
his item(s)
and you have no item radar to assist you, all you can really do is drive well and hope to god that the roulette doesn't decide it doesn't like you. The fact that there's an item on top of this created solely for the sake of getting rid of other people's items just pisses me off further; I don't care if there's an exploit to keep your speed the same, I want to keep my god damn item!
The inclusion of twelve players also means that everyone is far more likely to be huddled into one collective mass. If you are in front of a crowd and you get hit by a shell, you have
immediately dropped from 2nd place down to 7th. What's worse is that online play tallies points by placement, not by the relative time a player got in comparison to the best and worse in the game; this makes online play communistic, just like the rest of the game.
The redeeming aspect of the game for the skilled multiplayer enthusiast is the local multiplayer mode that you play whenever you're at a friend's house. Not because you can turn off computer players and don't have to deal with online's harsh ranking system, but because you can
toggle the item settings. Ironically,
all three settings besides "balanced" items is actually
balanced. "Aggressive" and "strategic" quintessentially scales down the item variety so that everyone either has very weak to decent items, or decent items to very strong (unlike "balanced" mode, which ranges from very weak to very strong, which evidently doesn't work with this game). Even the best of players has a chance to defend themselves against the strongest available items this way, and it results in a much more fair atmosphere than the default settings provided. There's also "no items", but that gets pretty stale quickly.
Once again, MKWii has a lot of cool aspects to it, but the item balance is not one of them. Frankly, I think twelve players is just too much for the game anyway; it becomes too hectic in areas where the crowd isn't evenly spread out, and with the onslaught of incredibly powerful items, "skill" flies out the window and the whole thing becomes a big luck-based clusterfuck.
tl;dr I like MK64 and MKDS, as well as MKWii to some extent, but none of them are perfect.
