What was Nintendo's golden decade?

[Iceman404]

Mario Kart will never be able to beat Diddy Kong Racing.

I deeply love DKR too but this just sounds extremely biased. Which Mario Kart game, why? One of my main problems with DKR is that there's no form of rank based item balance at all, causing extremely one sided races even between pros and making it nearly impossible to catch up. This alone killed and used to frustrate such a perfect game for me, considering its one of the core mechanics.