Gaming off the Beaten Path

I know it's a bit of a stretch for the whole "obscure games" thing, but I've been playing a lot of Mario Kart recently. It wasn't necessarily by choice. You see, my son has recently become absolutely obsessed with this 2003 entry into the much loved franchise, so much so that he asks to play almost every day. He's played games with me before, but this was really the first one he played by himself. He's not going to set any records (he finishes a course in an average of about ten minutes, they're supposed to take, like, two.) he does do a pretty good job for his age. Honestly, I kind of messed up, I had at least three years I could have used the "unplugged controller" trick left, but now there's no way he'll ever go for that again. Still I'm happy he enjoys it and it's nice to have some common ground. Of course, he doesn't understand that there are other versions of Mario Kart out there. This one, for the GameCube, kind of ...