Being the only one of my friends who actually makes the most of his Wii (pun intended), I pre-ordered Mario Kart Wii a month ago. I did this not only because I have owned every single Mario Kart created so far, but also because over the past two years I have developed a ritual with a few soccer buddies of mine where we would play soccer each week in our seasonal league and if the game ended early enough in the evening we would gather at one of our houses and jam a few session of Kart to relax ourselves, which especially worked after any match where we got our asses kicked, because we could then go and kick each others asses at Mario Kart.

With the concept of Kart being what it is, no matter how bad you are at the game, you are still guaranteed at least a couple victories in any given session because of the fact that you can go from last place to first place with the single use of an item picked up from an item box along the race. For example, you could be in dead last with no hope of a natural recovery on the last lap because you fell off the course so many times during your brain fart on the previous lap, but then you get a chain chomp or a bullet bill item (depending what version of the game you are playing) which essentially drives the kart for you in a hands off fashion until the item runs out, placing you in first place for the last second win and a very pissed off opponent.

Although this is an extremely unpleasing and annoying situation for the guy who got passed at the last second, the pleasure that the winner gets is so high that you forget that it has ever happened to you and you can’t wait to do it again on the next race. This type of gameplay is often known as rubber-banding and especially obvious in the single player mode when racing against AI opponents who for some reason always stay within a few seconds of your time no matter what you do. In fact, in some of the older versions of Kart you can even see the AI using a star (which makes you invincible and fast) pass you but turn off the star a second later just so they don’t go too far away from you. It is quite ridiculous. I have not seen this cheating behaviour happen in Mario Kart Wii, instead it seems the developers have included rubber-banding by giving the AI characters MUCH better items if you are too far ahead of them. While the items are supposed to be better the further you are behind the opponents, getting hit by 4 blue shells in a row because you have raced the race of your life and are half a lap ahead is ludicrous.

For the above reasons, I find the single player offering in Mario Kart Wii to be more of a grinding experience to unlock the content, much like it was in Super Smash Bros Brawl. Nintendo also dropped the ball by taking out the option to play the grand prix in 2 player mode. So you really can’t unlock anything with two players playing the game which makes it even more of a grinding experience. So now whenever I am browsing through he games menus and come across the modes with the option to include AI characters I cringe and get mad at Nintendo for being so irrational and stupid when they COULD have easily created a great single player game. In other words, there is not much enjoyment in single player because you just want to get everything unlocked and use the content with your friends.

Luckily I have other friends besides my GTA obsessed work friends who are willing to play local multiplayer, so I at least have some motivation to go through the painful unlocking content on my own. As far as local multiplayer is concerned, it is extremely fun. As in last offerings, you get to go through your unlocked tracks by choosing each race. This time there are many more options to choose from when choosing the format in which you play out these races. You can do up to a 32 race tournament so that it feels like a grand prix. However, I have 3 major gripes here. First being that they don’t allow you to turn off certain items like the dreaded blue shell race ruiner. Second, they also don’t let you preselect the order of the tracks you want. You either have to select a track each time, do them all in order, or go random. Third, you can’t change Karts without ending the current tournament.

I was never a huge fan of Battle mode. My sister and I would play one versus one which was pretty fun back in the N64 days. However they have replaced that with a flawed team mode where you have to race with a bunch of retarded AI characters which definitely takes the fun out of beating your human opponent to a pulp when all these other morons are interfering. And the balloon mode allows you to come back to life with 3 more balloons after you lose all three. This makes the balloon concept completely useless and having the time run out the only way to end the match actually made me shake my head in disgust at whoever came up with this idea. It sounds like at the last minute they decided to have a complete rework of the concept to make it more group friendly, and only got half way through development. As for online, I love it. Although the tournament mode is kind of silly because it seems Nintendo is planning to simply spew out a bunch of challenges to the world to do certain things on certain levels for no reward other than to see how you stack up against the general populous.

Originally there was supposed to be a challenge mode in the single player portion of the game like the one in MK DS where you collect coins on the levels and such, but it was cut and it seems Nintendo is just arbitrarily making up for that by offering the weak and uninteresting component to the online portion of the game.

The Wii wheel is very fun to use and I’m glad that gave motivation to use it by putting little wheel icons next to the players who are using it to show that they are not pussy enough to revert back to the GC controller, otherwise I would too. However, in order to even place in trophies on 150cc I had to use the GC controller which doesn’t matter because I could give two shits whether the AI can see if Im driving the wheel or not because they don’t have a leg to stand on with all the cheating they do. In the end, I am really happy Mario Kart Wii is finally out and I am happy that I have something new to play after soccer games with friends, however I am still extremely disappointed in Nintendo for not handing more customization over to the player when they seem to offer it in some areas (the rules menu for versus mode) but completely lack it in others (no item selection, and forced AI in team battles and shabby battle mode altogether). The integration of Miis driving the Kart is a neat concept but only allowing the registered user to use the one Mii at a time makes this addition nothing more than a tease.

Although most of my reviews tend to be on the negative side of things, I prefer to read and write reviews like that because anyone can focus on the things a game does well, but I find it is much more useful to the reader to read about where a great game falls short so that the reader gets the bottom line when playing the game and realizes just how good it could have been if the developer had used simple logic when designing it. So rest assured that if Karting has always been something you’ve enjoyed in the past then you will be pleased with this one for years to come as it offers the same core gameplay and fun for all attitude that the other ones did. It is just saddening to see a game that’s been in development for over 5 years completely miss quite a few very obvious design decisions. The future of gaming looks promising in terms of user driven content so my personal wish is that the next Mario Kart will have user created tracks.

Final Call: 8/10

Who: For Everyone

Why: Everyone who I have seen play this game has loved it within 30 seconds of playing

Tags: mario kart, nintendo
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This entry was posted on Monday, May 5th, 2008 at 3:35 pm and is filed under Reviews, Wii Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.