Mario Kart 8 Deluxehas dozens of courses, tons of characters, a cornucopia of cars and car parts, and generally more content that you can shake a stick at. But no matter how many courses, characters, or comedians in cars getting coffeeNintendoadds to the game, it will never be able to recapture the experimental fun of my favoriteMario Kartgame, theGameCube’s Double Dash.
Double Dash is the only entry in the series to depart significantly from basic Mario Kart play. Other games in the series have added new vehicles, gliders, and (in the case of Mario Kart 64) a whole other dimension. But Double Dash’s addition of cooperative play was the biggest change the series has ever undergone. As a kid, the game’s cooperative play inspired my own on the playground.
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Double Dash is a nostalgic game for me, in part, because of how much fun I had playing the actual game. But the IRL games that it inspired were even better. The school that I went through from kindergarten through high school had a huge hill on the playground and, during the winter, that meant some excellent sledding. One year, I remember getting so much freezing rain that the sledding hill was basically transformed into one big sheet of ice. You got one or two great speeding bullet rides down, but spent the rest of recess mounting an expedition back up the slippery hill.
In Double Dash, each player had two characters in their kart. One drove the car and the other handled items, deciding when to hurl a red shell or drop a strategic fake item box among the real ones. Though every Mario Kart game has this offensive and defensive element, Mario Kart: Double Dash fleshed it out, giving each set of characters a special item that offered a significant advantage if deployed at the right time.Characters could also switch between driver and chucker, so if you get bored of item management, you don’t have to do it for too long.
My school had some great red torpedo sleds which were big enough to seat two. This gave each sled roughly the same proportions as a Double Dash kart and my friends and I decided that that was exactly how we should use them. One of us would steer, and the other would roll snowballs to throw (covertly, of course, because snowballs were a playground no-no). Or the person in the back would reach out and grab the opposing racers' sled and try to knock them off course. I’m sure we tried pulling off the front seat-to-backseat swap, too, but that was significantly harder on a speeding real-life sled than in a virtual kart.
Just thinking about it, I’m getting the itch for a violent, adult sledding sesh complete with red torpedo sleds. Honestly, our real life version was probably better than Mario Kart’s. The person in the back had way more to do IRL. Nintendo should make a sequel, if not for any other reason, than at least to attempt to get on my elementary school friends' and my level.
