Pipe Plaza

This article is about the battle course from the Mario Kart series. For the similarly named place in Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story, see Pipe Yard.

Pipe Plaza
Information
Appears in	Mario Kart: Double Dash!! (2003) Mario Kart DS (2005)
Cup(s)	Battle Mode
Online play	Was never available (DS)
Music sample Mario Kart: Double Dash!! Shinobu Tanaka/Kenta Nagata Mario Kart DS Shinobu Tanaka
Course map Mario Kart: Double Dash!! Mario Kart DS

Pipe Plaza is a Battle Mode course in Mario Kart: Double Dash!! and Mario Kart DS.

Layout

The layout consists of a simple square-shaped plaza surrounded by a tall brick wall. The plaza itself is located in a field of grass with pipes coming out of the ground. On one of the sides, the wall is much taller and there is a total of four large pipes, which allow drivers to warp between the lower ground and an upper wire mesh area. Entering a pipe on the lower level will warp the player to the pipe on the upper level on the same side, but entering a pipe on the upper level will warp the player to the pipe on the lower level on the opposite side. There are also two ramps which connect the wire mesh area and the plaza, with some posts on both sides of each ramp. Some walls that are mostly made of wire mesh prevent players from driving underneath the ramps. Item Boxes can be found both on the upper level and lower level, though a few of them float in midair and require the player to fall off of the upper area to reach them.

In Mario Kart DS, Pipe Plaza is one of the smaller courses comparable to Nintendo DS or Tart Top, providing additional havoc. The course largely functions the same as it did in Mario Kart: Double Dash!!, though the midair Item Boxes and the posts on the sides of each ramp are now gone. There are also some visual changes, most notably the brick wall using a completely different color palette and having a much simpler shape. The course uses the same music as every other battle course, and also does not assign it the "GCN" prefix. The same also applies to Block Fort, a battle course from Mario Kart 64. In Shine Runners, there are nine possible spawning locations for the Shine Sprites, with six located on ground level and three more on the wire mesh area.

Glitches

In Mario Kart: Double Dash!!, there is an animation glitch: if Daisy is in the back of the kart and she is hit by a fireball that knocks her into one of the pipes, her "getting burnt" animation will continue until she is hit again or until the battle finishes.

In Mario Kart DS, there are two glitches that impact gameplay: If two players enter a pipe at the same time as each other, one player will be warped as normal, but the other will end up falling out of bounds and will be brought back by Lakitu. Also, it is possible to fall off the track when getting hit by an item such as a shell or a Bob-omb at the right moment while driving through one of the pipes.

Gallery

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  Course logo

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  A Bob-omb Blast battle at Pipe Plaza in Mario Kart: Double Dash!!

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  The course icon in Mario Kart DS

Names in other languages

Language	Name	Meaning	Notes
Japanese	どかんひろば[?] Dokan Hiroba	Pipe Plaza
German	Röhren-Platz[?]	Tubes Square
Italian	Tubitunnel[?]	Pipes Tunnel
Korean	토관 광장[?] Togwan Gwangjang	Pipe Square
Spanish	Plaza Tuberías[?]	Pipes Plaza

Trivia

Pipe Plaza in the kiosk demo for Mario Kart DS

• In a pre-release version of Mario Kart DS, there was a sunset background instead of a daytime sky as in its original appearance. This was changed in the final version.