19th November 2003, 7:31 AM
Well, I won't be able to play MK the rest of the week because of a paper and some exams, but I'll post my impressions so far.
I'm through 50cc and 2/3 of 100cc mode, and I must say Double Dash is much more challenging than previous Mario Kart's. Your opponents actually know what to do when they get a good item. They will sometimes hold onto it until they really need it, but they never seem to just randomly shoot it off like previous games in the series. I don't think the difficulty can be attributed just to learning new courses because by the time I had reached this amount of playtime in Mario Kart 64 I was already working my way through 150cc.
The controls are great, even if they took some getting used to after I had perfected the jump-and-slide maneuver in MK64. Switching between characters is fun and adds a great deal of strategy when choosing characters. I prefer Bowser and Yoshi. I use Yoshi in back when I'm behind in a race so I can use his eggs on the racers in front of me. I use Bowser in back when I'm winning so I can try and clear out racers behind me with his giant shell. Of course, I use Wario's lowrider as the cart because it kicks ass.
As for the courses themselves, I think they are much better than Mario Kart 64's courses although a lot of them seem to be inspired by courses from that game. I don't know why Fran had such a problem with the courses in the game, but I think they are pretty good. The cruise ship and DK's mountain are two of my favorites so far.
Multiplayer racing is fun, of course. I haven't tried out cooperative racing yet, but I've been told it's fun. I'll try that out with my cousins at Thanksgiving. Battle mode, as I said, lacks good arenas. Until DJ, I do not like the open arenas because you don't really get good, long battles. I wish they had at least included the MK 64 arenas so we would be able to choose which type we liked best.
Anyway, I think Fran's review wasn't too far off. I probably would've scored the game somewhere in the low 8s. All those complaints about too little to unlock, however, are going too far. Unlocking something after getting a gold in each cup is fine with me. I don't need some new skins that I could care less about.
I'm through 50cc and 2/3 of 100cc mode, and I must say Double Dash is much more challenging than previous Mario Kart's. Your opponents actually know what to do when they get a good item. They will sometimes hold onto it until they really need it, but they never seem to just randomly shoot it off like previous games in the series. I don't think the difficulty can be attributed just to learning new courses because by the time I had reached this amount of playtime in Mario Kart 64 I was already working my way through 150cc.
The controls are great, even if they took some getting used to after I had perfected the jump-and-slide maneuver in MK64. Switching between characters is fun and adds a great deal of strategy when choosing characters. I prefer Bowser and Yoshi. I use Yoshi in back when I'm behind in a race so I can use his eggs on the racers in front of me. I use Bowser in back when I'm winning so I can try and clear out racers behind me with his giant shell. Of course, I use Wario's lowrider as the cart because it kicks ass.
As for the courses themselves, I think they are much better than Mario Kart 64's courses although a lot of them seem to be inspired by courses from that game. I don't know why Fran had such a problem with the courses in the game, but I think they are pretty good. The cruise ship and DK's mountain are two of my favorites so far.
Multiplayer racing is fun, of course. I haven't tried out cooperative racing yet, but I've been told it's fun. I'll try that out with my cousins at Thanksgiving. Battle mode, as I said, lacks good arenas. Until DJ, I do not like the open arenas because you don't really get good, long battles. I wish they had at least included the MK 64 arenas so we would be able to choose which type we liked best.
Anyway, I think Fran's review wasn't too far off. I probably would've scored the game somewhere in the low 8s. All those complaints about too little to unlock, however, are going too far. Unlocking something after getting a gold in each cup is fine with me. I don't need some new skins that I could care less about.
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