Playing on the Go

What you see above may seem like an ordinary screen shot of Mario Kart DS, but seasoned veterans of the game will easily realize what the player of this paticular game is setting up to do. He or she is setting up to “snake“. This was usually referred to as “powersliding” back in my day of Mario Kart 64, but apparently the vocabulary has changed in around ten years.

If you aren’t familiar with the term, it is a method of getting a very quick speed boost in which the player slides back and forth before triggering the maneuver. It’s a trick of moderate difficulty that yields moderate results. However, many players that play the game over Nintendo WiFi seem wont to do this trick for the entirety of each track. In the opinion of this blogger, it’s incessant and annoying.

In theory, the Nintendo WiFi system pairs players together of equal skill, but it still does not seem to separate the snakers and the non-snakers. Frankly, it’s a problem that heavily segments the MKDS population into two, making the online experience pretty much unplayable for the latter half of those who partake in it. You are either a compulsive and obsessive gamer who chooses to snake the entire time, or you casually play as ideally normal. In my experience, this is a problem that presents itself in all of its hideousness nearly two thirds of the time when connecting to Nintendo WiFi. It also rears another problem. Many players, after realizing they’ve matched up with a snaker, drop out of the contest. Which of course usually leaves the snaker unable to complete the game since they are at it alone.

The point of this rant is this… We’d all do better for each other and would make the online experience worlds better if we would all practice a little more etiquette in online gameplay. There’s never a need to “own” all of the other platers because they can’t keep up with you, nor is it polite to drop out of a match that you’ve already committed to by joining. Both practices are very rude, and would make for a much more enjoyable experience for everyone if they were avoided at all costs.

mariokartds, nintendods, snaking