ryan kennedy’s blog

So, Lisa and I had Christmas a little early. She got me a new Nintendo DS with the Mario Kart DS package. It’s totally awesome. I loved playing Mario Kart on my old SNES, this is BETTER (yes, all caps better).

Let me start with the DS. It’s okay. I’ve got a nice racecar red one, fitting given the only game I have for it right now. I have some issues with hand positioning. The four buttons laid out in a diamond pattern are pretty small. I have a big thumb. You do the math. My only other complaint is one busted pixel on the upper screen (DS stands for “dual screen”…it has two). It’s stuck always on. Not a deal breaker, but I’m going to have to see what the situation is. Hopefully I can swap this one for one that doesn’t have the busted pixel. The screens (aside from this one pixel) are beautiful, though. If you ever imagined the most ideal dual monitor gaming experience, this is it…shrunk. In Mario Kart DS, the top screen shows you the race action while the bottom screen gives you an overhead map and the standings in the race.

So I played many hours of the game against the computer. It’s fun, just like the original Mario Kart on the SNES. Very addictive. Eventually I reminded myself that the DS has WiFi capabilities and that Mario Kart DS lets you play people across the internet. So I set up my networking, hopped online and found a game with 3 other people. Oh my god…so much fun. I got my butt handed to me, but I really enjoyed it. And finding a game couldn’t be easier. Let it know how to search for a game (regional, worldwide, friends, rivals) and it goes off and finds you a match. Very easy.

My only other complaint is the networking. The DS will only do WEP encryption. I have a newer access point and all of my wireless hardware supports WPA encryption…except the DS. So with my current setup my only choice is to put my access point back into WEP mode. I have a spare access point in the closet, so I might eventually delegate that to full time duty as a WEP access point just for the DS. But we’ll see. I may be too busy racing online to whip it out.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 24th, 2005 at 12:42 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.