Mario Kart: Double Dash!!

"Good, but not Great..."

Mario Kart has been one of the best racing games out there for a long time now. When it originally premiered on the SNES, it was an instant classic. Nintendo has continually followed up on the series, with Mario Kart DS and Mario Kart 64 being famous for their action-packed races. Unfortunately, while Double Dash is a lot of fun, it simply isn't the same caliber that the other Mario Karts are.

Basically, you can play as a team out of many characters from the Mario universe, such as Mario, Luigi, Yoshi, Bowser, and so on. You can pick any two characters to form your racing team, which you'll use to race against other teams. Complimentary characters, such as Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong, Mario and Luigi, or Daisy and Peach, will have a bonus by getting access to certain items which are unique to those particular couples. One character will drive, while the other will act as the item user and drifter. You can switch characters at any time during the race, which is nice. Different characters have different weights, which influence acceleration, speed, and the force you can hit other teams with. Generally, heavier characters will spin out lighter characters. Likewise, there are different carts available to each team to ride in. All the carts have different weights, but you can only use carts that are as light as your heaviest character. (For example, if you have a light and a heavy character, you can only choose between heavy carts) As a rule, heavier carts have higher top speeds but poorer acceleration, while inversely light carts can reach their limited top speeds quite quickly.

At first there will be a total of three courses, consisting of a grand total of twelve tracks open to you. There are three difficulty levels, with the first being painfully easy, to the third being a challenge. As you can imagine, it is a pretty steep difficulty climb. Eventually you will unlock a final course, meaning only sixteen tracks are in the game. However, you can unlock Mirror Mode, in which controls are reversed, which makes the game extremely difficult for those hardcore players.

Gameplay is pretty solid, but there are some faults. In the easiest levels, enemies almost avoid you, nearly handing the win over to you by only really attacking each other and moving very slowly. However, in the hard difficulties the races are really unrealistic. The same team will always win, unless you beat them, in which they'll get second place. This means that instead of random placings, one team will always be just a hair behind you in standings, so if you mess up one level just a little, the whole course will be ruined because they have gotten all the computer victories. Also, the CPU almost tries to hunt you down, instead of making reasonable choices. For example, if you are in third place, the computer directly in front of you (second place), will send their items backwards towards you, instead of making the smart choice and knocking out the first place computer to get first place for themselves. In this way all the computer teams seem to gang up and race as one, by ignoring each and even helping each other whenever you're around.

On the subject of items, there are a ton of them. They all either help you or hurt your opponent, by setting up traps, launching projectiles at opponents, giving you speed boosts or invincibility, giving you more items, protecting you from your opponents' items, and so on. However Double Dash is almost entirely dominated by items. What is particularly annoying is that you, or any player for that matter, human or machine, can make up for horrid driving skills by randomly attaining a good item. Often times it is the smart move to go off road and kill your speed just to get a double item box, which gives both members of your team an item. Yes, in Double Dash your team can have two items at a time, allowing you to utilize strategies which were impossible in previous games. This was actually a nice addition, but can lead to some overpowered or "cheap" races. Since different character duos have unique items only available to them, you can abuse these to give yourself an advantage. These unique items are generally extremely powerful, and not all that hard to get. These can include the "Giant Banana," which serves as a near indestructible road block. Projectiles will bounce off of it to either explode, bounce around the track, or come right back and hit you. It is so massive it is near unavoidable if you can place it in a tight spot, and the only way to get rid of it is to run into it, which immediately spins you off and drastically reduces your speed. By correctly utilizing these, you can drive other players off the edges, which normally takes five to ten seconds to recover from. Did I mention it also splits into several smaller, but equally devastating bananas upon being destroyed? The "Chain Chomp" item will chase after first place, dragging your team behind it at breakneck speeds and smashing anything in the way, whether it is an item or a player. This can almost guarantee bringing you from, say, sixth place to second if you are in a pack of other players. Even the normal items are severely overpowered, such as the Blue Shell, which flies over other players to home in on the one in first place. Upon contact, everything near that player is consumed in a violent explosion, not sparing second or third place either. If you are unlucky enough to get it yourself while you are in first place, you might as well give up if it is a close race.

