I talk mostly about Genesis shit on here but my real B&B in early childhood were portables. My fam was homeschooled 'til college, and for most of my early childhood, my older sister was a figure skater. The skater training regimen is a pipeline unto itself, these coaches had our mom driving her 40 minutes out of town at 5 in the morning multiple times a week. So until I was 11 or so, I spent the majority of school hours sitting in a cold rink lobby, either doing 'school' or playing GBA/DS.

Anyway, if you owned a GBA and didn't have Superstar Saga, you were getting a really garbage selection of Mario things. I didn't like the SMB Advance games growing up, Mario Party Advance was this insane butchering/restructuring of traditional MP, and then there's stray sucky things like, fuckin', Pinball Land. Ew. Worst among these was Super Circuit - lots of content, sure, but the controls are non-functional and the difficulty curve was obscene, let alone for a kid. It's petty to complain about it today, but if you're a literal-ass munchkin with zero money, zero friends, and zero ability to pursue anything outside of hand-me-down hobbies, then being stuck with Super Mid-io Brothers was a fucked up situation.

I say all this because it cannot be understated just how unbelievable of an upgrade the DS was - not just as a GBA successor, but for how well Mario's mainline entries were handled. My kid brain couldn't process that there was not only a fully 3D Mario Kart on handheld, but that it controlled better than all the preceding games (and arguably some later ones), had TWICE as many courses as Double Dash, wireless multiplayer (with twice as much single-pak content as Super Circuit), and a full mission mode. To contextualize this: Imagine if Mario Land 2 was a bigger and more fleshed-out game than World. I never considered handhelds 'inferior' to console, but to see a mostly-console series shine brightest on handheld was eye-opening in ways I can't articulate.

And like, even beyond impressions 'of the time', it stills holds up. Still has as solid a drift system as ever. Hell, biggest boon for me is the map system, I fucking love having a top-down support view of the track. It's a map, rear-view camera, blooper support, and shortcut scope all in one, with no intrusion. Features like this really showed off how 2 screens enriched game design without being merely gimmicks.

I'd argue I prefer other Mario Kart games - I like the track selections in others a lot more, I like the BMX feel of Wii more, stuff like that. But every other post-64 release feels incomplete in one way or another. Double Dash controls bad, Wii's balance is garbage, 7's boring and 8 a bad roster and overly-safe game direction. Conversely, DS is the well-rounded MK: It succeeds at everything it attempts, both as a party and competitive racer. And it has ROB. And you can drive a tank.

Look out for when I eventually divulge my 'Leapster' phase, root doo doot doot doooooo