I took this game with me to the premiere of 300 and before the movie I was working on improving my time on Airship Fortress, my favorite Mario Kart track ever and one in which I was briefly competitive for world record times. Suddenly I heard screeching around me. My tendency to sit at the back of the theater, combined with the ungodly bulbs of the DS Lite, illuminated a group of bats for everyone to see overhead. No one went to get any ushers to try to get the bats, for fear that they'd tell us to get out and we'd miss the midnight premiere of 300.

Mario Kart games are impossible to divorce from their time period. I could have written this about Super Mario Kart battles at the orthodontist's office. I could have written this about feeling alienated at the video producer's birthday party when they played Double Dash and refused to explain how it worked. I could have written this about playing Mario Kart 8 Deluxe deliberately as though we were at a roof party with everyone behind us screaming, as part of a multi-stage competition. Nintendo's approach to "every game in a franchise is someone's first game" shows through most brightly and blatantly here in the Mario Kart series.

I was just good at this one so I like it most.

Occasionally I get a hair up my ass to replay this and try to like prove that it's good or something, but I never get around to it. In my memory, this is one of my favorite 360 games because it does something actually interesting with shooting levels by making them this ridiculous speed shooting competition with combos. I do not remember how well it moves or plays, just that I was adamant there was something here. I suppose I still like feeling like I had some kind of insight about action, but I don't know that I really want to put this particular experiment back to the test ever again. I will think about doing it at least another dozen times in my life.