Mario Kart Wii review

A lot of good stuff going on this month. I grabbed myself a copy of mario kart wii before I get back into school.

I've always liked mario kart, I'm not nuts for the hardcore racing games, mario kart wii is one of those "everyone can enjoy" racing games. I've played all the versions, my least favorite was double dash, even though quite a few people think highly of it the whole two person thing didn't seem very mario kart like.

Anyho, some of the new features are things like 12 players, motorcycles, online play, new items, and a few other things. Unfortunately each new mario kart game seems to remove a lot of the skill required to be a good player and replaces it with luck. Its their way of making sure that people who aren't good at the game have fun too by keeping them in the race and giving them a chance at winning. I have this one friend who whenever we play with him (he knows hes not good), his entire strategy is to hang back in 12th place and look for the "bullet item" (it rockets you with no steering required fairly far forward, and will knock out anyone who gets in its way). Unfortunately the gap between veteran and crappy players is closing in, and nothing frustrates you more than getting hit by a blue shell inches in front of the finish line when you've been first place the entire time.

Mario Kart wii contains many, many unlockables. The game is practically 1/3rd of its true content when you start it up brand new, so to get a solid multiplayer account going to unlock all the karts, characters and so on you're going to end up doing a lot of single player. I have no idea why there are so many unlockables, because if you bring just the game it to your buddies house whos never played on his system you don't even have half the courses available to play. Thus begins a very frustrating many hours.

Mario kart is known for its mutliplayer fun. The fact that it forces you to already start playing single player is frustrating already. The unlockables go as far as 150cc grand prix and theres actually another 150cc after that which unlocks called "mirror mode" (all the courses are backwards, its a gimmick) which forces you to do the most difficult mode for a second time. 50cc and 100cc I found to be fair and fairly fun. But 150cc is just all luck.

No matter how perfect you are at mario kart, the AI simply hates you, and loves to combo you. Basically what comboing is (its what I call it, probably not an official term), is when you get hit by something, lets say a blue shell, and it stops you dead. Then the AI who is now passing you will use their items, and the heavier cars will bump into you. Which means you will be basically bombarded. Theres nothing you can do about it. I have easily gone from 1st place with a reasonable lead to dead last. I've been comboed as much as 5 separate hits without me having the ability to do anything.

The worst part is that comboing seems to be more frequent on the last lap. The items which can cripple your ranking appear to come far more often then any previous mario kart game I've played. I recall in mario kart 64 a blue shell probably happened once every 3 or so tracks you play on, in the wii version you can have probably around 3 blue shells launched to the poor guy in first place. Really, a sensible strategy people actually use is actually to remain in second place on purpose until the final stretch.

The game actually expects you to finish in first for an entire cup (which is 4 tracks, 3 laps each, you have to have a high ranking for more points, most points wins) an on top of that some unlockables require you also to get exceptional times while playing with the AI. Basically you play 150cc hoping to hell that the AI behind you isn't going to combo you back into 12th place after you finished 3 tracks and you're on the final lap of the last one. I've found myself just quitting a grand prix simply because I knew that I can't recover from a certain race. Regardless, im playing single player just to get the unlockables and then never touching it again.

The local multiplayer is of course lots of fun. I highly recommend to just disable the AI so you're just playing with your buddies. But by doing this most of the courses seem awkwardly large. One of my complains about the multiplayer is that when you play with 3 people, it actually splits the screen up 4 ways and uses the 4th screen as a useless spectator scrolling screen. I don't know why they couldn't just make first player have a bigger screen (or give the option). The other problem is when the screen is split up 4 ways the game severely cripples the quality and there's a noticeable drop in frame rate. This is because of the processing power required on the wii, but there's such a noticeable difference which i never noticed compared to previous games. Regardless, the multiplayer is what you should be buying the game for.

Last is the online portion, which allows for 2 people to play (probably better as 4 seeing how crippled the experience gets when the screen is split 4 ways). Its a huge change over brawl, I've never been in a laggy game, it always connects perfectly, and its a lot of fun. Racing against 12 real people across the planet is much more fun then playing against the AI. They actually got the online right this time.

I still do wish that nintendo did some kind of unified online system and voice chat, but apparently someone at nintendo thinks there will be preadators out there. It would of been nice to have something, because nintendo can easily whip something up to become comparable to xbox live, but sadly thats probably not going to happen.

Mario Kart Wii score: 4/5.
Definately a really great game, but the need for unlockables and the frustrating single player experience are definately negatives. However its a very solid multiplayer game, and even if you don't have a few buddies to play the game with you can hop online and find some strangers to play with, although I would of liked the option to talk with them... even if it is just me cursing about red shells.