Mario Kart: Double Dash!!

"Not bad... just not quite stellar"

I have to admit, I was really baffled and skeptical upon first hearing about the gameplay in the newest entry in the excellent Mario Kart series. Two riders at the same time? Just how was Nintendo going to pull something kooky like this off? I remembered having mixed feelings about Mario Kart: Super Circuit, so I didn't pay much attention to this game at all... that is, until I actually had an opportunity to play it.

Mario Kart: Double Dash!! is now upon us, and while I don't enjoy it as much as Mario Kart 64 or the SNES Super Mario Kart, Double Dash!! winds up being a rather nice, entertaining game nonetheless, and only a few minor bumps and scrapes keep it from reaching absolute greatness.

With this game, the title of the series suddenly becomes a little bit of a misnomer. Quite a few of the vehicles in the game are cars instead of go-karts. Thankfully, there is a LOT more variety in the designs of the vehicles. For example, Donkey and Diddy Kong drive a barrel car, Wario has his purple pimpmobile, and Baby Mario and Baby Luigi cruise around in a rocket-powered baby carriage. The only beef I have with the vehicles themselves is that the controls appear to have gotten somewhat spotty; the vehicles drift around a little too much for my tastes. However, this is a minor complaint, and it doesn't take long to get used to this game's controls.

Mario Kart: Double Dash!! features four cups (Mushroom, Flower, Star, Special) with four tracks each, as well as a hidden All Cup Tour that throws all 16 tracks in the game at you at random. Not all of the tracks have only three laps; one has two, while another has seven! (Luckily, the latter is an incredibly short track.) Most of the traditional items are still there, including straight-shooting green shells, homing red shells, bananas, and lightning bolts to shrink other racers, but the jumping feather is still mysteriously absent from the game, as it was in Mario Kart 64 and Mario Kart: Super Circuit! Another new feature is the double item box, which gives both of your characters items to use, and the special item, which varies depending on which characters you choose (each pair of characters has its own exclusive special item). Choosing characters, though, doesn't have much impact on gameplay besides dictating which special items you get and the weight class of your vehicle, and that's probably for the best in order to avoid overcomplicating the gameplay. Besides, you can mix characters from different pairs to give the race a more strategic edge. Unfortunately, there is one pair of secret characters (King Boo and Petey Piranha) that some people will use ALL THE TIME after unlocking them, mainly because they can use any of the other special items in the game!

Mario Kart: Double Dash!! is a fairly good-looking game. It's not overly detailed and loaded with polygons (which probably accounts for its incredibly stable 60 FPS framerate), but it rivals Super Mario Sunshine as one of the most colorful games on the console. The music and sound effects are just average - enough to get the job done, and that's about it. None of the tunes managed to stick in my head, but the voices and sound effects are a little better. There are even some quotes that made me chuckle upon first hearing them, such as Baby Luigi's ''Baby Luigi, number... not one.'' But as I said before, it's not bad and not great - just okay.

Course design tends to go two ways. On the good hand, there are several innovative and well-made tracks to be seen here. I particularly like DK Mountain, which shoots you up to the summit of a mountain near the beginning and has you screaming downhill while trying to avoid boulders that threaten to squash you. Another favorite of mine is the two-lap Wario Colosseum, with its caged look and tight turns.

Some tracks harken back to Mario Kart traditions, such as Mushroom Bridge (Double Dash!!'s answer to Mario Kart 64's Toad Highway), which includes a few forks in the road and traffic everywhere, and the obligatory Bowser Castle, which has lava pits, fireballs, and Thwomps to get in your way. Appropriately, Luigi Circuit, the first course in the game, is really easy so that newbies can get into the game, and it also features intersecting sections of track, which I found rather neat.

And some designs aren't really up to scratch. Baby Park, with its short length and seven tracks, might just be the most hated track in the game... not because it's hard (it's not), but because it's so plain, short, and uninteresting. It's just a circle - just a CIRCLE!! - and it doesn't even have any obstacles at all! Even though I sometimes like my tracks simple, that track looks just plain lazy. Meanwhile, Rainbow Road, which has a different design with each new MK game, should have had a little more work. Sure, it has a big spiraling curve and not many rails, but half of the fun of that track in MK64 was the outrageously huge jump at the very beginning! The boost-assisted vertical jump near the end doesn't help much, either. That course isn't horrible; it just could have been better.

Most of the time, the gameplay works well, and the two-person system doesn't have much trouble. On the higher difficulties, however, you soon become subject to AI cheapness, and the flaws and misfeatures in the game engine suddenly pop out of the woodwork. I don't like the way characters lose items when hit, as it sometimes tends to oversaturate the track with shells, bananas, and such, causing your character to get hit by items that just about come out of nowhere. The bots even seem to have a grudge against you, the human player, and will aim their green shells in your direction whenever possible. There is a difference between a legitimate effort to provide challenge and deliberate cheapness, and it would have been much better if I had felt that I was being the victim of my own game-playing mistakes rather than a barrage of stupid AI tricks. Call me a rookie if you think you should, but I have played this game enough to know that all of these crashes and spin-outs aren't happening by coincidence, and yes, I have unlocked all of the hidden vehicles and features, so I know what I'm talking about. The power slide is still there, and it is more like Mario Kart 64's slide than the really crappy one in Mario Kart: Super Circuit for the Game Boy Advance, but the little hop is gone! I realize that cars are heavier than go-karts, but it's rather sad to see it go, because it was part of the strategy in multiplayer Mario Kart 64.

The most aggravating gameplay misfeatures concern the spiny shells. For those of you who are new to the series, spiny shells are these homing blue spiked shells which seek out the first place character and hit him or her without fail. First of all, they sometimes come up way too often. In one race in Waluigi Stadium, I was in about 6th place, and I counted three spiny shells that passed me before I got one of my own. Normally, there would be only one or two TOPS in a race (but usually none at all)! Second, they float above and around everybody. No longer do they run into other characters along the way; they just make a beeline for the first-place character. It doesn't really help the lower-place characters anymore, because all it does is give the second- and third-place characters to pass the former leader's smoldering corpse and duke it out as they head to the finish line. And sometimes, they might not even get to do that, due to the spiny shells' third and final irritating aspect: they explode! What a stupid idea. I mean, it looks kind of good, but any characters caught even slightly in the blast radius will crash. And then, the two more fortunate teams behind them zoom into first and second place, potentially causing an even greater amount of madness for all involved. The spiny shells were just fine in Mario Kart 64, so why were they changed?

By now, you might be thinking that I'm rather disgusted with Mario Kart: Double Dash!!, except that you saw the 8/10 when you clicked the link for this review. Actually, even with its flaws, I still enjoy the game, and there is more than enough good stuff in it to offset the bad parts. This game is worth buying, although you might want to give it a good rental or two before making a purchase.

(Note: I regret that I haven't yet had an opportunity to sit down with the Battle Mode or LAN play, and if I ever do, I'll re-review this game with my thoughts on them.)

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 01/02/04