Mario Kart DS -- Mission Mode & Online Play.

Mario Kart DS offers up two features the other games in the series haven't. One is the new mission mode. There are fifty-four of them. They're set challenges for you to meet. They range from challenges like "Reach the finish before Mario!" and "Collect 40 coins!" and "Perform 10 power-slide turbo boosts in 1 lap!" and "Get the Star and use it to hit 5 Cheep Cheeps!" to full on boss battles like "Hit the Eyerok's eyeball 3 times with shells!" and "Use Mushroom boosts to hit Chief Chilly and knock him off the stage 3 times!". You're rated in how you do from C, B, A, one, two, and three star rankings. They're a great bonus to the offline game. The online game is the other new feature to the series. The online interface is pretty much crap. You sign on to Nintendo's NWC and you select the mode you want. In you then sit there while the game searches for your friends or rivals or regional players or whatever. When trying to put together a four player game with friends, it should be a snap, shouldn't it? But it wasn't. We were all on at the same time. We were all searching for friends. It took us numerous times to get all four of us into the same game. The game will sit there and search for a few minutes. If you don't have four it searches for the full search time and then starts the game. Even though we had each other's Friend Codes we couldn't seem to find each other every time. Hopefully this is just a network kink that will be worked out.  Once we were able to get into a four player friend's game, the gameplay was exceptionally fun. There was no noticeable lag.  The annoying chance factor that shows up in the single player game isn't present in the online game just for the fact that you know it's the luck of the draw and that it's another living person causing the action. It's not the game attempting to keep things close as it does in the offline game. The online game appears to only be the racing aspect. The battle mode doesn't seem to be present. That's a shame, as that's the real draw in multiplayer Mario Kart. I think Nintendo's first official step into the online world is rather good where it counts. The gameplay is key, and that's covered. I don't understand why there isn't battle mode online from a technical point of view. I mean, if they can track four players in a race and all the items and all of that, what's the technical limitation in doing it for battle mode? What am I missing here?