From the Memory Bank: My History with Video Games

The Mario Kart Series - Scripting a Better Race (Part 1)
How a company's increasingly inhibitive tendencies corrupted the definition of "fun" and the means by which I could extract it.

It seems appropriate: Every time I felt as though I was ahead of the game, Mario Kart would come along and wallop me with a metaphorical blue shell that would set me back about 12 months.

I'm speaking of the intense feeling of dread that would overcome me every time I'd pull up a chair and attempt to put this Memory Bank entry together. In those moments, I knew that I wouldn't be able to find the motivation to do it. I knew that I wouldn't be able to get excited about writing about my history with the Mario Kart series. And all I'd be able to do was wonder why that was.

So what I'd do instead was endeavor to produce an earnestly written piece through the sheer force of will even though I knew that engaging in such a practice would likely result in failure. And predictably, only days after starting, I'd be stressed out and mentally drained, and the resulting burnout would force me to go on a year-long hiatus and seriously reassess what it was that I was trying to do here.

I mean, it's not that the Mario Kart games aren't important to me or that I don't want to write about them, no. Rather, it's that I struggle to pay them their proper respect because they give rise to a problem that I've persistently been unable to solve: taking games that have had a great impact on my life and trying to lovingly write about them when I simply can't (a) generate enough interesting material to meaningfully convey their importance to me or (b) form a coherent narrative around them.

That's been the case with the Mario Kart games, which, by and large, have left me not with stories but instead with a collection of unconnected memorable moments.

It just doesn't feel like enough.

Still, though, I refuse to miss the opportunity to chronicle my history with the Mario Kart series, which has been a part of my life for over 30 years. So what I'm choosing to do is approach this piece from a different angle: I'm going to tell my story by instead sharing with you the broader, more-encompassing tale of how the series and I have grown apart over time. (Don't feel sad about this, dear reader. I promise that the story concludes with a hopeful message!)

It all starts with a question: "What, exactly, is Mario Kart all about?"

For me, answering that question is easy: The way I see it, Mario Kart is about ubiquity and dependability. Nintendo's manic racing series has always been there, it's always been fun, and it's always had the knack for reliably filling voids--for both me and the industry at large.

When I look back upon my experiences with Mario Kart games, it becomes evident to me that the laughter and joy that they provided helped me to endure some pretty rough stretches; and I come to see, also, that each one of them manages to reflect where I currently was in life at the time I played it, whether it was the days in which I was struggling to deal with the near-crippling effects of obsessive-compulsive disorder or the present era in which I'm constantly expressing my dissatisfaction with the state of game design.

During our time together, neither of us has really changed all that much in terms of outward appearance, no, but on the inside, we've clearly evolved in opposite directions. This phenomenon speaks of the changes that have taken place within Nintendo, whose design philosophy has sadly shifted from letting players define the parameters of their own experiences to obsessive-compulsively attempting to control how they derive enjoyment from the company's products.

It used to be that Mario Kart games were well-crafted racers in which items had tactical applications and were best used in specific situations. There was a happy medium between the two game aspects, and neither ever worked to diminish the other.

I mean, sure: There were plenty of instances in which we were the victim of comical item-barrages or hilarious screw-ups (colliding with our own tossed shell or banana peel, wildly swerving off a cliff out of panic, activating a star while on a snaking part of the road and accidentally rocketing off the course, and such) that ruined our races, and there were always times when we found great amusement in each other's misfortunes, but we never felt as though we weren't in control of our own destinies. If we lost a race, it was our own fault.

There were, we knew, benefits to mastering the game's mechanics. There was an incentive for us to try to improve even in those times when we were convinced that we didn't possess the skill necessary to achieve greatness. And there was satisfaction to be gained from winning.

But the creators at Nintendo didn't see the value in this formula. They weren't fond of the style of action that it produced. So they decided to take the Mario Kart series in a different direction. And in time, consequently, the series' games became more about manufacturing "fun" than providing a balanced, rewarding combat-racing experience.

Somewhere along the line, "Everyone must have a good time" replaced "Everyone is free to dictate the terms of his or her experience, and "Everyone must feel like a winner" replaced "Come to know the feeling of accomplishment that results from personal improvement." And it was almost as if Nintendo was seeking to make multiplayer human races indistinguishable from the ones that you had with mindless CPU opponents who relied on obnoxious rubber-banding AI routines!

