I recently returned to Mario Kart DS and I was really surprised to see a 3 star rank after beating the Mushroom Cup in 150 CC. I assumed the game's ranking system was similar to Super Circuit's, and it turns out I was sorta right. If you're going to get 3 stars, here's some advice: get 1st in every track, don't use too many items, and snake as much as you can. I was playing on an official Mario Kart DS cartridge that I don't know the origins of. Maybe my mom got it off eBay? Maybe we got it at GameStop years ago? Anyway, I'm happy to still have it. When I tested the load times between the R4 card and the official card, the R4 loaded way faster than the official. I soon got an idea: DS Download Play worked with the R4 being the host cartridge because load times weren't involved, but how would multi-card work? I created a group on my experiment DS running the official and joined the group on my primary DS running the R4. Because both DSes were reading off the cartridge rather than storing the game, I thought the different load time was going to cause issues, but it all worked without a problem! I guess there's something that waits for all DSes to be done loading before a race, which is weird because the developers expected people to play on the official carts with the same load times. Perhaps they took defective carts into account? Credit to Nintendo.
