Mario Kart: Double Dash is a game for you no matter how old or young you are. It is bouncy happy fun rendered in bright colours. Its soundtrack bursts with chirpy music and yelps of unrestrained enthusiasm. It turns rooms full of sensible grownups into hollering idiots. The sternest and most schoolmarmish among us will find it irresistible.

This much is not really surprising. Double Dash is the fourth game in the Mario Kart series. The first three were totally boffo; it follows that this new one should be too. No, a great and fun Mario Kart is about as unusual as a Grand Theft Auto title that causes outrage among youth pastors.

Which raises an interesting point, come to think of it. You will have to look very very hard through the catalogue of video game history to find a game that rewards you as richly as Mario Kart: Double Dash does for behaving badly behind the wheel of a motor vehicle. It is nearly as soaked in violent criminality as GTA is, really, except that said violent criminality feels more like Looney Tunes and less like Cops.

Double Dash is a racing game. You begin by selecting one of the famous Nintendo characters: Mario, for example, or Donkey Kong or Yoshi or Luigi. This character is your driver. Then you choose another, whose job is to ride shotgun. Or, more literally, whose job is to throw crap at all the other go-karts to try to make them crash or fly off the road.

Here is how it all comes together. You select an engine size, which determines how fast your go-kart and all the other go-karts will go. Then you select a "Cup," which is a set of races across a selection of whimsical tracks. Then you all hit the gas as hard as you can and try like crazy to get a head start. See, just around the first corner you will find a set of glowing boxes painted in rainbow colours. If you can drive your go-kart so it hits one, it will dispense a magical weapon, which you can throw at one of the other go-karts.

Sometimes the magical weapon is a banana peel, which causes a glorious high-speed spin-out. Sometimes it is a green tortoise shell, which serves as a high-speed missile. Sometimes it is a red tortoise shell, which serves as a high-speed guided missile, and which obligingly seeks out your rivals and crashes into them. If you are really lucky you sometimes get a blue tortoise shell, which flies right to the front of the pack and assaults the go-kart in the lead.

It is monstrously good fun, all this tomfoolery with the throwing and the spinning out. Sometimes when you have a really bad crash the rider at the back of the go-kart will have trouble getting back onboard in time, and will spend the first few moments of acceleration clinging to the rear bumper by his fingertips. You will enjoy this even more on those occasions when it happens to someone else and not to you.

This is the key here. If ever a game demanded multiple players, this one does. It is a blast of hot silly fun, perfectly calibrated to elicit friendly cussing and mock outrage. Your pals will be happy you invited them over, even if they are miffed about the tortoise shell.

Now, Nintendo has had enough experience with Mario Kart to know that it tends to work best this way. The series is widely praised as one of the best ways to enjoy the company of friends and video games at the same time. So why, for the love of Pete, can we not play the new one with our friends on the internet? We can play football on the internet. We can play soldier on the internet. We can even play golf on the internet. The PlayStation 2 and the Xbox are both neck-deep in online fun. It is almost 2004. Does Nintendo have a good excuse for letting things slide on this front? No it does not.

On the bright side, some nerds have hacked together a way to play the game online, and you can join the fun at www.warppipe.com. But holy cow did things ever not need to come to this.

As for the criminality, chances are good it will not make your impressionable children throw turtles on the 401, so feel free to let them play.