"So how did we get to this point, you longwinded freak?" you ask in a rude-but-genuinely-inquisitive manner.

Well, my snippy friend, let me show you the way.

Now the first thing that you should know is that "racing" had never been one of my favorite genres of video game. To me, racing games were barely a step above sports simulations and shoot-'em-ups, which I considered to be thoroughly uninteresting.

In my first decade as an enthusiast, I largely avoided racing games. I mean, I spent a fair bit of time playing the Off Roads, OutRuns and R.C. Pro-Ams of the world, sure, and in the previous months, I'd invested a whole lot of time and energy into conquering F-Zero, but never once during those experiences did I serious consideration to the idea that a racing game's action could amount to anything more than a brief diversion. A racer, I believed, was the type of game that you played only when you'd exhausted all other options or when you needed a temporary breather as you transitioned from one favorite action game to the next.

"That's all that racing games are good for," I thought. "That's their niche."

So you can understand why I wasn't overflowing with excitement when Nintendo Power announced that Nintendo's next big IP was going to be "Super Mario Kart," which the magazine described as a new type of racing game. Just the idea of it sounded ridiculous to me. "With so many activities to choose from, including infinitely-more-popular sports like baseball and basketball, why would you decide to go with go-kart racing?" I wondered in a completely perplexed manner.

For as much as I worshiped at the altar of Mario and friends, I wasn't ready to believe that their inclusion would be enough to make a racing game that much more interesting.

Now, of course I was going to buy the game anyway. I was, after all, a huge fan of Nintendo, which had never failed me. So all I could think was, "How can I take a chance of passing on Super Mario Kart and potentially missing out on the next big thing?"

That's where Nintendo Power's marketing was as enticing and as effective as ever. "Missing out on Super Mario Kart," the company had me convinced, "would be tantamount to refusing an invitation to a party that every kid in the world would be attending!"

I couldn't possibly miss the opportunity to own such a game! So as soon as it arrived in stores, I went out and bought myself a copy of it.

And in this instance, Nintendo Power's hype wasn't a lie: Super Mario Kart was indeed something special. It provided me a gaming experience that was well beyond what I imagined a "mere go-kart racer" could deliver.

To me, Super Mario Kart was a revelation. It was the type of game that I didn't know that I needed in my life until I played it. Really, I'd never seen anything like it: a racing game that featured a combination of solidly designed racing mechanics, wacky combat, and nonstop hilarity!

There was fun to be had in its single-player modes (Grand Prix and Time Trial), yeah, but its multiplayer mode was the place in which its action truly shined. Because let me tell you, man: Super Mario Kart became an absolutely magical game when friends or family would play it with me and join me for some multiplayer racing action!

Never before had a two-player racing game been as fun or as addicting. No other game had ever offered its irresistible mix of satisfying and hilarious gameplay.

We simply loved it.

We devoted hundreds of hours of our young lives to the game. In that time, we strove to master its every mechanic, we consistently played through all of its modes and attempted to best each other, and we had fun by putting together advanced racing strategies and creating sciences around the weapon system. And along the way, we extracted endless amounts of laughter and joy from the game.

Every kid owned Super Mario Kart, and wherever and whenever we'd meet up, there wouldn't be a single person who didn't want to play it. No other game was ever able to bring together so many different people.

That was the power of Mario Kart.

I played as Koopa Trooper almost exclusively. He was my boy: He was fast, he handled well, and his light weight, which was purported to be his main drawback, was hardly a negative. He was, I felt, the game's best racer, and I was able to win consistently with him.

I couldn't see the appeal in the other characters. Mario and Luigi had no perceivable strengths and seemed to be below average in every category despite their being advertised as "balanced" racers. Yoshi and Princess were too slippery and would get out of control too easily. And the big guys, Bowser and Donkey Kong Jr., took way too long to accelerate, which, in my opinion, negated any advantage that they gained from having superior top speed; and this weakness was greatly exacerbated by their needing to re-accelerate even after making light contact with a wall or obstacle.

"But what about Toad?" you ask with a puzzled look on your face. "His stats were identical to Koopa Trooper's, so why didn't you use him, too?"

