Gameplay this instinctive, fun, and balanced is tough to find.

Everything simply feels flawless, from the tricky-to-time starting boost to the crucial power slides. Of course, you'll also slip right into the silky, responsive controls. Course design runs the gamut from deceptively simple (the NASCAR-like simplicity of Baby Park) to the wonderfully insane (try racing through Daisy Cruiser, a tilting cruise ship, or rocketing down the no-rails cliffs of DK Mountain)-every track offers intense thrills. These imaginative courses don't exactly upstage the detailed worlds of Metroid Prime, but they adhere nicely to the Mario aesthetic. First, you'll notice the smooth, vibrant visuals.

But I digress.just go ahead and stick, say, Koopa Paratroopa and Baby Luigi in a kickass baby carriage and hit the track. With light, medium, and heavy characters and karts to mix and match, you'll have a blast experimenting with the vast possibilities. In previous games, you knew that a kart driven by a pipsqueak like Toad would handle differently than one manned by Bowser, but now, the pilot/gunner setup exponentially ups the variety. What really alters the game's strategy is far more subtle: Selecting your characters and kart really matters. Anyone who's played one of the previous incarnations will immediately know what's up with item boxes, power slides, boost pads, and the like. On the surface, the Mario Kart formula hasn't changed much. I don't care whether you're 12 or 42, the day you get Mario Kart: Double Dash!! will feel like Christmas morning-pure, exhilarating glee will envelop your soul, demanding that you keep playing 'just one more game' into the wee hours of the morning. The competitive multiplayer is a bit more fun, but playing on a split or quad-split screen is just distracting and while the game supports multiple GameCube's it does it in such a mediocre way it's almost more annoying than fun. Although this is fun, it isn't very rewarding for the non-driving player. If both of you hit the Z at the same time you switch positions. When you play cooperatively you and a friend take one cart with one of you driving and the other attacking opponents. You can play against or with friends in Double Dash. Multiplayer is fun, but should have been a lot more fun. Unfortunately it won't be long until you've burned through all of the single player levels and you turn to the multiplayer mode to fill your time. Each of the maps are themed around a different character in the game, my favorite is the Daisy Cruiser which has you racing through a cruise ship dodging coasting table and inviting swimming pools as you try to beat out your opponent. The tracks in Double Dash are just as fun as the original, going far to capture the essence of Nintendo play with colorful fully animated backgrounds that can actually reach out and grab you when you race by. When you push the Z button, or what I like to call the mini shoulder, your characters switch places. The extra character can also steal items when you start smacking into each other in a race. The way this works is that one character drives while the other hangs onto the back tossing things at your opponents with the push of a button.

This also means that you can now hold two power-ups at a time. Each one has their own special power-ups, activated when you pick up power-up cubes during a race. When you start a game you get to pick two characters with which to race. The other major addition to Double Dash is the inclusion of a second character on each cart.

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