Month of Mario: Mario Kart DS (DS)

When people look back at old Mario Kart titles, they often focus on the tracks, the racers, and the items, but for Mario Kart DS, a great deal of the racing game is defined by one thing: Snaking. This maneuver technically exists in some form across a few Mario Kart entries, but the introduction of global online play and the ease of performing the technique in this entry lead to its rise in prominence, your skill in the game defined by whether or not you utilized it. On one hand, it allows for a much greater focus on player ability in a racer often prone to shifts based on item luck, but on the other it creates a large gulf between more casual players and those who even have a small handle on the trick, leading to it being contentious even though it actually opens the game up to some of the most active mid-race maneuvering the series has ever featured.

Normally, while out racing on the track, taking turns would inevitably lose you speed. However, if you drift into the turn, you can preserve some of your speed, and if you rock the d-pad left and right quickly, sparks will start to appear around your tires. Once you stop your slide, these sparks release a mini-turbo, a small surge of speed that works well in giving players more to do than simply try and drive the best they can. Identifying when to start the slide, having the time to build up the sparks, and making sure you don’t hit barrier walls or other racers while doing so makes for something skillful but not too impactful when viewed in this context. Snaking however takes this a bit further, because it turns out many courses allow you to start the drift even on a straight stretch of road, rock the d-pad quickly to get those sparks, and unleash a mini-turbo before you’re at risk of going off the track. In certain situations, it is easy to even go right out of that mini-turbo into another drift, this zigzagging back and forth earning the serpent-derived nickname to mirror its side-winding nature. While the Mario Kart series is mostly fairly casual, the inclusion of such easy snaking allows Mario Kart DS to be very competitive but also fairly hard to get a group together with similar skill. The tracks do become more layered because so much of them technically have opportunities for this maneuver, but a snaker will be leagues ahead of someone who doesn’t even if they’re only decent at it. Even AI racers can’t keep up with it, the computer controlled characters at least playing fair in that you can leave them rather far in your dust by snaking around expertly.

Thankfully, while snaking might hurt a multiplayer experience if only a few players do it well, that doesn’t ruin the kart racing experience as a whole, especially since a great deal of Mario Kart DS is designed for solo play. Mario Kart DS sees many of his Mario’s friends and enemies from his adventures coming together for another round of kart racing, courses built in the kind of fantastical lands they frequent while item boxes help to spice up the racing to make it about more than just following a track’s curves properly. Item boxes are often found in a line somewhere on the track, spaced out a fair bit so you actually have to try and hit them head on, and after a little roulette, you’ll get a useful tool tied to your placement in the ongoing race. The eight characters competing are thus able to gain edges appropriately to how well they’re doing, someone in the lead getting simpler items like a banana to drop to make racers slip up, but in the back you may get a Bullet Bill that transforms you into an incredibly fast rocket to carry you ahead, a blue Spiny Shell that flies off to hit the first place player, or Lightning that can shrink everyone but yourself for a period to give you time to catch up. The most impactful items are still somewhat rare even for the last place racer, but middle ground items like homing red shells and mushrooms that give you bursts of speed allow for quick little advantages to be gained if used properly, especially since some courses have shortcuts to exploit or hazards you can knock people into.

A solo player is able to tackle races in a Grand Prix format across different engine classes that almost serve as difficult levels, the racer and the kart selected impacting their abilities like speed, handling, and surprisingly their luck when it comes to items. There are eight cup challenges to compete in, each one of them featuring four unique courses where the points you earn by placing well in each race will determine if you come out on top with the trophy. Interestingly, Mario Kart DS has four cups that feature completely unique levels made for the game while the four others instead bring back tracks from the past, this format becoming a series standard going forward because of its success here. These leads to a whopping 32 unique courses on offer in Mario Kart DS, although at the same time, the quality does seem to range quite a bit. On one hand you get some of the best and most creative tracks ever introduced in the series, but then you get a fair few flat and unambitious levels that are forgettable even when they sound neat on paper. Cheep Cheep Beach for example has you racing across a pier, heading to a beach to exploit the tide rising and falling if you can, and then winding through a jungle to the finish line, but it doesn’t make much of the ideas so isn’t the most exciting course. On the other hand, Waluigi Pinball makes exceptional use of its idea, the player entering a huge pinball table where pinballs threaten to flatten you and the last section is a chaotic push through an area filled with bumpers and flippers.

Airship Fortress sees you weaving through a range of dangers like cannon fire and flames, Desert Hills has the sun throw living flames down at you as you avoid cactus creatures, Tick Tock Clock makes superb uses of clock hands and gears to impede or assist your racing, and Luigi’s Mansion has you navigate the tight building interiors before being let into a muddy swamp with living trees. All of these are excellent and memorable additions, but then Shroom Ridge feels rather tame despite racing alongside civilian traffic, Mario Circuit feels like its inclusion of recognizable enemies is too generic, and the Retro cups dump a ton of flat tracks with little going on like Peach Circuit, Donut Plains 1, and Mario Kart: Super Circuit’s version of Luigi Circuit. Sky Garden’s lovely clouds and beanstalks and Frappe Snowland’s good use of snow hazards mean there are some more interesting selections in the returning courses, but many feel brought back because it would be easy to do so rather than them being the best choices. Thankfully, they’re better characterized as okay compared to the more impressive and imaginative new tracks, although Baby Park’s return feels a bit odd since it thrived on the chaos of Mario Kart: Double Dash!!’s item system while Mario Kart DS makes the simple oval course almost too large for its usually cramped action. In fact, one reason snaking likely takes root too much is Mario Kart DS deciding to provide a lot of driving room even though the racers aren’t that big nor are they plentiful. Some tracks like DK Pass justify it, you need to be able to dodge the giant snowballs rolling along with you so you need some wiggle room, but others like Figure-8 Circuit make you wonder if snaking is an intentional part of the design since it has long straight sections with nothing much to do. One way snaking is reigned in though are the courses with tighter paths, turns, or non-traditional road types. You need room to drift after all, something that’s not so easy when Bowser’s Castle has you taking hard turns repeatedly or taking jumps too often to get a slide going, this one way that helps not only keep some players in check but also leads to just a general rise in course variety as later ones aren’t afraid to get tough in what they expect of you without snaking being the solution to overcome them.

