Tart Top

History:

Some said that Princess Peach's obsession with Baking bordered on mania. After she grew bored with her excessive Giant Cookie Stage, she again devoted a great deal of the Mushroom Kingdom's resources into financing the creation of a gigantic Tart for Racers to do battle upon. She set this deep within an enchanted room of her own castle, with the secret intention of eating it later as a "midnight snack." Once her plot to dramatically raise her blood sugar level broke, it became a huge scandal with the media of the Mushroom Kingdom. Eventually her plot fell apart and she was ordered to dismantle the Tart. This task was handled by hired Shy Guys, who had a notorious love of eating Tarts.

DS:

Tart Top is very much a continuation of Double Dash's Cookie Land, which itself was a continuation of 64's Big Donut. It is a basic ring around a centralized, non-drivable area. The center area here is a mountain of dash panels that send Racers to the only Item Boxes in the course, which is also a curious facet of this course. The Giant Pastries can smother your screen if you run into them, and the Giant Strawberries can also cost you a balloon if struck. It is unclear why Peach built into her Giant Tart such hazards. The track itself is much wider than in Cookie Land, which allows for more open mayhem and less obscurity than the dividers. Unlike Big Donut, though, it's not too large that it becomes difficult to seek and destroy opponents. It's in general a solid, if not wacky course that, like many DS Battle Stages is a proper size to both have high interactions with opponents but not be constantly annihilated.