Reviews// Mario Kart DS

We could end all this here. Mario Kart DS is one of the finest things ever created by people and you should buy it for the DS you either have or need to buy to play it on. Problem is, the boss is a bit of a twat and believes we should actually write things for the money he barely pays us. See, there you have it – good and bad. Things are so intertwined these days. It’s like the Chinese have always known, that little yin yang thingy that hippies like so much explaining the whole world.

Was that new games journalism? Can’t be, we’re not puffs or owt like that. Back onto Mario Kart and the words we have to write. Okay, here’s a good place to start: Remember Mario Kart on the SNES? Remember how amazing it was? It wasn’t. It was shit. Go and play it now, not by downloading an emulator or anything. That would be illegal.

Back? See, rubbish wasn’t it? Only two players too. Rubbish. And remember Mario Kart on the Nintendo 64? Again, utter tosh. Slow-player catch-up that broke the game combined with spongy controls to make for a tepid outing at best. GBA Mario Kart – a bit better. GameCube Mario Kart: Double Dash – a game whose commemorative mug we drank our tea out of until one of our wives accused one of our writers of looking at his ex-girlfriend's phone number and he flew into a rage and smashed it up on the floor, though she claims he threw it at her which is a lie. That too was rubbish. Of course, we don’t actually mean it. All Mario Kart games (except perhaps Double Dash – that did suck) were excellent, if flawed in their own way.

So here’s the scene. As you will have read in various public toilets, SPOnG all sleep together in a big cosy bed, except for Adam who wees from the Ace. Uses him as a conduit or something. Anyway, one writer is lying around watching Spongebob DVDs when he decides he fancies a game of Mario Kart. He simply opens up his DS, boots the game and plays. Against human opposition. From around the world. And at this point, everything changes. Our oven chips taste like the finest groundnut oil triple-fried julienned Jerseys, our generic Tescos lager like Louis Roederer 1987. The world is amazing, especially when you live in the future which you do with your DS and Mario Kart.

The actual game is just stunning. With the PSP struggling to put together anything of great interest, Nintendo pledges of a stream of new and innovative games have been delivered, putting the twin-screened portable miles ahead in terms of raw gaming quality. This being the case right now, there’s some competition for the title of Number One Killer App for DS. Well, here’s some news for you. That game, the number one killer app is Mario Kart DS. Everything else out at the moment – the entire 360 range, Liberty City Stories and well, everything pales next to Wi-Fi powered Mario Kart.

What you can’t see above is a space in time between the end of the last paragraph and the beginning of this one. If however, you prefer to read in real time, you need to stop reading and wait for about 20 minutes. This is because we stopped writing, checked that the boss wasn’t about and played more Mario Kart against strangers who have little ejaculating penis avatars collected together from various points around the world. We just did it again. It’s actually impossible to resist playing. You know how the pornographic magazines discarded by truckers in the bushes of your local service station were impossible to resist? Those soggy pages of bepermed women adorned by garish lingerie… Mario Kart grips you a million times stronger than that and is 14 billion times more addictive that crack and heroin combined. Times ten. Squared.