It looked great on the diminutive screens and, along with games like Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow and Animal Crossing: Wild World, helped announce to the world that this kooky dual-screen handheld Nintendo had rushed to market was a serious contender.
Not only did it stand as the finest Mario Kart to date, it also proved that Nintendo was serious about the DS as a platform: Here was a console-quality experience, and the fact that the graphics were on par with a racer for the original PlayStation didn't matter one bit. Gone were the flat and uninspired tracks of the sprite-based games, the rubber-band AI of Mario Kart 64, and the loopy complications of Double Dash!! It offered great tracks, great balance, a wealth of customization options, and tons of unlockables. Peach has got it, but you already knew that.
The fifth entry in the series, MKDS brought together the best elements of its predecessors and discarded their baggage. It walked back the entertaining but frankly weird additions Mario Kart: Double Dash!! for GameCube had made to the series, while nevertheless feeling far more robust than the previous handheld Mario Kart, Super Circuit for GBA. For starters, it felt like a truly great, truly uncompromised version of Mario Kart despite being on a portable system. See, when Nintendo launched the game in the fall of 2005, it represented a watershed moment on several levels.
It took the series a few steps forward into greatness and managed to transcend the mundanity of merely driving in circles (with all due respect to our resident racing game fanatic Jaz). Despite having little interest in racing, I couldn't stop playing Mario Kart DS back when it was new.