The characters and carts themselves aren't really that much fun. While there is a ton of unlockable carts and characters, along with the huge number available from the get-go, most of them are really the same. While you can make hundreds of different, unique combinations of characters, nobody in their right mind would do such a thing. All the characters are simply a speed and weight rating with a different face. In fact, all the speed/weight ratings total the same amount, meaning almost all the characters are a simple 1/5, 2/4, 3/3, 4/2, or 5/1 rating. Since all the characters share ratings with several others, there's no reason to diversify - especially at the expense of those all-powerful unique items, which are reason enough to justify a team selection. So really all you end up with are Mario/Luigi, Yoshi/Birdo, Koopa/Paratroopa, Baby Mario/Baby Luigi, Bowser/Bowser Jr., etc... combinations.

All these characters brings us back to the AI. As I stated before, Heavier carts/characters have poor acceleration but wonderful top speeds. So, in a nutshell, they are hard to get going, but once they get going they are fast. Usually you will want to avoid these combinations, opting for lighter teams with better acceleration. Why? Because, whether your opponents are computer or human, as soon as you get any speed going they are going to attack you and spin you out. And then you are back in square one, having to slowly build up all your speed again, which means you'll eventually end up losing. However, the AI doesn't suffer from these difficulties, and as an effect, in the harder difficulties, usually the top computer opponents will be heavy teams. In the event you do make it into one of the first several places, they will proceed to ram you until you fall off the edge of the track or are successfully spun out. In order to get past the heavies cramming up the narrow passageways, you'll usually have to take out several at once, which is where the overpowered items come back into the picture. However, soon they'll be back at your tail, since they don't suffer from acceleration difficulties. And then you'll be bearing the brunt of their attacks, all the while racing towards the first place computer, which has been shielded by the other computers.

Another annoying computer-player aspect is that they all play the same. Wario and Waluigi don't utilize the underhand tactics that emphasize their guile and cleverness they are famous for. Bowser and Donkey Kong don't focus on brutish tactics consisting of pure strength. They all play the same. In fact, they all travel the same paths when possible, and would really all move in the exact same line, were it not for the constant disruptions presented by each other and track obstacles. This really leads to a repetitive single player mode, which was already limited by its small number of courses and tracks. Instead of programming advanced AI, Nintendo simply used the age old method of giving the computer a large initial material advantage to make up for the shoddy, sheer stupidity that the computer sometimes presents. This really shows some laziness on the developer's part.

Don't get me wrong however, Single Player is a lot of fun. It also includes Time Trials, where you race against the clock to complete laps as fast as you can. However, this loses its feel and enjoyability after you've gotten good and played a bit with it.

A disappointing factor in the gameplay are the shortcuts. While shortcuts in previous Mario Kart installments were clever and often required reckless courage to attempt, many of the shortcuts in Mario Kart are easy to memorize once you learn how to use a few of them, the courses get much easier, particularly because the computer rarely, if ever, uses them. Mario Kart is one of those games where once you learn the "tricks," it becomes significantly easier.

Multiplayer is where Mario Kart has traditionally shined, and while Double Dash isn't spectacular, Multiplayer certainly is more entertaining than Single Player, and will provide countless hours of fun. While still suffering from the same faults as Single Player, against humans the game is suddenly much more enjoyable. You can play against up to eight players, a truly great feature when experienced on a Gamecube of all consoles. You can participate in "Shine Attack," a Capture-the-Flag style game, reminiscent of the Tony Hawk "King" games. As the timer counts down, whoever is in possession of the Shine at the end of the 45-second period is the winner. Battle Mode has been a memorable favorite in the Mario Kart series, and it's back in Double Dash in all its glory. However the levels are limited and cramped, and aren't as magnificent as the older games. I really wish they had added "Bots" so you could play Battle Mode in Single Player, much like they did with Mario Kart DS. As a note, you can now "steal" balloons from your opponents, which can give you a decisive advantage, and adds a "cheesiness" factor in the previously hectic Battle Mode, since now battles can drag on and it loses its flair. Also, there is Bom-omb Attack, in which players have to blast each other, since the only items available are Bom-ombs! One complaint I have is that in Multiplayer mode, there are only a few available levels, most poorly designed compared to the older games, and that the previously unique items are no longer unique. In multiplayer, all players can get all the items. One nice feature however is that if there are only three players, they will all still get an equal amount of screen, with the fourth focusing on the first-place player.

