Let's talk about Mario Kart series' biggest screw up. (Spoiler, it's not the mobile game)

Mario Kart. It's quite possibly the biggest thing Nintendo has ever had going for it. More accessible than Smash Bros. More replayable than their platformers. More multiplayer friendly than Splatoon or Mario Party. Mario Kart is and will always be Nintendo's main money printer. Hell. They got us to by Mario Kart 8 for over a decade and still made us feel like it was new.

And the series slaps. It absolutely does. The inventiveness, the music, the absolutely bananas level design, the tight controls, there's so much going for it that constantly keeps it fresh.

Even in the older games there was always stuff that made it cool. Mario Kart 64, despite some truly frustrating levels is still a blast to see. I will ALWAYS love how fun and chaotic Double Dash was. Mario Kart 7's first person option? Oh, and let's not ignore the fact that watching Mario Kart on the GBA for the first time was stunning. Especially if you, like me, played it on a Game Boy Micro.

But it's also screwed up in the past. The mobile version of Mario Kart was just a commercial for its own paid transactions. Mario Kart 8's sadly depressing Mercedes DLC. The fact that we never got the Dr. Mario viruses as an item in anything outside of the arcade. Every...fucking...thing about Mario Kart Wii. There's been a lot.

But there's one thing that I remember the most as a moment of experimentation that felt like, in my opinion, the thing that changed Nintendo's opinion on how they approach multiplayer for the rest of their existence. And that, my friends, is all thanks to Mario Kart DS.

If you already know, you're already cringing.

See, Mario Kart DS was incredible. Not only did the multiplayer work INCREDIBLY well despite being on the Nintendo DS, it looked good, sounded good, controlled well, and most importantly...LET YOU PLAY AS R.O.B. Where'd he go, Nintendo?

But, the gave us a LOT of freedom in this game and, Mario with his winged hat, flew too close to the sun. Because this freedom gave us two VERY big problems that still haunt me to this day. In no particular order, we're going to talk about them.

1) Snaking

Mario Kart DS did something to the power sliding mechanics to make it easier for entry level players to achieve. This is all well and good except this handicap was abused in the worst possible way which gave birth to something called "snaking".

It was one of the things that spawned the whole "it's not a bug it's a feature" and "if they didn't want us to do it they'd remove it" debates.

See, what happened is, people found out that instead of playing the game as most did, instead of worrying about skill, or fun, or items, all you had to do was make your car slide left and right, over and over, and you could generate sparks on even the straightest of straightaways giving you speed boost after speed boost.

It got to the point where if you wanted to even score in the top 50% you NEEDED to incorporate this awful butt wiggle because suddenly every player that's never felt a win before suddenly felt like they needed to do this.

It was a miserable way to play that involved button maneuvers so aggressive that I remember working in Gamestop when busted DSs started rolling in from people beating the hell out of their controls.

At the time, it wasn't easy to patch an online game on a portable system with limited storage space so because Nintendo's hands were tied, it lead to abuse and an end to the competitive multiplayer on what was Nintendo's first well made online experience.

2) Dicks Ahoy

It could have just been the sparks and the snaking. But Nintendo also allowed us to do something baffling. When you play Mario Kart, surely you've noticed that your emblem on the car changes depending on your racer. Could be the Tri-Force, or a Daisy. Could be a Banana or the Wario W. Could be any of those.

But Nintendo, the sweet summer child that they were, thought...what if we give the players a fairly decent pixel art tool so they can create their own.

Now, to look it up on Google today makes it look like it was an artistic paradise where people flaunted some gorgeous sprite work.

To quote Dr. Ian Malcolm - "Oh yeah, 'ooooh, aaaaah' that's how it always starts. But later there's running...and screaming."

See, that's how it is NOW when people using their old systems and emulators wanna show off some fun pixel work. But real Gs know what really happened. When you give the internet the ability to make whatever they want, you must be prepared to harvest the field of dicks that will lay before you like a corn field.

And that's what happened with Mario Kart DS. Sure, we could have had karts with cool pixel art. But what we got were hundreds of cards with plain white backgrounds and, in simple line art of what more than likely was a crudely drawn dick.

Going back to my time at Gamestop (or as my therapist calls it, "revisiting past trauma") I remember the angry customers trying to return the game because of the constant phallic imagery their kid had to plow through like the worst event on Takeshi's Castle.

To this day, you cannot convince me otherwise that the snaking debate and the dick pics starting shortly before Nintendo started getting REAL strict with their online behavior policies was a coincidence.

But for now, we have Mario Kart World, a game in which up to 24 people can race each other by exploiting every goddamn surface available while weathering an absolute Black Friday crowd of item attacks. Godspeed, Mario Kart. Godspeed.