Not completely worthless but good for about an hour worth of fun at the most.
For starters, Quad Dessert Fury actually looks pretty good from a technical standpoint. It surpasses many GBA titles--notably the GT Advance games--in that it's terrain features changing elevation which truly affects gameplay. That said, the art direction is fairly bland. Each course is set in identical dessert setting and features like cactus, rocks and bushes are all represented by the exact same sprite every time you see them. Similarly, the games title theme is a lively punk rock piece which fits the fast racing action perfectly but is also the only song in the game, repeated indefinitely until you turn it off. Overall, it feels something like a single level tech demo--only there is more than one level.
In fact, the levels are so similar that I can't tell if there's new terrain for each track or if they simply placed the checkpoints in differently across the same map to create different courses. Checkpoints are thrown about haphazardly, sometimes close together and sometimes far apart and your task is to drive between them for the duration of a two to five minute race.
There does seem to be some sort of track you are supposed to follow but in reality the best practice seems to be to just point your four wheeler at the next check point and drive straight for it, over whatever ravines and sheer cliff faces might be in your way. Amusingly, the AI uses the exact same strategy and the initial minute or so of the race while you are still packed in w/ the AI riders is sort of like driving bumper cars down the side of the Grand Canyon--and it's actually pretty fun.
However, after a few races worth of experience, it becomes fairly easy to pull away from the AI drivers and streak your way to victory after three very uneventful laps. The controls are extremely simple--turn, accelerate, brake--and you are pretty much fine to just hold the accelerator down for all but a few hairpin turns. Your four wheeler doesn't slide through turns and taking your finger off the accelerator for about a second allows you to pretty much turn on a dime, which more or less removes any challenge this game might offer. The two hardest things are controlling your four wheeler after hitting a nitro boost--represented for some reason by ordinary gas cans randomly strewn on various courses--which sends you careening wildly into the the rigid sides of bushes and cactus and simply not missing check points. However, even the AI misses checkpoints so victory is pretty much assured if you don't mess up to bad.
Quad Dessert Fury has two game modes and no varying difficulty nor choice of riders or vehicles. The first game mode is quick race where you can select one of seven tracks to race on vs. three AI opponents. After each race, the game announces "You win," or "You lose" depending on the outcome and you are dumped back to the main menu. There is also challenge mode where you must earn first place on each track in order to advance to the next. The first track is the only that seems to provide any kind of challenge so after that you are pretty much on easy street for the remainder. Even if you fail to acieve first place on a given track you are allowed to replay it over and over w/o penalty. Once you've worked through all seven, the game announces (*spoiler*) "Congratulations." Then you are dumped right back to the main main menu once again. I could see how the crazy simple gameplay might work for some fun multiplayer action but that is not offered in any capacity and these two simple race modes just plain don't cut it.
When it was released, Quad Dessert Fury was a budget game and now on the used market, it tends to sell for a buck or two. It is about the same price as a crumby time-waster game for a mobile OS and offers about the same depth of gameplay. While it's technically impressive in that it offers race courses where elevation not only exists but actually matters towards gameplay, it is really pretty much lacking in every other regard and racing fans and GBA stalwarts alike will be wise to avoid this if they expect more than an hours worth of amusement.