Info
This version of Mario Kart DS is a Pre-Release Kiosk Demo, dated from May 30, 2005. This version of the game was able to be played at different retail store kiosk machines around the US to build up hype for the upcoming release later that year. There are quite a lot of differences as compared to final retail build of the game, a lot of its assets being reused from its predecessor, Mario Kart: Double Dash!! for the Nintendo GameCube.
Some of these differences include:
- The "classic" Mario Kart logo, this version in particular looking very similar to MKDD's logo, before getting redesigned for the forseeable future.
- Double Dash's Instruments being used for the music
- Unfinished player collision (Bumping into a CPU from behind slows you to a near halt)
- Able to zoom in and out of the bottom screen mini map
- Donkey Kong is referred to as just "DK" in character selection
- Donkey Kong uses placeholder voicelines from DK64
- All item roulette icons appear to be ripped from MKDD
- Chain Chomp item appears in the item roulette, later being replaced with the Bullet Bill in the final game (Chain Chomp cannot be obtained)
- And so many more!!
Also worth noting is the existence of a much rarer European version of this cartridge. This European demo has a build date of a month before the US demo (April 28th, 2005), and its main purpose was to demonstrate the multiplayer capability of the game (2-8 players), making it the only DS "not for resale" cartridge with multiplayer functionality.
This other version was featured at events such as E3 and GamesCom 2005, and speculated to have also been used for magazine advertising purposes throughout Europe, namely Sweden according to the previous owner of one of the surviving copies of the prototype.