I'm a grown man with a job and a house, so why am I still rooting for Sonic to finally get one over on Mario?

I was a Sega kid growing up, which meant I was a Sonic kid growing up. If you've seen me in a t-shirt, the ode to Sonic and his friends permantly inked onto my forearm might have given that away. I loved Sonic in the '90s, and I still love him now.

Don't get it twisted, I never hated Mario. I was never into the whole cosole war gimmick as a kid and I'm even less into it now. Even when Sega was forced to dip out of the console game, I never held any ill will towards Nintendo, maybe because I had long since shifted my gaming focus to PlayStation by that point.

However, in 2025, as a 35-year-old, self-employed, homeowning father of one (soon to be two), I can smell Mario's blood in the water, and I like it. I don't want the world's most famous plumber to fail - I might even love modern Mario games more than Sonic ones, don't tell anyone I said that - but Sonic might finally be about to notch up a win over his oldest rival after all these years, and I'm a little excited.

Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is only a few weeks away, and if you've seen the trailers, you'll know Sega has pulled out all the stops. SpongeBob and Patrick will be playable characters, and even Minecraft Steve received an invite. If there's one thing that's going to guarantee kids want to play your game, it's having something from Minecraft in there.

Crossovers alone won't be enough, and it's not Sega inviting any kids characters it can find that aren't contractually bound to Nintendo that has me hopeful. It's the previews. It's the buzz. It's those who have gotten hands on with CrossWorlds and reported back that it's great. It's people online seeing more of this game and saying "now hang on a second".

That buzz has only gotten louder following the lukewarm launch of Mario Kart World. Not in terms of sale, the latest Mario Kart game has sold millions of copies and will continue to sell even more. It just doesn't seem to be hooking people in and keeping them there, not this time. Kart racing fans young and old have been left wanting more, and by god, they might be about to get it.

Between World leaving people unimpressed and a few months having passed since it launched, CrossWorlds' timing couldn't be more perfect. It's an open goal for Sonic in his eternal match against Mario for the first time in, I don't even know, maybe ever? But I've been a Sonic fan for too long. Despite my excitement and that want for the mascot who dominated my childhood to prove he's still got it, there's still a big ol' part of me that thinks he's going to send the ball flying over the bar when it finally comes time to take the shot.

Two years on from the, what might as well have been same day, releases of Sonic Superstars and Super Mario Bros. Wonder, I'm still hurting. To be clear, that was not a Kart/CrossWorlds situation. When Nintendo announced Wonder's release date, I waited, then wondered, then begged for Sega to delay Superstars. It didn't, it flopped, and it deserved to flop.

I don't believe Superstars is a bad game. I loved it. However, Wonder is an all-timer. Up there with some of the best 2D Mario games ever. You put a 7/10 2D-ish Sonic game up against it, and it will forever be remembered as a 5/10, if it even gets remembered at all.

Not only does CrossWorlds look like it might be better than Mario Kart World, but any hype World had has well and truly died down. Like I said, it's an open goal, all Sonic needs to do is blast the ball into the back of the net. Sonic doesn't need to be 2D to be good, and in 2025, there are still things he can do better than Mario, I just know it.

Oh, I can feel the pessimistic Sonic fan taking over again. Sorry, here it comes.

Even if CrossWorlds is as good or better than what we've been led to believe, and the newest Sonic racing game is objectively better than the newest Mario Kart game, it ultimately doesn't matter. Mario Kart World will be talked about more, played more, and will outsell CrossWorlds by about five to one, at least. Nintendo can do no wrong right now, even if people kinda sorta don't like its new Mario Kart game.

The movies have proved that. The Sonic movies are better than the Mario movie (the new animated one, not the 1993 live action one, although Sonic's movies are better than that too). Nintendo played it as safe as it possibly could with the Mario movie and made way over $1 billion. Sega took a risk with Sonic and although it paid off in every cinceivable way, and cointinues to do so, Mario still won. I guess the kid inside me would like to see Sonic win one, just this once.

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