Well, there's a very scientific explanation for why I didn't play as Toad: I thought Koopa Trooper looked cooler than him! And, honestly, I never liked Toad all that much anyway. I rarely used him in Super Mario Bros. 2, after all, and I was immediately repelled by any game in which he had a starring role (like Wario's Woods). I just never found him to be an interesting character.

I mean, I might have used him had there been any notable differences between characters of the same class. There weren't any, apparently, even though we wished that there were. That's why we got excited when Nintendo Power hinted that there actually were some small differences between characters in the same class!

In reaction to the magazine's comments, we spent an excessive amount of time trying to perceive the small differences. We repeatedly went into multiplayer mode and attempted to synchronize same-class characters' movements in order to find proof that one was faster or heavier than the other. In the end, though, we wound up agreeing that the magazine's information was suspect and that there were likely no such "small differences."

It could have been true that there were differences between them, sure, but we never saw anything that could lead us to conclude that their stats diverged in any way. And if there was actual variance between them, it was probably so negligible that it wouldn't be noticeable. Yet, still, people in our group continued, for years, to make claims like "Yoshi is slightly faster than Princess Toadstool!" and "Bowser is definitely heavier than Donkey Kong Jr.!"

Such were the days when there was no definitive source of information!

There was no such conflict when it came to our opinion of Super Mario Kart's music, though, no. We were unanimous in thinking that it was wonderfully distinct and that its jazzy-sounding note strings and spirited tones worked to imbue the game with an infectiously effervescent personality that strongly set it apart from other Mario-brand series.

Super Mario Kart established the series' trademarked style of music, which would come to function as an important indicator. In the future, we were able to identify a Mario Kart game simply by listening to its music and taking notice of its unmistakable funky beats and sharp, quirky percussion.

We liked all of the game's tunes, but our absolute favorite was the Rainbow Road theme, which never failed to invigorate us and pump us up with its powerful energy and the goosebumps-inducing story that it told: "Persevere and you will ultimately triumph," it made us believe.

We considered it to be one of the greatest video-game tunes of all time. And of course, I made sure to record it with my tape recorder (I included it in my compilation of favorite video-game tunes) and listen to it regularly (especially when I was bored or tired and needed a boost).

Super Mario Kart was strong in every area, but still it wasn't without its annoyances. The first was admittedly one of my own personal issues: the game's excluding Donkey Kong in favor of his less-popular son, Donkey Kong Jr. To me, Donkey Kong was a true gaming icon, and I was very disappointed that Nintendo left him out of a game that was purportedly made to bring together all of the company's "all-star characters."

"How can it can be 'all-star' roster if it doesn't include the character that basically established the company?!" I would always wonder in puzzlement. (And I was annoyed by his exclusion even before I bought the game. It became an issue for me as soon as Nintendo Power revealed the game's roster in its first preview.)

Donkey Kong's omission strengthened my belief that Nintendo was, for whatever reason, trying to erase the existence of its pioneering mascot. And my friends felt the same way about the situation. They, too, were convinced that Nintendo hated the big ape for some unstated reason.

"I mean, you don't replace a star character with a B-teamer unless you intend to bury him!" logic told us. (The truth, as we learned two years later, was that Nintendo was disassociating him from the Mario characters simply because it planned to reintroduce him in his own game, Donkey Kong Country, and attempt to establish him as a standalone character. So we obviously misjudged the situation. And we were happy to admit that we were wrong.)

Also, I didn't like how CPU racers could generate an endless supply of character-specific items, which was something that the player obviously couldn't do. This wouldn't have bugged me so much had Bowser and crew not been so adept at tossing fireballs and mushrooms in such a way that they'd somehow land right in front of me, even in times when I was wildly swerving all over the road!

"That type of predictive programming is just unfair, Nintendo!" I'd think to myself every time it would happen. "You could at least try to make it seem as though you didn't purposely rig the system by having a tossed item occasionally land in a random spot!"

And if the CPU characters weren't doing that, then they were persistently bumping into me from the side and redirecting me into lava pits and knocking me off courses! Princess Toadstool was notorious for this. She wouldn't stop doing it! In any race, she'd hound me from start to finish and do everything in her power to piss me off! She was my eternal nemesis.

