Sorry, I should have caught this earlier, but I think this entry breaks this rule of the competition:

Entries must be original. Plagiarism and copyright infringement will result in disqualification.

The overt Mario sprites are hard to miss. It seems like it's probably just an art change to avoid the problem. Would you be interested in doing that for the physical "Action 53" cart, when the time comes? Otherwise it would need to be omitted.

For the competition itself, I need to think about if there is a way to avoid disqualifying this entry.

I assume mariokart86-aa9d5fd.nes is the version we should be playing for the competition?

FYI: Fiskbit noticed that:

"(this game) isn't initializing its VRAM properly; using random RAM values causes graphics corruption."

Not sure if that's something you want to address before the end of compo or not, but thought I'd let you know!