The best Mario Kart to date.
review into two parts: Online and Offline. Lets start with the Offline, shall we?..Well, I
don't care what you think, I'm going to start there anyways.
Offline:
When you first start Mario Kart DS, you have a number of things you can do. The first is
Grand Prix, which has been pumped full of steroids. You will start out, like most Mario
Kart games, with three speeds: 50cc, 100cc, or 150cc. You will then have 4 courses already
unlocked, 2 in the Nitro Grand Prix, which is the new tracks, and 2 in the Retro Grand Prix,
which is a compilation of tracks from the SNES, GBA, N64, and NGC series. The Retro tracks
are an extremly nice addition, seeing as most people have been waiting for this for a long
time. All together there are 8 courses, and 32 tracks, which is double the amount of any
other Mario Kart game. What makes Grand Prix so very interesting, however, is the ranking
system. On a course, you can get a rank from E to 3 Stars, E being the lowest and 3 stars
the highest. This adds alot of replay value to the game, as you'll want to keep trying to
get a perfect 3 stars on every course, and on every speed.
Next is time trails, in which not much has changed. In time trails, you simply race
to see how fast you can beat the track. One new, great feature, is that once
you do a time trail, and save your ghost, you can then send your Ghost to a friend, so
that he can race it. Other then that, the only thing that is different is that,
depending on your kart, depends on the number of mushrooms you get to start with.
You can also unlock staff ghosts, which the staff from Mario Kart DS has put in the game.
Vs. and Battle mode have been upgraded with great results. You can now race against the
computer, meaning that you no longer need any friends! You can choose the CPU's difficulty,
you can now have teams of 2 (Red and Blue teams,) and you can even have rules, so if you
can put "first to 5 wins," or you can pick a fixed number of races. In Vs., you can choose
all the tracks you have unlocked to race. There are a couple of new things in Battle.
You can either play the classic Balloon Battle, in which you burst your opponents ballons to
win. You start with 1 balloon, and 4 in reserve, and you can blow up to 3 balloons at once.
To blow up your balloon, you simply blow into the microphone, or hold the select button.
The new mode is Shine Runners, where you collect more shines than anyone else, and those with
less shines gets booted from the game over time.
The newly added Mission mode adds a lot of replay value to the game as well. There is six levels
of missions, each one getting harder then the last, with 9 missions in each level. You do a
number of things in this mode, included things like collecting a number of coins before time
is up, racing a cpu oppenent, or drive through numbered gates in order. Each level also has a
boss. These are rated almost like the Grand Prix mode, except it is C to 3 stars, and not
E to 3 stars.
When you start out, you have 8 characters to choose from to race, but there is four unlockable
characters, and a ton of karts to choose from. It doesn't matter what driver you pick anymore,
but rather the kart you choose, which will have individual attributes. There is also a number of
new items in this game, including the VERY annoying Blooper. Use this, and black ink will appear
on your oppenents screen, making it almost impossible to see for about 8 seconds or so. Another
is the Bullet Bill item, where your kart turns into a big Bullet Bill, and destroyes anything
that gets in its path. Also, if you hold the "L" button, which is the item button, you can hold
items behind you, just like N64 version, which is great for protecting yourself.
Online:
When I finally got to play Mario Kart Ds online a couple of weeks ago, I was very excited.
After all, its every gammers dream, right? Well, sadly, it was alittle disapointing.
First of all, there is no chat whatsoever, so forget about it. You can have a friends list, where
you add your friend's friend code, and you have them on your list. Which is all fine and dandy, but for
some unGodly reason, Nintendo WiFi will search for your friends on random, so there is no way
you can CHOOSE who you want to race. But, its not so bad if you only have a few friends, its
just disapointing that you can't choose.
Theres 4 ways you can search: Friends, Rivals,
Regional, or Worldwide. When you search for Rivals, it searches for people who have a similar
record that you have, which is pretty cool. Regional is, obviously, your region (North America,
Europe, wherever you live.) Worldwide is great, because you can play against people anywhere in
the world, including Japan. Some things have been taken out of the game as well, like there being
only 20 tracks. Now, this may seem fine, but it seems that they chose the worst tracks for online.
Also, you can't hold items behind your kart if you hold the "L" button, which is also a bit of a
downer.
So, thats it for my review. I highly recomend this game! With the ranking system, missions,
multiplayer and Wi-Fi, it with keep you entertained.