I used to watch Cartoon Network at least somewhat regularly - Dexter's Laboratory being one of my favorite shows on there - but I haven't watched anything other than Adult Swim on there in quite a while.

However, when I got Cartoon Network Racing for my Nintendo DS Lite, I was pleased to see that I could still remember a lot of those characters.

The game is fairly straight-forward. The top screen is a third person view of your racing cart. The bottom screen has a map, with each racer indicated in their position by a tiny picture of their head.

That's actually rather inconvenient, I've found; having to look back and forth between the screens and decode which head is mine and which is someone else's got annoying to the point where I mostly simply don't do it anymore.

The controls are also fairly simple - the control pad steers, A "accelerates" and B "brakes" (funny how that works), X uses your Toon Power, and the left and right buttons use an item and power slide, respectively.

I'd prefer different controls myself. Since you need to hold down A to even maintain your speed it can make it awkward to use your Toon power, though that was rare enough I didn't worry about it too much. It would've been nice though if pushing up on the control pad would've accelerated or just to be able to customize your controls. Alas, you cannot.

When you first start playing you're given a choice of 9 characters (out of a possible twenty) and basically one mode of play - Championship racing.

A Championship racing event is a series of four races on four different tracks. You get between 1 and 10 points for finishing, depending on where you finish at between 1st and 8th. There's no way to save your game between races so if you can't do all four in one sitting, you may want to make sure the battery is charged up so that you can keep it on pause.

It also means that the championships can be rather arbitrary. In one series of them I got first place in the first three races, and the same opponent got second in each; that left me up by 6 points, but I lost the championship thanks to one bad run where I got stuck in a corner. Very frustrating.

Another Championship ended with me so far in the lead it was nearly impossible for me to lose on almost all the courses and in the points. I aborted one when I simply took missile after missile after missile every time I moved into first place.

There's also little feeling of what you're building up to - basically, by doing the Championships you open up new Championships on new tracks, and the tracks you were on open for Time Trial races (where you race a ghost of your best time). You also earn points that you can spend on various things. The idea of unlocking cartoons is kind of cool, though it takes forever to actually unlock anything interesting.

Let's go back to the 9 drivers. You have your choice before each Championship of who you want to race as. The first nine are Courage the Cowardly Dog, Cow and Chicken, I Am Weasel, Johnny Bravo, Dexter, and the three Power Puff girls. Each cart has its own characteristics in terms of acceleration, top speed, handling, and weight.

Most of those are fairly self-explanatory. Weight mostly influences two things: whether you're the bouncer or bouncee in a collision, and how far you can fly off a ramp.

In addition, each driver also has a special "Toon" power that they can use if they manage to power it up during a race. It's based off their character, so Johnny Bravo will do kung fu attacks while Cow turns into Super Cow. Some are a bit more forced, from Courage's shriek to I Am Weasel's "Super Stylish Steering".

Those seem to only rarely be used, and are only marginally effective when used (at least, so far in my experience). More used are items that you pick up on the road. There are a bunch of different ones, such as oil slicks, smoke screens, land mines of various sorts, and rockets. Encounters with those weapons, or with hazards in the road, will typically put the racer into a spin, not doing much other than just slowing you down to lose time.

It's the bumps that really kill you - hit someone, or something, and a lot of times you'll stop dead. There's nothing more frustrating than getting stuck in some of the corners, stopping dead every time you barely clip a door frame.

The audio is annoying. You hear the same phrases over and over again, the sound effects don't add much, and the music is dated. The graphics are also fairly crude; they do the job, but there's nothing special to them. After all, they are replicating a cartoon, I guess…

There's limited multiplayer - they have a very limited version for 2-4 people with only one copy of the game, and an expanded version for 2-4 people with their own copies of the game. That's it, though.

So, is it fun? Yeah, it is, for the most part, despite some of the random frustrations that come about. It's probably more fun if you have friends with it as well, but it's not particularly deep - I don't sit back and think about playing it more, just kind of randomly get into it when I get a chance.