Seriously: It was never anyone else. No matter which racer I picked, the game would choose the bubbly pink menace as my rival, and she'd never leave me alone! And that's how it would go for the next 30-plus years!

Because of she behaves in Super Mario Kart, there have many times when I've come close to hating her. And I might get to that place one day.

And Super Mario Kart was the series' worst offender when it came to CPU racers getting boosted by rubber-banding AI, about which I was ignorant at the time. I never understood how it was that the second-place CPU racer would always manage to catch up to me no matter how cleanly I raced, how smoothly I executed turns, or how well I utilized my items!

"I just saw Donkey Kong Jr. fall to the back of the pack after I hit him with a green shell, so how was he able to rocket past all of the racers and catch up to me within ten seconds?!" I'd wonder as the inexplicable comeback occurred. "I never observed such nonsense in a versus match, even when my opponent was the beneficiary of consecutively distributed mushrooms, so how are the CPU characters able to do this?!"

Well, you know why.

But honestly, the CPU characters' annoying habits didn't really hurt the game or diminish my enjoyment of it, no. To the contrary: Super Mario Kart's irritating quirks were part of what made it so memorable to me. They were admittedly hilarious aspects of the game.

My friends and I loved Super Mario Kart, warts and all. For us, it was a truly special game. We derived years of enjoyment from it.

We recognized Super Mario Kart as a quintessential SNES game and one of the 16-bit generation's finest creations. And we would have continued to play it for many years in following had it not been for the arrival of its 64-bit sequel.

I'll come right out and say that Mario Kart 64 is my favorite entry in the Mario Kart series. It holds that status because it's the one that provided me the largest collection of fun experiences and memorable moments. Also, I consider it to be a pretty damn good racing game!

For how it aggressively refined the formula, Mario Kart 64 represents the biggest game-to-game evolution the series has ever seen, and it represents the template upon which all of the future series entries were built.

So you could say that both the series and I benefitted greatly from existence.

Mario Kart 64 holds the distinction of being the first racing game that I ever looked forward to hearing about and buying. I eagerly awaited each new issue of Nintendo Power with the hope that it would come bearing news of the game, and I made it a priority to ignore all other N64 releases and save up some money in anticipation of the game's arrival. I couldn't wait to get a hold of it and begin testing out its new mechanics, all of which sounded really cool, and exploring its genuinely-three-dimensional environments!

I mean, sure: I knew that there was a possibility that the game could fall short of exceeding or even matching its predecessor, which had set the bar pretty high, but I had no reason to believe that it would. Because, after all, Nintendo had yet to publish an N64 game that didn't wow me! The company was on a roll!

And, as I expected it to, Mario Kart 64 delivered! It looked great (despite its having obviously flat 2D character sprites); its unmistakably styled music was high in quality, and it succeeded in capturing the essence of the original and using its comforting vibes to make me feel right at home in a game that I barely knew; and, most importantly, it played amazingly!

My earliest hours with Mario Kart 64 were all about excited experimentation and exploration. They were about the fun of testing out the game's cool new mechanics and getting a sense of its size and scope. I was very aware that Mario Kart 64 wouldn't be "new" forever, so I made sure to savor each early moment and extract the type of rapturous enjoyment that you could only get from a first-ever experience.

I'm glad that I did so. It helped me to create some very vivid memories of my experiences.

I recall, for instance, how I loved the newly introduced power-sliding mechanic. It appealed to me because it put an emphasis on cornering and gave a decided edge to anyone who was skillful enough to master it. And because I was great at cornering, I was certain that power-sliding would help me to have a natural advantage over my friends!

Also, power-sliding made the simple act of turning so much fun on its own! Whenever I was racing, I couldn't wait to come across a circular or L-shaped portion of road and start madly skidding around it!

It took me a while to get the hang of power-sliding, actually, but once I did, I never again missed the opportunity to abuse it. For certain, I sorely missed its presence when I returned to the SNES original!

I was sad to see that the feather item was removed (though, later on, I realized that its exclusion made sense because I was able to visualize the many ways in which it could potentially break the game), but I was fond of all of the new items, and I liked how they could be utilized in creative ways: You could use triple red and green shells as shielding that could help you to block items or dissuade rivals from bumping into you; you could use banana bunches to calculatedly litter the track; and you could mix a fake item box in with real item boxes and really screw your friends over!

