I don't grok Mario Kart

(tags game, Mario Kart, Dual Screen, Gameboy Advance)

I finally finished the Cups in Mario Kart DS. On the last track my first power up was a Mushroom Boost, and after clearing the first shortcut it was an eeriely uneventful hair-raising ride. Not even a blue turtle shell broke my concentration. The fear of one, well that's the story.

Kart fever struck. I then dug out my old copy of Mario Kart Advance, because hey that has even more maps. I was not impressed. The 2d is so flat, so hard to see. Drifting seems to be blind, requiring rote memorization. I can't believe I played this game and like it. And of course, it's too difficult. I have not yet unlocked the 100cc Retro tracks. Give me Mario Kart DS any day, I need my 3D.

And on a slighty off-topic but still relating to Mario Kart, Steve Yegge on my blogroll wrote about dealing with programming unknowns, and he used Mario Kart as an analogy for a system. I still don't understand the "One-Way Wall". Perhaps I was totally stuck thinking about how to drift through the next turn. But I understood it when he mentioned meta-programming and reflection.