The Bizarre World of Nintendo DS Racing Games 

Did you play any of these games back then? Share your memories in the comments :) Check out the sequel to this video - The Forgotten World of PSP Racing Games: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-JWuQXRFW-6M.html

The Moment Most Wanted is technically both the best and worst game of the franchise.

I've actually messaged one of the dev of the DS port of UG2 asking why they didn't get to port MW. During the development of DS UG2, they just wanted to 'enhanced' the GBA version but they went the extra mile after finding out that DS was more powerful than expected. None of the code and assets from the GBA port can be used. The engine code was written from scratch and the assets were reworked from the PSP. The additional work meant their completion date slipped by a couple of months and supposedly that lead the next port to be given to someone else.

NFS Carbon on DS is the only version of NFSC (except PC) that runs at 60fps.

Hope you make a sequel to this video but on the PSP, as there are some "obscure" racing games like Wangan Midnight Portable

Imagine hearing about NFSMW, how great it is, immediately wanting it, asking for it for your birthday/holiday, and then receiving the DS version instead

You missed the absolute best racing game on the DS, Sideswiped. It's an insane achievement for the system. It runs at 60 FPS most of the time and has really neat graphics and physics. It's burnout-esque fun.

Dustin: "I'm playing these games on an emulator" Also Dustin: *records himself chilling on a couch with a physical DS*

I think part of the reason the liveries looked muddy in Race Driver: GRID is because of the texture filtering you had enabled in the emulator. Similar with the motion blur for Burnout Legends, I bet it looks much better at native resolution, possibly affected by texture filtering as well.

The fact track mania was so well ported is honestly mind blowing

The DS is certainly a very interesting handheld in gaming. I don’t think many of us expected these games to be good. That is what makes these good or great games(for some of them at least) so special and impressive for what they are.

The insane part is that even bike racing games like Ducati Moto DS or Moto Racer DS were also pretty enjoyable and a fun alternative to car racing ones

I'd imagine some of the issues with collision might be due to the DS CPUs lacking a floating point unit. Without this, the accuracy of calculations can suffer. Any floating point calculations would need to be done in software, which is extremely slow, hence nobody would use them and just accept the shortcomings.

Really great video, but it's a shame you missed so many games such as Ridge Racer, Micro Machines V4, Ferrari Challenge, Cars, Homie Rollers and more. Any chance of a part 2?

A good listing of some that I didn't even know existed. I had a title where you could play through 10 years' worth of races in the Indianapolis 500, from 1961-1971, with different drivers. I believe it was called Indianapolis 500 Legends.

When it comes to DS racing games I always need to bring up Speed Racer: The Movie: The Game. It's a fantastic little high speed futuristic racing game which when I reviewed it back in the day I said it would tide us over until we got an F-Zero for the DS...which we never did. Sooo...it's the best high speed racer on the system. Super smooth, great sense of speed, very arcadey. And you know, that was why *I* didn't get many racing games on DS: I don't care about real cars and most were ports. If the DS had more arcade style futuristic racers, I would have bought them. But it weirdly didn't and thus I played the crap out of Speed Racer because it scratched that itch!

Trackmania is one of the smoothest games I have ever seen on my DS. It was a constant 60 fps during every single race. Good that you put extra note there.

As a person who never owned a Nintendo DS seeing all these different racing games on it was and how some companies were able to make such great games out of the hardware was preety cool , especially how ProStreet and Carbon play on it makes me want to try them out with an emulator, really enjoyed this video 👍

I think you forgot about Ridge Racer DS In my opinion I think is just decent, not the worst, not the best but gives you a lot of fun. Nice video btw.

i think playing on an emulator ruins this test, i think one of the worst parts of racing games on DS was that you couldn't tell a left from a right without the minimap on half the games due to everything just looking indecipherably bad, and part of what defines a good one for me is how well they designed the graphics for the system its on.

What about its "dad", the Game Boy Advance?

The best part about Most Wanted on the DS, is that the GBA port of the game is actually vastly better. It uses the same music (although this feels more excusable given its on the GBA), and somehow it looks BETTER than the DS port. I would go on, but just overall its way better lol.

Great video. Hope there’s a sequel where you include “Speed Racer” DS.

The NFS Most Wanted cars look like sometime took a can of soda and drunkenly hammered it into the shape of a car. 🤣

The DS version of Underground 2 is actually a version NFS Underground Rivals released on the PSP, rather than being a downgraded version of the console version.

I had no idea Marco Reus was so into DS Racing games. Nice video

You made me play trackmania DS again, reminds me of happy times. Little me playing trackmania on my DS, not a care in the world. Actually made me forget about loneliness, depression, anxiety etc. Thank you.