I was even an advocate for the new Blue Shell item, which was programmed to strike all of the racers that were ahead of you. "What a great new addition!" I thought.

If only I'd known what I was welcoming.

And I felt that Mario Kart 64 had the series' best courses. Moo Moo Farm, Choco Mountain, Sherbet Land, Bowser's Castle, Toad's Turnpike and the rest were all standouts to me, and I loved their track designs and all of the cool ideas that they brought to the table. I raced my way around them hundreds of times over the year, and I had a ton of fun freely exploring them in Time Trial mode and reverently examining their every unique graphical detail.

I was especially delighted that you could veer off from the road in the Royal Raceway track and drive over to Peach's Castle, which was ripped directly from Super Mario 64! I always thought that it was neat enough when a game would find a clever way to recycle sprites from its predecessor, but it was nowhere near as epic as seeing a game recycle a monstrously large three-dimensional structure that previously encompassed a third of an area! Its presence in Mario Kart 64 was mind-blowing to me.

And of course I spent a whole lot of time examining the castle exterior and checking to see if its design elements, including tree-placement and object textures, matched up to Super Mario 64's. To my surprise, the castle grounds were pretty much faithfully replicated. There were, I noticed, only two differences: The waterfall on the left side was missing, and there was no grating near the pond! And I was a bit disappointed by these changes (because, as you know, I'm a stickler for such things).

If I wasn't doing that, then I was having fun trying to glitch my way over the walls in Wario Stadium and cut minutes off of my Time Trial record, or I was using mushrooms to rocket myself off of the sides of Rainbow Road and attempt to land on later portions of the track! It was fun to discover the game's intended shortcuts, certainly, but for my friends and I, it was even more fun to create our own! So that's what we did: We developed strategies for breaking tracks and cheating our way to victory!

And when we'd grow bored of doing that, we'd head over to the Battle Mode and spend hours bludgeoning each other with items! Because, really, there was nothing more fun than abusing your friends in video games!

I mainly did that with Wario, to whom I naturally gravitated (because I was a fan of the character). He did, as a heavy racer, have that undesirable slow-acceleration issue, yeah, but his wasn't as pronounced as Donkey Kong (he finally made it in!) and Bowser's. So there was no real downside to using him. He basically had it all: He was fast, he handled well, and his corner-cutting ability was topnotch.

I won races frequently when I used him. And each time I won, I would customarily seal my 1st place finish by mimicking his victory taunt and shouting, "I'm-a Wario! I'm-a gonna ween!"

Because that's what a true warrior does.

I guess.

If not for any other reason, though, I'll always remember Mario Kart 64 for how it made a positive impact on my life during my college years, when everything was falling apart for me. At that point in time, I no longer had any friends, my condition was worsening, and my future was looking bleak. One of the only things that I could look forward to--one of the only things that I could depend upon for a lift--was playing Mario Kart 64 with my brother, James, who always knew how to cheer me up and make me laugh. It became our daily routine.

James, like me, had been around video games all of his life, but he wasn't particularly good at most of them. He did, however, have a strong aptitude for racing games. His skill-level was such that he could set the top score in any arcade racer or complete even the toughest console racing challenges (F-Zero's Master difficulty, for instance, was no sweat for him). So not surprisingly, he also loved the Mario Kart games.

Logically, I thought, he'd tear through the competition like a pro because the Mario Kart games were comparatively much easier than the types of racing games that he grew up with. But that didn't happen. Instead, for whatever reason, he struggled mightily with them.

What made our time playing Mario Kart 64 together so memorable was his deciding to embrace his futility and purposely use it as a mechanism to make me laugh uncontrollably. That's exactly what I'd do whenever he, as Luigi, would fall off one of Choco Mountain's higher ledges for the 30th time, wildly bounce in front of me while screaming "MAMA-MI-YAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!" in horror, and then proceed to drop even further down the mountain.

Stuff like that was the norm.

He'd spend entire races in a flustered state, and at certain points, his increasingly confused commentary would start producing Professor Fink-style questions that neither of us could answer. "Why do I keep falling off the thing with the person?" he'd ask in an exacerbated manner. And I'd laugh each time.

