As someone in his mid-forties, I am too old to be part of the video game generation. I remember playing the original pong in my teens and then there was my Galaga obsession in my early 20’s. But unlike my friends in their 20’s and 30’s, video games were not much a part of my world until my son Jeremy started playing them. And even with all the games that Jeremy has amassed, most of them don’t do much for me, that is except for MarioKart. MarioKart is the one game I’ll play on the Gamecube when the kids are not around. It’s also the one game my 14 year-old daughter Sasha will play and so sometimes the three of us will play together. The times when that happens are always lots of fun.
Jeremy has gone through the many generations of Game Boys and although I find his Nintendo DS to be a cool piece of hardware, I’ve never really done anything other than look at it. That is until today when I started playing with the just released MarioKart DS. The classic game play, music and graphics are there, but it’s the wireless game play that makes this game so amazing. MarioKart is the first game that takes advantage of the WiFi built into the DS. If you have a wireless network, you can easily configure the DS to connect to it, and then the magic happens – you can play with other players from all over the world. Normally I only get my kicked by Jeremy alone, but today there I was just hanging out on the couch having my butt kicked by three kids from around the world. Now that’s cool.