Played while sick as something easily digestible and non-intimidating to engage with. The older I get the more intrigued I am by the artistic call for a non-insignificant portion of this games musical DNA to be staked on the stylistic signifyers of acoustic American Blues. When you think racing game, specifically racing game from Japan, you think Jazz Fusion. This is just the nature of the beast. You play a racing game, it has jazz fusion playing in it. Or jazzy breakbeats, or hard rock with fusiony solos. Same difference. There's an interesting history to that in it of itself, what with Japanese racing broadcasts being soundtracked by the fusion band T-Square for decades, essentially codifying the aesthetic association of racing = jazz fusion. But the music in Double Dash? It's a lot of like, synthesized emulations of acoustic folk and R&B styles. There's some funk, a weirdly recurring amount of Ska, some Caribbean folk, but you'd look at the music in Mario Kart Double Dash and assume it was created in an alternate timeline where Rock & Roll never existed. And it's basically just this game that this stylistic oddity occurs, Mario Kart 64 had jazz fusion, Mario Kart DS might as well be the genre of jazz fusion cursed into the form of a handheld video game, it's just this game that shifts into this alternate reality. And like, i guess I get it, this whole game is the opposite smooth and slick, it's a brash and uncontrolled chaotic mess to play. The karts feel like they are barely holding onto the road, controlling them isn't immediately obvious or intuitive and kinda requires you to adjust your brain to the games specific feeling and mode of interaction. The item balance is mostly unhinged cause every character gets access to a unique overpowered nonsense item, the character switching mechanic leading to a lot more strategy required of the player beyond "know what item is most useful to have at any given time". As maybe the third video game i'd ever played, it's weird quirks all feel natural to me, but looking at it, it's a whole mess of weird systems both low level and upper level. It's definitely not as impressive or grandiose as what Mario Kart 8 achieves, it seems to have it's priorities basically set to the complete opposite of that game, but it feels so distinct and engaging to control and interact with, and the genuinely chaotic hard to predict nature of the game makes it feel really wholly new to come back to every time. It's such a weird little one off game both mechanically and aesthetically that it ends up being so much more interesting as a singular artistic statements than the successive titles, which feel like they picked an artistic direction and have just been successively refining to the point of crystaline lab grown perfection. This game is not that, it's a trash fire racing along at max speed. So it's probably the best mario kart maybe.