Battle Santa 64

Battle Santa 64 is a homebrew hack of Mario Kart 64 by Triclon, DeadHamster, and MtZuul released on 24 December 2023. In it, you play as Santa Claus who has to recover stolen presents in the Double Deck stage.

You can get the ROM patch from the download page using the password havesomecoal and apply it to a ROM called Mario Kart 64 (U) [!].z64 with Flips.

About Battle Santa 64

This ROM hack is a cousin of SantaKart 64 as you play as Santa Claus in both games. However, what sets Battle Santa 64 apart is that you play the game in battle mode instead of the standard racing mode.

The story is that Donkey Kong, Wario and Bowser were naughty and never received any gifts so they stole a bunch. It is therefore up to Santa to get them back – at any cost.

In Battle Santa 64, you play as Santa Claus trying to take back the presents stolen by Bowser, Wario, and Donkey Kong. You have five minutes to collect as many as you can. They will run away so you will need to chase them down, hit them, and pick up the presents they drop. After five minutes you will see how many you have collected, what your high score is, and can restart by holding A and B simultaneously to try again.

Every time you hit one of the baddies, they drop a bunch of presents that you can then collect to try and get a high score.

The initial intention of Battle Santa 64 was to be a test for new features to be used in Overkart 64:

• New use of cutscenes
• Custom droppable items
• Better audio fidelity

Review and conclusion

Like its predecessor, Battle Santa 64 is a delightfully silly mashup of Christmas and Mario Kart. I love the way that it adds new elements that we haven’t seen in other mods into a fun little package that stands on its own.

If anything, what could have improved it would be perhaps some kind of target presents count that needs to be reached because otherwise it’s a kind of arbitrary “get as many as you can”. At least there is a time limit so there is a point where you can compare your score with others. It also is a bit awkward to switch between hunting, attacking and then stopping all that momentum to collect the presents.

I do like how the AI controlled characters do tend to drive very cowardly and try to avoid you at all costs, like if Santa was some kind of godly terror about to bring down justice upon those who wish to bring down the Christmas spirit.

Do give Battle Santa 64 a go around the holidays, it’ll be sure to give some Christmas cheer to anyone who wants a visit from the ghost of Christmas kickass.