The Nintendo DS: Part Two

The Nintendo DS was, until late 2005, largely useless. The games available for it up until that point were not of the caliber seen even on the less powerful Game Boy Advance, at least in terms of gameplay depth. Almost a full year had passed before the first worthwhile games began showing up - such as Mario Kart DS, the game that made me begin to fall in love with the DS.

Released on November 14, 2005, Mario Kart DS was an important release for Nintendo in many ways. Just in terms of the Mario Kart series, Nintendo was pulling in the reigns a little, returning some of the gameplay ideas of older Mario Kart games to counter complaints levied against the Gamecube's Mario Kart: Double Dash. Gone were the two characters riding one kart, gone were holding two items at once, and returning were the jumping of vehicles and Mario Kart 64-style powersliding (more on this later). They did keep in the ability to pick different karts for each character, though.

But Mario Kart DS represented Nintendo's first tentative steps into the world of internet gaming. This was the first game Nintendo had ever made that allowed for online competition - and in many ways, this shows. When a player would drop out of a race early - typically because they were losing - the people left wouldn't get credit for beating them. This meant that if all the players dropped out before the end of the four races, nobody would get any credit for having won any races - meaning the win/loss tally for the player would never be quite right. The other problem was people who "ragequit" weren't penalized with losses, either, which meant they could quit with impunity.

But some would see a bigger problem with the competitive nature of Mario Kart DS - and that is the art of "snaking". The Mario Kart series has always had drifting and powersliding in it, with different implementations in each game. Typically, though, while going around a curve, if a player holds down the drift button, and uses the D-pad to lean in and out of the turn, they get a small boost when they release the drift button. Mario Kart DS had this feature, and it was made incredibly easy. The time required to activate the boost was significantly lessened, and the D-pad made precision powersliding a breeze, when in the past players had to deal with a more sensitive analog stick. This led players to discover that they could powerslide across straightaways, something that was pretty much impossible in past Mario Kart games. This ability, dubbed "snaking" for the way players would zigzag across the track while performing it, split the Mario Kart DS player base into two groups: those for it, and those against it. It became commonplace to see people dropping from matches as soon as they saw snaking, which made finishing any races at all even harder whether you were snaking or not. Since players couldn't host matches themselves, there was no way - short of playing only with their friends - to make sure their opponents weren't snaking. Thus, just a few months after Mario Kart DS's debut, was the online scene a ghost town for people who did not want to snake.

Nintendo's online foibles aside, though, the game itself was incredibly solid. I fell in love with its precision controls immediately, even before I taught myself how to snake. The courses were incredibly well-designed, too, from the tight corners of Luigi's Mansion to the windy turns of Desert Hills. It also was the first Mario Kart game to let the player play tracks from older Mario Kart games, ranging from the Super Nintendo all the way up to some of the better levels from the Gamecube version. Putting Mario Kart DS's superior controls into these older levels made them that much more fun to play for many people - myself included.

The game also introduced a mission mode, which was for one player only. This greatly extended the life of the single player game, though, because there were a ton of missions. The game would task you with goals such as "collect all the coins in X seconds" or "get rid of all the Koopas" and would grade the player on how well they performed. You could unlock a few characters this way, and people could not complain now that Mario Kart was only good for multiplayer.

The Nintendo DS was a departure for Nintendo from the old way of doing things. They were embracing online play now, Mario Kart DS being the first step. They were experimenting with new ways of player input, with the largely failed Super Mario 64 DS - although they would try again, and not perhaps not fail so badly. They were preparing themselves, in essence, for the Wii - the console that really sparked the advent of the "casual gamer" - that is, people who don't normally play games would now begin to play. That isn't to say that games made for the "hardcore" crowd didn't exist on the platform, and one of the best was brought to the DS by Konami just before the release of Mario Kart DS, in fact. But more on that next time.