Mario Ride for Windows

If you're a fan of Mario, there's no need to limit yourself to the games produced by Nintendo; the Mario fan community has created numerous games featuring Mario and other characters from the franchise. In Mario Ride, users must navigate through 10 levels with Mario on a dirt bike. It's not the most exciting game we've ever played, but it's fun and challenging, and it's worth checking out if you're a fan of Mario or driving games in general.

Mario Ride is a Flash-based game, and its graphics are of fairly high quality. A screen at the start of the game suggested that Mario's bike could be controlled using the left, right, and down arrow keys, but it offered no further information about the game's controls. It turns out that the up and down arrows represent forward and backward, respectively, while the left and right arrows seem to accelerate Mario in either direction. All of this takes a bit of getting used to; Mario does quite a bit of jumping over obstacles, and the forward and reverse controls needs to be used carefully together in order to prevent him from flipping over. As Mario traverses the various levels he collects coins, stars, and other objects that increase his score. That's really all there is to the game; it's fairly simple, but the challenge of getting Mario through each level without crashing or falling into a water hazard makes for surprisingly compelling gameplay.

Mario Ride requires no installation.