Mario Kart and more come to McDonald's

At McDonald's restaurants across the country, the idea of playing with one's food has taken on a whole new meaning.

Look around on your next visit and you may notice that some of the guests are letting their french fries grow cold while they sit twitching and giggling, their fingers wrapped tightly around a silver-gray box.

You may have seen the box before. It's a Nintendo DS, the Japanese company's popular portable game machine. But you'll likely see a great many more of them at McDonald's in days to come.

That's because the DS contains WiFi wireless Internet technology that enables an owner to play electronic games with other DS owners anywhere in the world. All that's needed is a WiFi hot spot where the DS can log on to the Internet. And now, there are 6,000 such hot spots in McDonald's restaurants from coast to coast, part of a three-way deal between the hamburger titan, Nintendo, and Wayport, a wireless Internet company best known for serving hotels and airports.

Anybody with a WiFi device can use the McDonald's hot spots, for a sensible price -- $2.95 for two hours. That's considerably better than the base rate at Starbucks -- $6 for the first 60 minutes and a dime a minute thereafter. Combined with McDonald's recent moves to upgrade the quality of its coffee, Mickey D might even corner the market in latte-sipping laptop junkies.

But your WiFi money is no good at McDonald's if you own a DS. For Nintendo gamers, the hot spot service is free. Just stroll in, sit down, and log on. You don't even have to buy a Big Mac, though McDonald's is betting you will.

The people at Nintendo will be satisfied if you just start playing their games online. The number-three video game company has taken its own sweet time about making its products Internet-compatible. The PSP handheld game device from rival Sony has touted its WiFi capabilities since its release a year ago, and many PSP games are designed for Internet play. Just find a hot spot and get busy. Microsoft's Xbox consoles have always had wired broadband connections, and the company's superb Xbox Live service makes it easy to find online competitors.

But Nintendo's Game Boy products don't have online capability, and while there's an Internet adapter for the GameCube home console, Nintendo never really promoted it. ''At the time, it just didn't make sense for us," said Nintendo of America spokeswoman Beth Llewelyn.

The company came to its senses with the DS; WiFi is built right in, and simple to use. Still, in the year since the DS was released, the feature has sat idle. Nintendo hadn't released any WiFi-ready games. More important, the company hadn't completed its own gaming network, a sort of gated community where players of Nintendo's family-friendly games can feel safe from predators and online game cheaters.

Now the network, called Nintendo WiFi Connection, is up and running, and retail stores are stocking up on the first batch of WiFi-capable DS games. There are three so far: Mario Kart DS, Tony Hawk American Sk8land, and Animal Crossing: Wild World. Animal Crossing is like The Sims, the popular game where you build a home and interact with other members of a virtual community. Only instead of virtual people, your neighbors are a menagerie of zany cartoon animals. Animal Crossing was a hit on the Nintendo GameCube, selling about a million copies. But players couldn't hook up and visit one another's digital neighborhoods. With the DS version, any gamer can invite friends to drop in.

''With Animal Crossing on the GameCube, I would decorate my house and rarely change it since no one would ever really see it," said Richard Cook, a 25-year-old retail worker in Illinois. ''Now, since I have friends coming over almost every day, it's constantly changing so I can show off my newest finds."

It's not easy to put your house on display. To prevent bad behavior, players can't pop in on one another uninvited. They must punch in a secret code to enter another's neighborhood. That makes it hard to try out the wireless feature, but gamers are getting around the problem. Since the game came out about three weeks ago, fans have begun posting messages on Animal Crossing websites, offering to share their codes with friendly gamers. No doubt a fair number of warm, fuzzy friendships will result.

But most online gamers just want a few minutes or hours of intense competition. Log in, beat up on some total stranger, log out. For them, there's Mario Kart DS, the latest adventure of the world's most famous Italian plumber. Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach, and the rest of the gang race against one another in a series of go-kart competitions, featuring predictably zany courses and road hazards.

Getting up an online game in Mario Kart DS is as easy as logging on to Nintendo's WiFi Connection. You can request a race against someone in the same room, or in the same country. Or you can tell the system to match you up randomly against a DS owner anywhere in the world. The log-on procedure is automatic, though it may take a minute or two for the system to find you some rivals. From then on, Mario Kart DS offers plenty of simple, goofy fun.

Since Nintendo WiFi Connection launched last month, about 200,000 people have signed on, most of them in the US. The number's bound to grow, since more WiFi-compatible DS games are in the pipeline. You don't even have to go to McDonald's to play them; the system works with any WiFi Internet connection, including those in millions of homes. Playing at home is probably better for you anyway; fewer french fries.