One of MKDS' most controversial design decisions was the addition of snaking. With a bit of skill, you could break your thumb in order to pretty much miniturbo your way through the whole race. Speedruns, online matches and pretty much any kind of competition that required you to be as fast as possible basically forced you to use this technique if you wanted to stay competitive. Being controversial and all, these mechanic has some people that absolutely love it (myself included) and others who hate it.
The main reason why I liked it is because MK is a little braindead at times. Even if the later entries got better at this, in MKDS there's so many situations where all you're doing is holding A and at most making slight turns with the D-Pad if you're not snaking, however once you start doing it the whole race basically becomes a huge game of position management, endurance and planning thanks to the random items. I agree that it might be a little unfair that you're simply always going to beat people that don't know how to snake, but if you're racing against the right rivals it's probably one of MK's most intense experiences.
The main reason why I liked it is because MK is a little braindead at times. Even if the later entries got better at this, in MKDS there's so many situations where all you're doing is holding A and at most making slight turns with the D-Pad if you're not snaking, however once you start doing it the whole race basically becomes a huge game of position management, endurance and planning thanks to the random items. I agree that it might be a little unfair that you're simply always going to beat people that don't know how to snake, but if you're racing against the right rivals it's probably one of MK's most intense experiences.