Mario Kart goes online - unofficially

Enterprising coders have created a software solution which allows GameCube owners to play Mario Kart: Double Dash over the Internet using a tunnelling system which runs the game's LAN mode online.

Although Mario Kart itself doesn't feature any form of online play, it does allow owners of the broadband adapter to link up their consoles on a local network and play head to head games - a feature which is exploited by this new software.

Called Warp Pipe, the software tricks the game into believing that a broadband internet connection is actually a local network connection. This is a technique similar to that used by Halo fanatics to play online when the game was first released on the Xbox.

Mario Kart: Double Dash is released in Europe on November 14th, by which point the creators of Warp Pipe hope to have ironed out many of the bugs and stability problems with the software