Last year I found my DS and played through these games again and my old copy of NFS Carbon, Grid, and a game not listed here Asphalt 4 blew me away. The customization, sense of speed, and vibe of NFS Carbon and variety of things you can do in Grid was insane for a DS title. For Asphalt 4 imagine Urban GT 2 except better, but I wouldn't say it lived up to Grid or Carbon.

I played Need For Speed Nitro way too much as a kid, I managed to almost complete 100% achievements, the last one I missed was to race against a friend with a copy of the game. I remember that I started a new save years later after I wanted to replay the game and I saw how insanely high my Total Driving distance have gotten over the years 😂

These games actually looked pretty good on the nintendo DS screen, because it was made for that. The pixelation wasn't that bad on the OG small ds screen, mainly due to the pixel density and resolution. If you look for off-screen gameplay of these games, they actually look fairly decent. So the way you showed them with upped resolution is a very fair way of representing these games, very nice! Great video!

It is the first time that i heard someone talking good things about the Carbon and Pro Street versions for DS, i have a really good memories with them around 2008-2011, even i managed to beat the final boss in Carbon with a Stock Golf just like Kuru, but a lot of years before lol. The DS has a really interesting catalog of racing videogames, and this video showed in the best way, such a great work

Speedrunning Mod for Trackmania DS turbo: yeah most emu's can't handle it so we have a different leaderboard for that but the handheld does it nearly perfectly. Also it does have the multiplayer feature (Hotseat, Multi-Card Play, Single Card Play, and the Nintendo Wi-fi Connection). Just that emu's don't aim for multiplayer support due to hacking/cheating etc. see the button at 1:09:45

20:40 Not entirely though. NFS Prostreet allowed you to modify the interiors as well by adding rollcages and changing racing seats. And if we're really stretching it, NFS Underground 2 also has the feature to change gauge designs and add stereo systems to your car's trunk area. Technically an interior bit as well.

16:57 damn the devs literally predicted 2022

I never played the burnout game, but are you sure the emulator wasn't making it run poorly or glitchy? There's no way developers would just let world culling appear to the player and think vehicles falling through the map during crashes is acceptable

I had Asphalt 2, ProStreet, Grid, Undercover, Nitro and Pimp my ride. I spent way too much time on Pimp my ride and Prostreet, i played them up and down, back and forth. I somehow never played Grid more than twice after buying it. Amazing time it was

I'm quite surprised that Ford Racing 3 got ported to DS. Haven't heard of it until now, so thanks for the review. And as for the Ford Racing 3: Yeah, I can agree on that. Ford Racing 3 title (on all consoles) feels like if you took some sleeping medications. I'm fan of "Ford Racing" games, but Ford Racing 2 had at least some "good tracks" which were kinda memorable, even if it was older title and had less cars. And to the whole video - It was a really great video and I enjoyed it.

Watched the whole video. It really feels like a journey. And thanks for making this kind of video, because without it I would never know about the hidden good racing games on NDS as I never had one.

Thank for putting in the effort to make these videos! It's quite a journey to see some actually fun games, to truly horrible ones. Great video Eden! Loved every minute of it

@DustinEden This is really an almost perfect review covering almost every DS racing game , appreciate the effort , but.. you should've done some extra digging because you missed that incredibly positively exceptional game : ⭐Sideswiped⭐ The game offers unbelievable crashing physics and a stable frame rate !!! Man ! you should really try this one immediately.

"Hot Wheels: Beat That" was a racing game that came to my mind pretty quickly as it was one of the first I had ever gotten for the system, and it was considerably fun. Enough so I checked out the PC version and, well, translates well enough I could say.

This video it's truly over the top dude! I've unlocked so many good memories while watching it. I remember playing hours and hours Prostreet, Asphalt 2 and Carbon on my old DSi, along some others like Burnout (which I didn't remember to be that bad). Really astonishing what a little handheld could bring with that limited processing power.

Dude this video was so well put together, you are gonna be huge if you produce quality videos like this

The fact that a DS game has a full-blown track editor is mind-blowing. I might have to try out Grid / Dirt 2 for the DS one day just for that.

1:02:59 "with only a small selection of preset colors and vinyls being selectable" NFS Nitro DS enjoyer here, this is false! Yes there are presets you can select but you can also, chose your own colors (primary, secondary and your wheels) and actually draw your own logos with the tag editor and put them on your car by selecting the "Custom" theme on page 6. Also there is a way to improve a cars stats (iirc you do this by winning races meant for cars with higher star ratings than the car you want to upgrade). Also small SPOILER, Finishing every bronze,silver and gold race/mission as 1st place unlocks the nitro cup, with 3 extra races/missions on the moon!

