Mario Kart Double Dash

I'm currently about 70% done with this game.
I guess much has been said about how this game is not as good as other Mario Kart games, and all I'll say really is this: I've had worse.

This game is good but not great. They added a lot of annoying voice clips and some of the gameplay mechanics are annoyingly different from Mario Kart 64 (which is still very high on my list after all these years.)

Give you an example: Mario Kart 64 you used to get a triple mushroom turbo. Mario Kart Double Dash, you can still get a triple mushroom turbo, but now you see that your character is juggling these three mushrooms as the other character drives (oh, you have to pick two characters, hence "Double Dash") BUT if you got hit in Mario Kart 64, nothing happened. If you get hit in Double Dash, you lose two of those three mushrooms cause your character felt the need to juggle and showboat in front of everybody else. Of course you're going to get a shell to the face!

Same thing happens with three shells. Because your character has a glandular need to grandstand, he juggles the shells and if you just so happen to get hit at that time (which, let's face it, it's gonna happen a lot), you lose 66% of your projectiles. LAME! This is just arbitrary! There was no need to change from what Mario Kart 64 had established.

By the way, there's going to be a lot of that in this post. There's going to be a lot of comparing this to Mario Kart 64. I know, living in the past and all that, but I can't move on. MK64 is the crowning jewel (I confess I haven't played the portable mario kart games.)

Next, not every character has access to all power-ups. Each character comes with a special attack exclusive to that character. Mario and Luigi have these fireballs. Bowser and Bowser Jr have a giant, spiked koopa shell. The items are all fun, but I hate it that I can't have a chain chomp drag me along the track simply because I don't feel like playing with Baby Mario. Give all characters all power-ups!

Also, these are not go-karts. These karts are more like buggies and trains and barrels and strollers. Because of weight classes, you pick a character and then a vehicle from a selection available to your character's weight class. Wrong! I just want to pick a character (or even two) and start racing.

One good thing is that this game still has miniturbos from MK64. This is the last hardcore Mario kart to feature them before Mario Kart Wii dumbed them down into inconsequence. Double Dash has difficult, challenging mini turbos, and if you don't learn how to do them, you will fail. My friends still say I'm cheating when they see the blue sparks shooting out of my exhaust. That's cause they never learned to do miniturbos.

Right now, I'm done with the 50cc, 100cc, and 150cc categories for the Mushroom, Flower, Star, and Special cups. I'm down to the All-Cup Tours for 50cc, 100cc and 150cc and those, at 16 races apiece, are probably going to be a bitch, especially considering how hard Special on 150cc was.

Ok, back to the races!