Mario Kart: Double Dash!! [GC]

Nintendo of America and various third-party GameCube publishers met at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco recently to show off some of the bigger games scheduled to ship for the console in the next several months. One of the titles with the most clout there was Nintendo's own Mario Kart: Double Dash. Following, IGN's Fran Mirabella III delivers his latest impressions.

---

Nintendo's E3 2003 demo returned in identical form to the Gamer's Summit. Perhaps Nintendo just wanted to give the press a little more time with the version in a less crowded environment, but with no improvements it seemed almost pointless, as the company has since promised more speed and the return of the power slide and complementary boost. Nonetheless, I took some more time with the title and thought you dedicated IGN readers would find it interesting to hear my perspective, now, almost two months after I've last played it. Is there still hope? Did we miss something last time around?

No, the truth is that playing Mario Kart: Double Dash again only reaffirmed my previous thoughts on the title. It really is just too slow, and this is pretty much the industry perception, as I heard several others commenting on the sluggishness of Double Dash. I returned to play the game and made sure I chose the 150cc speed class. Optimistically, I was ready to jump off the starting line when the light flashed to green. It wasn't long before I felt as if my hopes for the title took a nosedive off a cliff edge. I crawled off of the white line, almost as if I was in some sort of terrible surreal world, where nothing worked properly and moved in slow motion. This was Mario Kart on GameCube as Nintendo first intended to show it, and playing it again alarmed me to the fact that the development team has either been working on the project at an surprisingly slow pace, or that they really aren't sure what gamers want out of the franchise.

Well, call me crazy, but the word frantic is the first theme that comes to my mind. Mario Kart has always been fast-paced and hard on the nerves. I remember I used to lap my buddies in past Mario Karts, but that didn't mean you'd won quite yet; anything could happen, and you were always kept alert for the dreaded lightning bolt or blue shell. That fear is sort of still there, as these power-ups have returned, but because the pace of the game is so dreadfully slow, it's incredibly easy to become detached from the game world. If the final game were released at this speed, Sunday morning mass at your local religious establishment would suddenly seem like a thrilling alternative.