I managed to barrow someone’s DS lite this weekend! To bad they only gave me one game, Mariocart DS.

Mario Kart DS
Nintendo DS

Presentation: (Fine)

Most serious gamers look at Mario Kart as a simple racing game geared towards little kids and Nintendo fan boys. While this may be mostly true, there is still a little fun to be for any gamer… although if you’re not a little kid or a Nintendo fan boy you probably don’t own a DS and therefore won’t be able to play this game.

The plot of this game is a little thin, not that any of the other 4 Mario Kart games had a real story. Basically Mario and his gang decided to go racing in go-karts and a bunch of the bad guys showed up to race against Mario. That’s it, that’s the whole plot right there… sparse isn’t it? The other weird thing about this game is that you have no real objective in this game, remember how in all the Mario games ever you had to save someone or something from an evil boss? Not in this game, no sir-e bob. You don’t have to do anything other then win each race and go on to the next. If you lose big deal the princess is still safe and you live to race another day. The plot isn’t so much a problem JUST for this Mario Kart as much as it is a problem all the Mario Kart games faced.

You know what? Ignore all that, my whole presentation is changed to this: “It’s fucking Mario Kart, again”

Graphics (Very, DS’ish)

The graphics in this game seem to be on par with most of the Ds’s big titles. Menu’s are pretty much the same as the last Mario Kart game only with an extra little bit slapped onto the touch screen. Animation is limited since the characters are sitting in little Karts and the karts them self simply move forward. Level design has always been the best part of Mario Kart, with crazy levels based on levels from other Mario games. Each level is different from the last with very little re-use of any environmental features, such as giant rolling pin balls or huge jumps, which is very fun the first time you play the game since you never know what kind of level you’re going to end up on next. Long story short: Better then GBA worse then PSP. (Flame shield)

Sound (Shine get!)

The music in this game is as great as every other Mario Kart game. Most of the music sounds reminiscent of old Mario games but with a little extra flava-flav. Individual levels have music that fits with the theme of that level: the beach level has tropical music, the woods have tribal type music, and the castles have spooky-ish organ music. All the music is up-tempo and happy which is not to be unexpected since this is aimed at little kids.

The sound effects are mostly copies of the other MK games (yea, that’s right. I abbreviated Mario Kart to MK; you got a problem with that?). Everything sounds the same as in MK64 only with much more annoying voice bites… Oh god how I hate those damn voice bites, they never stop. Every time you do anything every person involved lets loose with some random high pitch noise that violates your ears, like some kind of carnivorous ear wig.

Gameplay (How many times to I have to say this “it’s just Mario Kart”)

Basically you pick a difficulty, set up in “cc” ratings: 50cc is easy, 100cc is normal and 150cc is hard, then you pick a player. Speaking of players there are about 12, mostly big names like Mario and Donkey Kong but there are a few little guys thrown in like Dry Bones and Waluige (SP?). Each player has 3 cars to pick from and each car has slightly different stats. Then you head out to the race track, there are 4 all new sets of races and each set has 4 tracks. You can also play re-mixes of old tracks from any of the other MK games. Not all the old tracts are here since they just kind of mix and matched a selection of tracks from other games.

Once on the track you play in a normal GP mode: scoring points depending on you position at the end of the race. Then whoever has the most points at the end of the set wins. Pretty easy stuff. The race starts with a 3 second count down and it you hold A at the right time you can earn a speed boost. Once you get going you can find items to help yourself and attack the other racers, who will attack you back. There are quite a few types of weapons to pick up; shells and mushrooms are back as is just about everything from all the other MK games. They did however take out the special weapons from Double Dash, a big mistake if you ask me. To make up for the lack of special weapons they added 2 new weapons, the Squid that sprays ink on the screen and the Bullet Bill that turns you into a big flying missile that knocks other players off the road.

Other then the normal race modes you can do mission mode, which as the name implies gives you missions to do. Missions are mostly easy. Things like get 10 rings or drive under the 5 gates are not very hard but you are ranked on how long it takes you to do it. Each set of missions has a boss level that seems to be some sort of battle with a large monster looking guy; once again you are graded on how fast it takes you to complete the task. Once you beat the boss you a taken to another set of missions.

Can I ask something real quick? Why did this have to be on DS? The bottom screen is near useless. All it is, is a map… whoopty-fucking-do! The only thing the DS adds is Wifi. Speaking of Wifi, There is now online multiplayer! YAY! Well that’s assuming that you have a wireless router, I don’t so I can’t review this part. Sorry.

Lasting Appeal (long with Wifi, Short without)

I’ve played this game for about 2 hours and I’m already sick of it. I’ve played every level and seen every weapon. I guess if I owned this game I would beat every difficulty rating in the hopes of unlocking a new set of races or something. Mario Kart has never really had a long single player life span and this is no exception.

From what I hear the multiplayer is fast and fun, but unless there are more then 16 new tracks (32 total) to play on I bet that gets old fast.

Overall (Ehhh, it’s just Mario Kart)

This is a great game for little kids, but it’d just too short and repetitive to hold my attention. The WiFi might be really cool but I don’t have WiFi so I’m left thinking of what could have been…

Posted in Nintendo, Nintendo DS |