There is another Multiplayer feature, Co-Op mode, in which one player controls the driver in a team, and the other controls the rear character. It was interesting, certainly, but poorly played out. Usually you will end up losing your races, since there is so little for the rear character to do, and that you can only do some things, such as powersliding, drifting, and even switching drivers and rear guys, by cooperating and pressing buttons at the exact right time together, just to achieve the same thing that would be much simpler to do by yourself. All in all, you will eventually find yourself not having as much fun as would be expected.

If you can bring yourself to do it, you can race each other, but this can get really repetitive due to the small amount of tracks available. However, this is easily the most fun part of Double Dash, and the LAN networking options gives a lot to the Gamecube, since eight players playing at once is unbelievable fun. In short, the more human players, the more fun Double Dash is.

Graphics are so-so. The backgrounds are fantastic and full of rich, lively detail. The characters are animated well enough, but many details are poor. For example, the faces look no better than in N64 games. Even though the heads are rounder now, they still look like their mouths and eyes were drawn separately and pasted on, giving a plastered look to character faces. It doesn't help that their bodies are a little on the angular side, and their faces don't really have any animations. Eye blinking would at least add some flavor to the characters. Animations are fluid and smooth, but mostly just overused flashes. The explosion for a Bom-omb is the exact same as the explosion for a Blue Shell, except that the Bom-omb explosion is red, while the Blue Shell explosion is, well, blue. Other than that they look exactly the same. However, in spite of this, all the exaggerated action fits well and is entertaining and fresh. The carts move smoothly and dust flies up off the dirt roads. The effects are by no means lacking. I just wish the characters themselves looked less like cardboard and lived up to the standards that other Gamecube games have been able to achieve.

The Sound and Music is not as great as the game is Graphics-wise, which should say a lot. While the music isn't just composed of unoriginal loops, some songs are simply annoying ambient noise which are absolutely terrible. There is usually a mismatch of random loud noises coming in at the strangest times for some songs, and while a few were meant to represent, say, a jungle, they sound nothing at all like one, and simply serve to annoy you. Some songs are pretty good actually, and resemble what they are supposed to sound like. However, even the most beautifully composed song will eventually get tiring after hearing it a hundred times. And with only sixteen tracks, some of which you will undoubtedly dislike, anybody who plays a lot will eventually start hearing the same music again and again. To top it off, the last lap in every track is simply the same song as all the others, except at double pace. Instead of creating a new, frantic, "Last Lap" melody which would have fitted perfectly, Nintendo decided to go the easy way and land themselves with some music pieces which were obviously not cut out for a retail game.

Sound Effects are remarkable good. It's nice hearing the voices of the different characters, however, as usually is present in Mario games, the characters are really limited to yelps, grunts, and screams. They fit pretty well and along with the visuals can paint quite a humorous picture. Characters do have victory and defeat cheers, but since there are only two or three for each character in total, they become extremely repetitive. Of particular note is Baby Mario/Baby Luigi. They both talk in an ear-piercing high-pitched voice with can really send your head spinning. They honestly couldn't make them any more annoying. Not to mention the fact that you can never make out what they're saying whether they are talking in their usual glass-shattering speech, or amid their crying. (Yes, they cry sometimes, like real babies!)

I think there are many features that could have been implemented to make this game an instant bestseller. Better graphics and sound are obvious, but more levels and a stronger AI would have helped too. Balancing the game would have been nice, and making the characters more unique, along with providing more incentives to mix and match characters would have helped. What this game really needs is a strong single-player replay value, since everything is so repetitive. A Freeplay mode would have been nice as well, so that you wouldn't have to play through three other levels just so you could practice on a particular one. Double Dash has some serious issues, but is a solid game when it comes down to it. Hopefully in the future they will add more gameplay modes and make the existing ones better.

In short, this game isn't really amazing in any way. Most everything has been done before in other games, and usually better. Hardcore Mario fans might want to pick this one up, along with those who have a lot of people at their house, which mandates that multiplayer games be the games of choice, since Double Dash really shines in Multiplayer. However, the Single Player levels are really just drudges and everything is too random to really depend on a fair amount of skill. The game is less racing and more item/battle oriented, which cuts gameplay a lot, and the computer plays poorly, instead choosing to make itself strong by employing unrealistic strategies against you. There are tons of unlockables, but to get them, you will basically be replaying some things over and over again, and since almost everything is the same as several other things, why even bother to drag yourself through it? This game could be a good potential rent, but without playtesting it first, you might find yourself with a bad buy.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 12/26/05