Mario Kart DS: This Fast Paced Racing Game Lives Up to Its Expectations
The single player consists of two parts: grand prix racing and missions. In the racing part you have to choose from three levels of difficulty and four original cups. Although you can unlock four more. In the actual race there are seven other players to beat and you can use power slide, boosts on the ground and a big variety of weapons.
These range from banana skins all the way to a chain chomp dragging you along crushing every thing in its path. At the same time the bottom of the two screens shows you were you and your opponents are on the map of the course. The action packed races never get boring and with so many courses to choose from you will never want to stop.
The missions however could be better since they are all a bit samish. But I do have to admit some of the bosses are great fun. I would never have thought you could battle a giant bomb in your car by throwing shells at it! It has an annoying marking scheme though which means if you get a C or one of the levels and all the others are A’s your overall mark is a C. I think they could have put a lot more into the missions like a decent story line.
Now comes what would seem to be the highlight of the game, the online multiplayer function. At first sight this is a great feature allowing you to play friends all over the world just by having wireless internet around your house. But when you actually try it turns out that everybody online is Chinese and most of them are 10 times better than you.
Then comes the added downside of the long wait to find an opponent. But the worst bit is that at any time your opponent can see that they are losing and switch of their console ending the match as a draw. So I suggest that you stick to normal wireless multiplayer where you can see your friend turns of the game.
The normal multiplayer is very good with up to eight people being able to play at one time if you all have game cards. But even if you don’t all have game cards you can still play although you get a limited amount of tracks to choose from and the people without a game card cannot choose their character.
So to sum it up this is a really good action packed game but stay clear of online multiplayer.
