Mario Kart goes a long way towards appeasing the non-racing gamer with plenty of unlockables and extra modes. I can get behind that. So far, I've unlocked all the GP cups, Daisy, Dry Bones, and the third tier of karts. Bowser's third kart is one of his hilarious clown-faced airplanes. I like that, when online, you can see the bonus stuff even if you haven't necessarily unlocked them... the other night I saw Dry Bones for the first time in an online match, and he was in a tank. Gawrsh.

Is 2005 the official year of Dry Bones? He's playable in Mario Party 7 as well.

As everyone has reported, the Online Friends mode is nowhere near as robust as it should be. You can create a buddy list once you gather some 12-digit friend codes, but you don't actually get to click on a friend to invite them to a race... the matching service just pulls randomly from all your connected friends. I guess the way around that is to not have that many friends. You can also lock your friends to increase the probability that a particular pal will be matched with you, but that seems like a long way to go for something that could be accomplished with just one stylus click on a live list.

Of course, you can always race with non-friends, which is what I've been doing. Just don't expect Nintendo to allow you to turn any non-friends into friends; there's no way to communicate with fellow racers, not even an after-match "Want to Buddy? Y/N" option.

Despite Nintendo's attempts to bulletproof and fam-friendly the system, there are still plenty of pricks in the online world. I've had a competitor bail out of a race at the last second when it turned obvious I was winning (His handle was Artoo.) And I raced against one guy who made his custom car decal say "FUCK COPS." I forget his name, it may have been Megatron but spelled stupid. You rock, dumbass.

My custom icon is my little Dred Head, as visible every three inches here on fourhman.com.

So here is my MKDS friend code. Feel free to add me into your friends list, and email me with yours (or use the shoutbox on the main page.)

I took my DS into a Panera Bread last weekend, just to see if I could play online Mario Kart while eating something vegetarian in a bread bowl, but was unable to get a connection on their in-house wi-fi. It kept throwing an "access point detected, but cannot connect to the server" error, something like 52100. That sounds to me like there's something I should manually edit after the DS successfully senses the wi-fi, but I don't know what that is. Also, they were out of bread bowls. Jesus, folks, order a few more of those.

While you're waiting for a race, check out the real reason for taking your DS online, Animal Crossing: Wild World. Here's a classy commercial for the game in Japan (via Kotaku, you are reading Kotaku, right?)

I love this image. It's the kind of thing that gives me chills.