I can't tell you how many times he screwed up the final jump near Wario Stadium's end portion and had to repeat half the lap or how many times he ran into his own fake item boxes.

That's how it would go.

If there was a gap somewhere, he'd find it and fall into it. If there was a penguin idling about, he'd collide with it. And if a course had no rails, then it would be a certainty that Lakitu would be working overtime.

And he was an abuse magnet. Seriously: I'd never seen anyone else get hit with as many random green shells or have as many thrown bombs and banana peels land perfectly on his or her head. These things were happening to him constantly.

Sometimes he'd become so lost in the chaos that he'd resort to blindly following me, which would work out fine if I was doing well. When I wasn't, though, you'd get instances like the one that transpired in Frappe Snowland: During a particularly messy race, I became so overwhelmed by the mayhem that was occurring all over the screen that I lost sight of the track and wound up making a series of wild turns that carried me over to a remote off-course snow bank, and upon entering it, I crashed into a wall.

I had no clue where I was or what I was looking at, and it almost seemed as though I'd glitched through the floor and drifted off into some inescapable netherworld. I mean, I was so far removed from the action that my character's icon wasn't even appearing on the mini-map!

As I was backing my way out of the remote corner, I thought to myself, "Man--no one can be dumb enough to do what I just did."

But two seconds later, sure enough, James came flying over a snow hill and crashed into the exact same section of wall! And though I had many questions for him in that moment, I didn't dare to ask them. Because, really, I didn't want to evoke a response that worked to shatter my perception of him as the "intelligent, observant big brother."

And those were the types of moments that formed my daily Mario Kart 64 experience. During our races, James would make me laugh hysterically, and sometimes he'd make me laugh so hard that I'd start fearing for my life. I'm not even joking: Every so often, I'd laugh so long and so hard that my face would go numb, and then I'd begin to feel as though it was raining but only doing so on my face; and in some of those moment, I really believed that I was on the verge of suffering a stroke.

And even then, he wouldn't stop. He'd continue to try to make me laugh!

But honestly, I was fine with what he was doing. Because for at least a few hours a day, his hilarious antics were allowing me to take my mind off of my troubles and find some joy in life. And that's all that really mattered.

These days, I'm inclined to think that he knew what I was going through and did what he did because he wanted to be there for me and help me to get through a tough stretch. Because when I look back on our long history together and view his actions in a greater context, I can see a clear trend and conclude that he behaved the way that he did because he was looking out for me.

That, I'm sure, was exactly what he was doing back in our Mario Kart 64 days.

Of course, the game also played a strong role in helping me. It did just as much to make me forget my troubles and bring joy to my life. So I owe a lot of thanks to it, too.

To me, it's a truly special game. I'm very fond of it.

That's why it pains me to constantly see it labeled "overrated" by Internet folks whose sole reason for existing, it seems, is to parrot the damning opinions of media types who view video games through a lens of cynicism. They say that it doesn't live up to the original Mario Kart. They tell us that it fails to reach its full potential. And they insist that it's one of the series' worst games.

Well, I don't see it that way. The Mario Kart 64 that I know offers incredibly satisfying racing action; has many creatively designed courses and a large amount of great content; and provides players a lifetime's-worth of laughter and fun.

And, really, what more could you ask for from a video game?

So logically, you'd think, I should have been excited when Nintendo Power announced that a new series entry called "Mario Kart: Double Dash" was coming to Nintendo's latest console: the GameCube.

Sadly I wasn't.

I've reflected on the matter many times over the years, though I've never been able to determine the exact reason why I wasn't looking forward to Double Dash's arrival. It could have been because the amazingly addictive Super Smash Bros. had become my go-to game for frantic multiplayer action and consequently stolen the Mario Kart series' thunder. Or maybe it was because I'd played Mario Kart 64 so much that I'd become fatigued on the series. Or perhaps it was because the GameCube simply wasn't an exciting console for me and Double Dash was suffering the consequences of being associated with it.

I can't say for certain, but I tend to learn toward the last suggestion.

The GameCube was, to be fair, a fine console. The little purple lunchbox (as we affectionately called it) was home to some legendary games and one of my all-time-favorites: Metroid Prime. But at that point in my life, I was slowly losing my love for consoles and beginning to favor portable systems, which were now rife with the kinds of games that I wanted to play (2D side-scrollers, mainly).