Trackmania DS was my first experience with that seires and have since bought all the editions on PC. Also, the Transformers games had really fun vehicle mechanics

For Asphalt Urban GT 2 the song is also notable as it is the intro music which was used for the ITV broadcast of F1 in 2006.

Great vid, gave me something to watch as I B-Speced the 24 hour endurance race on the Nordschlife. Obscure, compromised 'impossible' ports of games are always super fascinating to me.

You should've played Sideswiped, which is in my opinion the most ambitious Burnout clone on the DS. It has a ridiculously detailed physics engine and still manages to run at 60 fps. And the best thing about it? It's actually fun

Another great and interesting video. I had a Nintendo DS as a kid, and back then i played all the games you presented here, so i know these versions very well. Your video was a great opportunity to have your opinion on theese games, especially on some gems like ProStreet or Carbon (DS) for example. Thank you again for this 1 hour and 20 minutes well spent. xD

Pro Speed was so amazing, also the music list is insanely good, the tracks burned into my head

New subscriber, the longform video thing you got going on is amazing. Leave the whole thing playing on my phone while doing whatever and I love it.

Firebrand games were basically the ultimate company that developers asked to make DS versions of their bigger budget racing games Sort of like n-space for FPS games on the DS

This was a great video! I think taking a look at Wii Racing games would also be interesting, as they are in a similar spot as the DS racing games. Just an idea tho.

Great video bro, very enjoyable. Glad I found it. I still love and play my 3DS to this day.

I used to play DTM Race Driver 3, which also featured a track builder tool. Really enjoyed the video and had some childhood throwback.

Make a sequel with Game Boy Advance racing games :D

As a car game and Nintendo lifer, this breakdown has thoroughly satisfied my spirit as to if the DS had any memorable games for us automobile boys. Thank you Dustin for experiencing racing games like NFS Most Wanted so I didn't have to find out the hard way. 👏🔥

Thank you for reminding me of the pure terror I went through with the hydraulics mini game on ProStreet

Great Video. Really interesting to see other NFS Titles as a DS Game. For my part, I only played Asphalt GT and Carbon Own the City. Both great games. Keep up the good work :)

Pretty sure the DS version of Grid also has a damage model for different parts of your car which affect your handling, speed etc...

35:10 I remember being stuck on the campaign mode for 3 days because of the hydraulics, I hated it. it was the worst thing in NFS ProStreet

What an awesome video dude! Hope to see something similar with some more obscure games

That Asphalt UGT2 homescreen gave me goosebumps...

The most wanted OST is fucking hilarious

The track at 8:07 on Asphalt: Urban GT is almost a one to one recreation of the track used for the 1997 and 1998 Argentine Grand Prix

My first foray with Asphalt was on the n-gage qd, and the GT2 came and that menu music, so many memories.

Now i really want you to dive into the world of PSP racing games. With the name of the vid kinda like "The Joyful world of PSP Racing games"

Damn, you didn’t mention about the *Pixar Cars DS games* (Cars, Cars Mater-National Championship, Cars Race-O-Rama and Cars 2).

Micro Machines V4 had a solid DS port. Worth playing

As someone who owns a DS Lite and spent a lot of my childhood playing ALL of these games on it, thank you so much for the video lol. It's a true nostalgia drive for me.

Awesome video, I never got to play any of these games but I remember reading reviews about them in Nintendo power issues and wished I could one day get some of them. I'd love to see your take on some of the crazy kart racers on the ds and other systems

Wow! How does this video only have 12k views? Now thats a lot of time and effort put into 1 video. loved it!

Wouldn't think id learn so much from this cideo honestly, great work! If you ever do a part 2 then you must check the sonic racing game, its quite impressive 👌

Hello, would you know the racing games where there is the option of cockpit view/hands on wheel, on the DS please? I only found ATV ridge riders. is that all?

Man you certainly brought back some hidden memories with this video, my very first game when I got my ds back in 04-05 was nfs Underground 2 and enjoyed it quite a lot. I miss not judging these games to much when I was a kid nowadays I find myself being more selective with what games I buy, I know its part of growing up but sometimes you might miss on something. I also happened to get pro street back then and I remember enjoying playing it, its a surprise to find out that its one of the best racing game experiences on the quirky handheld. I will definitely give these games a try very soon.

Ah, NFS PS. The game that was so good I couldn't actually complete it because my 11 year old brain couldn't navigate the tracks without obliterating my own car!