While the Grand Prix offers a good deal of content already, Mario Kart DS made an interesting choice in also including a Mission Mode. There are 63 special challenges that test your racing abilities in quite a few ways and ones where snaking won’t avail you much. A fairly common and simple one is placing some gates in a familiar race course, the player needing to race through them all even if they’re placed in odd ways counter to the optimal racing line. Coin collection is a bit similar as are breaking item boxes, although the boxes will at least often move about so you need to chase them down. Enemy destruction feels like something that breaks from standard racing in an interesting manner, the player needing to use items well to knock out all the enemies, but the boss fights are truly the highlight of the experience. Bosses from Super Mario 64 DS return to face you, often in special arenas, and taking them on is rarely just about driving fast. The Big Bully for example needs to be rammed into the water before he does the same to you, King Boo tries to sabotage your coin collecting efforts by pilfering them and running off, and even a race with the Goomboss sees him scattering his minions around the track so you have to weave through them properly to clear it. Every mission has a ranking awarded based on your performance up to three stars, many of the missions actually quite hard to hit the star requirement in, and while there are a good amount of basic or forgettable ones like driving backwards, Mission Mode still offers a unique way to play a game that is otherwise normally about just going faster than all your opponents.

Battle mode also shifts the game up in an interesting way, it able to be played with other human players or even just computer controlled opponents. Here, you have a set amount of balloons attached to your kart, and when you’re injured by an item, one balloon will drift away. You can only have three balloons on the kart at once but you can inflate reserves, meaning you technically have five total and can even steal some from other players with good item use, and perhaps five for everyone is a bit much, especially in larger battle arenas. However, there is a good mix of stages on offer with most being quite good at their job. The cake-themed Tart Top feels like it focuses too much on a central jump leading to slow matches, but the battle atop a giant Nintendo DS keeps players within sight of each other well, Pipe Plaza’s pipe shortcuts give people quick getaways but doesn’t send them too far away, and Block Fort gives four corners of action across small multi-layered structures. The bottom screen definitely helps battle mode by allowing you to better find opponents in stages like the eerie Twilight House that was almost too big for its own good, although it does spoil a bit of the fun in using Fake Item Boxes since they’re clearly marked as traps on the touch screen if you bother to look. Battle Mode’s inclusion works wonderfully alongside Mission Mode in providing a different experience and one that reshapes how you approach the action, Mario Kart DS more robust than just another set of tracks to tackle for fans of the series.

THE VERDICT: While snaking can make Mario Kart DS either a rich and skillful racing challenge or a miserable multiplayer time based on who’s playing, everyone can appreciate the incredible offerings when it comes to the race tracks and the extra content on offer. A well crafted battle mode, the intriguing recontextualizations of the missions, and many exceptional and creative courses to balance out the simpler ones means a player can have a blast on their own or still find ways to enjoy the action with friends. The item system is certainly put through its paces in all sorts of modes and rises to the task as an effective but enjoyable disruption to the racing or a great way to form new ways to interact with things in a racing game, Mario Kart DS definitely one of the series’s finest showings even years later because of it.

And so, I give Mario Kart DS for Nintendo DS…

A GREAT rating. Sure, some character models are a bit low quality, especially poor Donkey Kong and Bowser looking oddly monstrous or weirdly round respectively, but the DS employs its rudimentary 3D graphics where it has to in order to let levels shine instead. Courses like Waluigi Pinball and Airship Fortress are memorable and exciting throughout, unique concepts for hazards melding well with strong layouts and music that match them perfectly. The Retro courses do hold things back a touch since they’re so unambitious, although that is partly the flaw of the predecessors it borrows from. It could have certainly selected some more of those older games’ highlights though, but if having a few plain Grand Prix tracks was the price for having a very strong battle mode selection and the intriguing missions mode, then it is at least the right price to pay. Even if you never discover snaking, Mario Kart DS already has so much to offer because of its range of activities and the racing having plenty of other merits to keep it entertaining. Snaking may let you wring out every bit of skillful expression possible on a course, but already tracks start to ask for more interesting maneuvering and management of dangers, items a nice way to keep things competitive even for players who fall a great deal behind. Mario Kart DS does have its item system well under control so it’s not too disruptive and the computer players also play fair in terms of never receiving artificial speed boosts to remain competitive, but it is a bit clear that snaking should at least be toned down to preserve what feels like the game’s intended level of challenge. A wider range of interesting mission types and a few less so-so retro courses would probably give the game the extra spice it needed from the casual angle, but Mario Kart is a series often at its best when skill will aid you in placing well in a race but not to such a degree that other players see you lap them simply because you know something they don’t.

Mario Kart DS’s legacy will likely always lead to a short discussion of snaking, but it provides many other great ideas, not nearly enough of them continuing on into future titles. The retro tracks are an inspired way to introduce more courses without having to spend so much time thinking up designs, but missions and boss fights only just showed their potential and didn’t get to involve into what could be a meaningful bit of solo content for people looking for something beyond races. Even battle mode would start getting weirdly experimental with too much focused on points over survival down the line, and while there are undoubtedly better Mario Karts in the series after this entry, Mario Kart DS still feels rather full-bodied compared to its successors since it aimed to be more than just a racer.