Mario sports and racing games bring out the weirdest behaviors from the Mushroom Kingdom’s zany characters, and Waluigi is a prime example of this. The animation team for Mario Kart World must have had a field day with Luigi’s lanky nemesis, as displayed by video footage of a Mario Kart World demo capturing something that might be easy to miss during gameplay.
In a video on X posted by user Mr. Duby, Waluigi gets a Coin Block item, which grants the player coins upon hitting it. But as seen in the video, Waluigi makes the unconventional decision to kick the Coin Block upwards.
It’s a rather impractical, yet impressively flexible move. Say anything you want about Waluigi, but he’s anything but boring. Traditionally, Mario and friends hit coin blocks with their fists, but Waluigi seems to want to go out of his way to showcase his impressive limberness.
And it’s not just Waluigi who mines coins from blocks using an unexpected body part — his buddy Wario straight up uses his derrière to hit blocks. One has to wonder how Wario and Waluigi would approach the fairly standard action of hitting blocks if they were in a traditional Super Mario platformer.
Waluigi has always been characterized by quirky and expressive animations in the Mario spin-off games, from his romantic rose pose in Mario Party 8 to his shockingly crude celebration in the Mario Strikers series. He might have missed the cut for Super Smash Bros., but at least the Mario sports games are blessed with his chaotic unpredictability.
Mario Kart World, poised as the killer app launch game for Nintendo Switch 2, has a wild cast that features background characters, like Penguin from Super Mario 64, and limbless enemies that have no business of driving karts, such as Pokey. We’ll have to see how they approach the challenge of hitting a coin block, and the internet will surely get a lot of fun GIFs out of those.