Indeed, track design in Mario Kart: Double Dash is one of its biggest strengths.
Everyone can do 3D now, so the team behind Double Dash has been more careful, threading shortcuts up and down instead of just round the side, and, when it does give in completely and send us up, down, left, right, backwards, forwards and over the rainbow, it provides some of the most memorable gaming in years - the DK Mountain, Wario Collosseum and Rainbow Road tracks here, of which more later, are amongst the finest in MKDD, and they're about as far removed above and below from Super Mario Kart as you can possibly imagine. On the racing front, in answer to both criticisms, Mario Kart: Double Dash still relies on the ups and downs, but this time they're less gratuitous. And it seems necessary to address these points in Mario Kart: Double Dash on two fronts: racing and battling. No, MK64 suffered in my eyes for two main reasons: it was 3D, and the track design was surprisingly forgettable. Most people go straight for this, but for me that was something I managed to get over. The main problem that I had (and have) with Mario Kart 64 isn't that it looks fuzzy. Or rather, to stave off the inevitable backlash, my favourite game. Looking back at it this weekend, I realised that it's actually one of the best games I've ever played - it's just that, for me, and I would imagine rather a lot of other people, it was the sequel to the best game I've ever played. Of all the games we knew about ahead of the N64's launch, MK64 was easily the most exciting prospect, and ultimately it's often held up as one of the most disappointing of those early titles by die-hards. Not Street Racer then, not Bomberman Kart now, and not even the PlayStation's rather enjoyable but generally derided Speed Freaks somewhere in-between.Īnd not, it has to be said, Mario Kart 64.
Nothing before or since has managed to incorporate such a tightly and memorably constructed series of circuits, complemented them with such an addictive racing model, and then risked it all by throwing in a boatload of obscure, destructive and varied power-ups. But I'd like you to try and think of a game that has created a genre and gone on to hold its head high over the competition for an entire decade.