15. Mario Kart: Double Dash!!
Nintendo | Nintendo | 2003
So what if this mascot racer feels a lot like its predecessors? The fast and frantic gameplay is still perfect
What made it so great?
Double Dash didn't revolutionize the Mario Kart franchise like many hoped it would, but the improvements here go beyond surface deep. The character and vehicle selection is huge, the new weapons are appropriately insane complements to returning classics and the tracks themselves have never been this diverse. Wario Colosseum is such an exhaustively twisty daredevil affair that it's only two laps long, while Baby Park is such simplified round-and-round madness that it requires seven.
Of course, the multiplayer is what counts and is where Double Dash gets creative. Two players can control a single kart during races, with one handling all the driving and the other dishing out all the power-up punishment. It may be the greatest team-bonding exercise in videogame history. Besides, what other tense, emotion-fuelled multiplayer could inspire exclamations like "Use the golden mushroom, damn you, use it now!" or "Holy crap, watch out for that banana peel!"?
A 29-year-old PC racing game going cyberpunk anime with Troy Baker, Initial D drifting, and cutscenes from the Metroid: Other M studio sure wasn't on my Game Awards bingo card
A speedrunner just beat Need for Speed: Most Wanted's world record by 90 minutes - by using Half-Life's Gordon Freeman instead of a car
