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Mario Kart DS Review
Written by Señor Cha Cha on Monday, November 14, 2005
User Score
A smorgasbord of single player content and a highly entertaining online mode.
Those friend codes kind of suck, and you can't travel too far away from the wireless router without losing the connection.
Up until Nintendo dropped Mario Kart DS I was never too keen on the popular series. I always saw the games as these goofy little titles where people wasted their lives putt putting along and hitting one another with turtle shells. I enjoyed the games, but I also knew I had better things to do with my life, so I was definitely stuffing dramatic irony down my throat as I played this game because I couldn't put it down. That's not to say that this feature packed race fest is perfect because that's far from the truth, but it's a damn fine achievement and a must buy whether you're after the hot single player action or looking to dive headfirst into a little online play.
That's right. After years of spewing text book PR BS about how there's no future in online gaming and how Nintendo wasn't ready to take the proverbial plunge, Mario and Co. decided to make Mario Kart DS its very first worldwide online title and it's quite spectacular. Through the power of the branded Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection (and a wireless router), you can plunge your little kart racer into cyber space's digital innards and challenge up to three other people, and everything runs about as seamlessly as it does offline. Actually finding opponents can take a few minutes and every so often some unsightly lag will hinder a race, but none of that's enough to hinder the experience, and once you hook up with some buddies you can continue to race against them without any prolonged waiting periods.
The best part is how easy the setup is. Nintendo's gone to great lengths to make it as user friendly as possible and the game's developers have succeeded in making it a plug & play system. In fact, so long as you have a wireless router set up or acquire the Nintendo USB router (awkwardly codenamed: dongle), you shouldn't run into many problems.
The online stuff is all well and good but a couple of things really stick in my chicken fajitas. First, you can't move too far away from the router. I'm all right when I'm playing downstairs, but if I go up to my room I lose the signal. Secondly, the actual online play is very impersonal. With no real way to communicate to anyone, most of the time I'm racing against these no name people and when I beat them I can't trash talk. Furthermore, instead of the game providing you with the option of adding friends after you race, you can only create such a list by exchanging a personalized 12 digit "Friend Code". But unless you have a means to contact these people it's impossible to acquire their codes, so this really blows.
Thankfully, and unlike some Xbox Live enabled games, there's much, much more to Mario Kart DS than just simple online racing. In fact, its single player component is about as meaty as a well fed wooly mammoth, but that's really the whole story of this game. Nintendo's shoved lots of content into it and the result is a devilishly enthralling title that'll keep you busy for weeks. There's the Grand Prix mode that features about 20 different courses (some brand new, others pulled from previous games) to check out, but there's also Time Trials, Vs (where you can wirelessly race and Battle against up to seven other people using a single game cart), and the most intriguing mode, Missions, where you have to meet specific challenges that'll test your karting skills, some of which require you to tackle bosses from Super Mario 64. There are also a few characters that you can unlock and they join an already solid if not vanilla list that includes Mario, Luigi, Yoshi, Bowser, Wario, Princess Peach, and Donkey Kong, among other racers. Each of them has at least three different vehicles that vary in Speed, Acceleration, Weight, Handling, Drift, and new to the series, Items, which determines which sorts of weapons you'll pick up.
Personally, I'm conflicted with the weapons. On one hand, tossing bananas onto the court and hitting people with red shells can be lots of fun. Plus, Nintendo's added some new items such as the Bullet Bill and the Blooper which are pretty cool. But on the other hand, and this ties into the faster vehicles, the game creates too much of a dependence on these items. Winning doesn't always mean you raced better than everyone else but instead hit the leader with a spiny shell at the last possible moment. That's certainly all right when everyone's neck and neck but not when I've been in first place for three quarters of the game. All's fair in love and Mario Kart DS, but more often than not such occurrences leave me feeling cheated.
The reliance on items isn't that big a deal. Rather, it's the faster karts that truly bug me. Speedy as hell, they render most of the other vehicles in the game useless, and what winds up happening is people keep using the same damn karts again and again. This is also where the weapons come into play, because some karts are so impossible to cleanly pass that weapons are the only way to win, and even then you're leaving your fate up to a roll of the dice. You're never guaranteed to acquire a spiny blue shell or a Bullet Bill just because you're getting your ass kicked.
All complaints aside, this is a damn good videogame. It must be, because for the first time in my life I actually care about a Mario Kart to such a degree that I'm going back and replaying all of the prequels to see what I've missed. As for the online quirks, yeah, Nintendo made some weird decisions and I hope these friend codes don't keep popping up in future games, but being able to pick up my DS and blaze through a quick four races against someone across the world is always too enticing an opportunity to pass up. Loaded with goodies and irresistible to resist, Mario Kart DS is fun in its purest form.
posted June 20, 2006