Game Factory has licensed another hot property, and they’re doing their best to make it into a game for all ages. This time we get Cartoon Network Racing. The host of colorful franchises owned by Cartoon Network is a veritable cornucopia of potential game content. Dropping a bevy of these well-known characters into go-karts and setting them loose sounds like the perfect family-centered DS title, but as always the execution must be solid. And that is the very area in which Game Factory falters with this game. Graphical polish, bountiful extras, depth and a popular license won’t save a game if it isn’t fun to play.

If CN Racing was the first of its kind on the DS, I probably would have given it more room for error. Unfortunately, CN Racing is up against some mortal competition, a shining star in the kart racing genre and one of the DS’s killer apps. Of course I’m talking about Mario Kart. I hesitate to make the comparison between the two, because it really isn’t fair. Mario Kart DS is one of those rare games without peer that propelled DS sales and sustained the portable.

And yet, if CN Racing had put on a good show I still would have recommended it. It does so many things right, despite being an obvious clone of Mario Kart.

Nostalgia is most definitely not the problem. The source material, the CN TV shows, are paid full respect and represented in all their wacky glory. I can’t attest to the accuracy of Cow and Chicken or the Powerpuff Girls, but back in my 6th grade days I was an absolute Dexter’s Laboratory fiend. I was very happy to see three racers, Dexter, his ditzy sister Dee Dee and his rival Mandark, fully playable. There were also two nicely done Dexter’s Lab tracks—the labs of Dexter and Mandark. Dexter’s was perfect down to every detail, even the music, but Mandark’s had the generic, Samurai-Jack inspired spiky black and orange look of the more recent cartoons. I would’ve preferred to just see Samurai Jack included, but I digress.

I guess it comes down to your childhood cartoon preferences, but Johnny Bravo, Courage the Cowardly Dog and I Am Weasel were also included so whichever show you grew up with, you’ll be happy. Each show has one or two tracks modeled after locations in the show and I was surprised at how accurate to detail they were. A remix of the show’s theme song usually plays in the background (like the aforementioned Dexter’s Lab). The tracks contain some interesting shortcuts, but the AI uses them exclusively, so they end up as the only real ways to win the races, which kind of defeats the purpose of shortcuts in the first place. A few of the turns are also impossible to navigate well with any of the racers, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

The inevitable collection of items, used and obtained just the way they are in Mario Kart, were less inspired by the TV shows. You’ll pick up generic cartoon prop items: mines, smokescreens, nitro peppers, a leader-seeking bomb (blue shell, anyone?) and even some Ben-Hur like wheel spikes, but nothing that harkens back to a particular episode of any show. In fact, most of these pickups are carbon copies of Mario’s items, just less fun and effective...