My disinterest in Double Dash was so great that I had absolutely no compulsion to go out and buy it when it hit stores in November of 2003--around Thanksgiving, which was the prime game-buying season for gullible enthusiasts like me. Even in such a season, I felt no temptation to buy the game.

It came into my possession a month later, but it only did so because I'd tossed it onto my Christmas list as a filler item when James insisted that I request more than a single game. And even though I was cold on Double Dash, I decided that its arriving in my hands as a gift meant that I simply had to make an earnest effort to derive enjoyment from it

Because that was my rule.

I gave it my best effort, but in the end, I just wasn't able to form a connection with the game. I felt that it was too standardized and lacking for ambition, and nothing that it was doing was making me forget about Mario Kart 64, which had, contrarily, evolved the series' formula in so many meaningful ways.

As I played it, I was mostly disengaged.

I mean sure: Having two drivers per kart was an interesting twist on the formula--particularly for how it added an element of team strategy and produced the type of agitated squabbling that onlookers found hilarious--but I didn't feel as though it represented a true evolutionary change. I saw it more as a superficial change that was designed to distract us from the fact that the rest of the game was largely derivative (this was a theme with Nintendo's GameCube sequels).

I had some fun with the game, yeah. There were a number of times in which I got together with James and his friends and engaged in some frantic, joyful four-player racing action and shared some laughs with everyone around me. But that was about it. That was basically all of the time I spent with the game.

I didn't have any friends of my own to play Double Dash with, and James and his friends had a great a greater interest in games that were releasing on competing platforms, so it wasn't before I abandoned it and made it a permanent fixture of my game rack.

The fact was that the game wasn't anything special: Its visuals and music were merely solid. Its new tracks were, on the whole, so dull that I couldn't remember more than three of them. And its new items--like the giant egg, the fireball, and the chain chomp--were neat but not game-changing at all.

Also, I found it highly irritating that the Blue Shell was redesigned to act as a homing missile that would only strike the person who was in 1st place. The problem was more so when it tended to appear: at the race's end. Because of the frequency with which it would strike me on the final lap right as I was approaching the finish line, I could swear that it was specifically programmed to do so. "And if that's true," I thought, "then it's a terrible design choice and just plain cruel."

There wasn't a Double Dash player who hadn't come to know the feeling of having a gold cup stolen from him or her thanks to a last-second Blue Shell. It was a recurring event and one that made everyone hate the item.

The infamous Blue Shell is the very symbol of misguided game design, and it continues to infuriate players to this day. Despite the fans' protests, Nintendo refuses to rethink the item and tweak it to where it strikes all of the racers in front of you, like it does in Mario Kart 64. Because, I guess, someone on the development team thinks that punishing players for doing well is the height of hilarity.

Certainly no one can be deluded enough to think that the design choice has anything to do with "balancing" the game. Because it clearly doesn't. It you're far behind, it does nothing for you, and its use only serves to screw with the person who's in 1st place.

"Who really benefits from this item?" I was left to wonder. "In what way does its presence enhance the gameplay? What is its purpose other than to leave me feeling angry and dispirited?"

Why, it was almost as if the Mario Kart team was in the early stages of an experiment that entailed using spitefully designed items to achieve the goal of removing the games' competitive aspect and creating completely randomized race outcomes!

In retrospect, that appears to be close to the truth.

I wish that I could say more about my experiences with Double Dash, but I can't because, honestly, there weren't many memorable moments. The only thing that I remember well is how James would make my cousins and I laugh with his refusal to accept our explanation of Waluigi's character. "He's a tall, skinny Italian plumber," we'd tell him (in a mostly uncertain manner).

Each time, he'd reject our claim and insist that Waluigi was instead either "a vampire" or "Dracula," and during cooperative play, he'd demonstrate this for us by triggering Waluigi's leg-raising taunt and shouting "Bluh! Bluh! Bluh! Bluh!" in a Dracula-like voice.

Because that's what James did. He always found new and ridiculous ways to make us laugh.

But in the end, Double Dash did almost nothing for me. It was so forgettable, in fact, that I couldn't envision a future in which the Mario Kart series would ever again excite me.

I was simply bored with the series.

Page 2: The Story Continues