The game that showed me the DS didn't suck

Mario Kart DS is the best Mario Kart ever. It combined perfect controls, great levels, great music, and damn good graphics in one fantastic package. To add to all of this, it also had online races, which I played the fuck out of.

Snaking, though. I can do it, but I can see why people don't like it. It really limits the fun you can have while playing Mario Kart. Having a match between people who do nothing but snake is exhilarating, but tiring. At my Mario Kart DS peak, I could only play 5 or 6 matches before my hands cramped into a gnarled mass of fingers. And snaking against people who either couldn't or refused to wasn't any fun either, and I actually felt bad about it, so I tried not to do it. It really did break the game.

But that's not to say it sucked, though. Mario Kart DS introduced missions, which were excellent single player diversions for people like me who had no one nearby who wanted to play the game. There were plenty of missions, and some of them were balls hard.

I never really got into Battle Mode in any of the Mario Kart's, though, so my opinion of Mario Kart DS's version of it is pretty much the same as the other Mario Kart games: fairly boring.

Overall, Mario Kart DS is a fantastic game and if you missed it, you really missed out on the best version of Mario Kart to date.

To celebrate Mario Kart Wii's upcoming release, I will periodically be posting about various other games in the Mario Kart series. This is the first such post.