Loved the video,new suscriber bro hahaha im waiting for the 3ds one 👀

NFS underground, man you brought back some childhood memories..I played it so many hours, always manual shifting, it was awesome

This video is awesome and I remember playing carbon on my ds because it was my first ever game. sad that the wikipedia list didn't include Activision's Monster Jam which was another fun take on the racing formula. Overall very nostalgia for me being a 2000 baby and growing up with a DS for many long road trips. Good work!

i remember playing a lot of Indianapolis 500 Legends, and the speedracer movie game, sometimes more than mariokart. those games were super fun!

Man I played ProStreet a ton back then. I never really realized that I had the best possible DS racing game other than Mario Kart, I really loved the Nevada Sprint race.

I played almost every one of these games back in the day! Thanks for the nostalgia trip.

thank you for this amasing video it was very interesting and i really think to try out some racing games on ds also looking forward for the sequel keep up the great content

i think it's worth pointing out the track layout of haruna at 38:30 is the same track layout as the road to the east of the lake at mt. haruna and is used in other games like the initial d arcade series and kaido battle. that's definitely something i didn't expect when the console versions of grid chop it up, reverse some parts and hit it with a steamroller to smooth out any hairpin turns same thing happens with the long beach street circuit

What an absolute banger of a video, must have taken weeks to produce such a long video but it was totally worth it! Btw. am i hearing a german accent?

I played most of these and some others like Speed Racer and DTM Race Driver Create & Race as a kid. DS racing games were a huge part of my childhood

I remember the Herbie racing games on this thing, still have mine to this day but it's been used as an alarm clock for over 10 years lol

I just tried the DS version of DiRT 2 and I thought it was pretty good until I hit a problem, my career progress was stuck at 69% and the map didn't display any new events and didn't know what to do, I found 2 people online who had the same problem without solution so I'm not sure if it's a bug or if all versions suffer from this.

Out of all the games you reviewed here, I was so surprised I actually played 90% of them. Watching this brought back so many memories ! I essentially played these games because I really enjoyed the PS2 or Wii versions and was curious to see how they were like on the DS and even though they clearly weren't the best games I played on this platform, I still really enjoyed them. Was a blast to see how you liked (or disliked) these titles !

Loved this video, would love to see you do this for the Gba or the PSP

at 26:55, what is that background song? I've heard it so many times and cant get the name.

If you ever do that part 2, I recommend Sideswiped, Speed Racer the Game, Ridge Racer DS, and Moto Racer DS (if you plan on touching bike games, that is). There's also an MX vs ATV game on DS but I haven't played it.

U forgot ferrari challenge, indianapolis 500 legends, and asphalt 4: elite racing. I'm sure I'm missing more included, owning those three games back when it released was the best feeling

Ow boy.. don't even start to think of making a part 2 video about the 3DS, perhaps can be worse in certain ways or not.. i never get to a conclusion on this especific subject. And i tried really hard on that. Great video by the way..

10:45 I let out a howl of laughter so hard it gave me a half hour long stitch in my sides 😂

Regarding 28:40 - Hi! I own Juiced 2 for the DS, & I 100%'d it. I don't remember how long it took me to do the drift events, but I definitely did it. I wasn't a fan of the physics & handling model, which bring you to top speed really quickly, nor did I like how almost every turn was a 90 degree one. But I somehow was able to stomach it all the way without much fuss. It just felt really mid. I love this video BTW, as someone who's collected a lot of DS racing games, basically all the ones I find tolerable enough to play to the end. A really nice trip down memory lane. Also, Trackmania Turbo isn't as smooth on actual hardware compared to the emulator, but it's still really good fun, & I've gotten the Author medal on half the tracks in it! Happy to see you enjoyed NFS Carbon too, that's one of my favorites, even though I beat the whole thing in... I want to say only 5 hours back in 2013? Pro Street is phenomenal too, but I haven't spent enough time with it. Underground 2 became unbearable with how you had to run a perfect race later on, & the repetition of the tracks. Out of these games you've shown, I've beaten Asphalt 1 & 2, NFS Carbon, Juiced 2, GRID, NFS Undercover (my personal favorite), Burnout Legends (yes, I suffered through it), & Trackmania DS & Turbo (race events only, if I recall). I got pretty far in DiRT 2 & NFS Underground 2, but never beat them. Maybe one day! Pimp My Ride being on the Asphalt 2 engine made me check it out, out of curiosity, it's better than it has any right to be! Thank you for making me aware it existed.

i love racing games and ive been subed to this channel for a while and i can say you have definately earned that sub dustin, great videos and content, keep up the great work!😁 also you should take a look at the crew, if you havent already, its fun and has things to offer.

I was honestly expecting this video to feature more kart racers, but I still find this really interesting

Enjoyed the video! Not put too much time into DS racers despite it being my favourite genre. I won't either but good to see some quality titles here!