After playing enough of MKWii, I suppose it’s finally high time I got around to writing about it. First things first… I’m giving this game an 8.5 out of 10. That isn’t to say that I don’t completely love the game, because I do, but it has enough moments where you ask yourself just why Nintendo decided to do things the way they did that can really take you out of the game.
Let’s talk about the good. To many vets of the DS version of Mario Kart, Mario Kart Wii is almost going to feel like “more of the same”. Fortunately for those of us who liked MKDS, this isn’t a bad thing at all. Nintendo didn’t change the formula too dramatically, with the biggest changes coming in the form of motorcycles you can race in (to complement the karts) and the new steering wheel adapter that really does a great job of motion-controlled steering. Bikes are a bit tough to adjust to at first, but if you play the Grand Prix circuits the 100cc circuit is exclusively bikes in an effort to force the player to at least get a taste of them. Bikes can only charge a single level of sparks in drifts, which means they can’t get the same level of Mini-Turbo (MT) coming off a turn as a kart can after charging to the second level, but bikes gain a distinct advantage in the straightaways with the ability to pop wheelies for a small boost in speed. They also handle much tighter than any kart, which is great for tracks with tight corners but can very often leave you stuck in the grass on the inside corner of a turn (or facing the inside corner of a wall) for the inexperienced racer. Still, they’re a nice change to the series and I wouldn’t be surprised to see them stick around for the next installment of the series as well. Fingers crossed Nintendo just stays away from airplanes a-la Diddy Kong Racing.
For the most part, “the good” simply contains Nintendo continuing to do well what they have done well in the past with the series. A healthy number of tracks - 16 brand new and 16 “retro” revamped tracks, similar to what they did in MKDS - with GP’s across 4 race classes: 50cc, 100cc, 150cc, and 150cc mirror where all the tracks are flipped left-to-right. On top of the GP’s, there are Time Trials where you simply race the clock with three boost mushrooms to last the full three laps. Similarly to MKDS, there are Staff Ghosts that come with the game so you can race against a saved ghost to try and better your time with a goal in mind. A new addition in this game are EXPERT Staff Ghost times, which will unlock on a track after you beat a certain time better than the original staff ghosts; these guys are tough, and I doubt most players of the game will ever beat most of these ghosts without serious dedication put into the game.
Online has been slightly re-tooled, mostly for the better. Pick-up-and-play has seen a vast improvement in MKWii over MKDS, with online matches supporting up to 12 players at the same time (and one console can bring 2 players online to play split-screen, also). When you attempt to find a game, you will more often than not be dropped into spectator mode of a session already happening online, where you will have to wait for the current race to be over before going back to the Track Voting screen. Personally I prefer this method over the servers attempting to find players who happen to be looking for a match at the same time all into the same game, especially when you do have the 12-racer limit. You may have a race with 5 people, and the next race will have a full 12 players on the track, which is really nice and also doesn’t limit you to a 4-race, Grand- Prix-style format either, since you can stay in one session and keep racing for as long as you want.
Controllers have been a hot topic of discussion leading up to the game’s release, and I have to say that coming from MKDS I don’t see any alternative to the Classic Controller. The wheel is a great tool for introducing more gamers to the franchise, is implemented very well, and I give Nintendo a lot of credit for not trying to make a true peripheral and instead make the “shell” that they did where the Wiimote fits right into the wheel to act as a controller. Still, ask any powergamer of Mario Kart to race while relying on motion-sensitivity for tricking off of jumps, drag an item and constantly hop in and out of turns with the B-button without feeling like you’re going to sprain a finger, or be able to counter-steer and correct in a turn without being able to rely on button-press response and a more comfortable controller to hold than the side of the wheel: the wheel simply is not going to win over the hardcore racers out there. The wiimote/nunchuck combo works well I suppose, but the top two controllers of choice are definitely the GCN controller or the Classic Controller in my eyes. Personal preference, I feel the cube’s shoulder buttons require too much “depth” to press, and I’m not a big fan of the digital click of them either. The d-pad is and always has been ridiculously small, and these two points going against the cube controller combined with the pure smooth comfort of the CC lets me know where I have a winner.
Now to some of the downsides. First of all, setting up your Friends List has never been more annoying than in MKWii. It has supposedly been made much easier to connect with friends, and the game even has a function that allows you to send a MKWii Friend Invite to someone on your Wii Friends List, which will allow them to simply reply to your message they receive on their bulletin board if they have the game so that you will both automatically be added to each others’ lists. The problem I have found is that the only reliable way for this to work is for BOTH people to send invites to each other, and BOTH people to reply to each others’ invites. Manually entering Friend Codes can take upwards of 24 hours for the “?”-block entry you put in to validate and show your friend’s Mii in your list, and the auto-reply feature one time outright failed for me when my friend and I were trying to get online to play against each other - we ended up deleting each others’ entries after 4 days of the game simply never finding each other and trying again with the “send each other an invite” method.
Speaking of inviting Wii Friends, this sounds like a great feature but like many of the ancillary functions in MKWii, is almost impossible to find. My second very large gripe with the game is just downright user un-friendliness. In order to send a Wii Friend an invite for MKWii, you have to first go to the MKWii Channel. There are 4 permanent menu options here: for Friends, Ghosts, Rankings, Tournaments, and then there is a 5th option that rotates a message every few seconds. Wouldn’t you know, the 5th slot is still a menu option and will sometimes show the “Invite Wii Friends” option. Someone please remind me why this isn’t handily located in the Friends menu again? Even once you do find that option, you can only invite a single Wii Friend at a time before having to go back to the Channel Menu and waiting for that magical scrolling option to come back so you can invite another person.
The Ghosts menu in the channel is the same way. You can either race ghosts from online, where your system will download a random ghost from another player out on the www and you will race to see if you can beat other people, or you can view downloaded ghosts. Fairly straightforward, but this menu completely lacks an interface to a very cool feature that the game contains, which is that you can also send your own ghosts to people in your MKWii Friends List as a “Challenge”. The Ghosts section seems to be a perfect fit for doing something with this feature, but instead you can only do this under the Rankings menu.
The Rankings menu in the channel allows you to view each track in the game with a pseudo-chart of Mii’s that indicate where you are on the bell curve of your Friends, the Regional standings, or the Worldwide standings. You can awkwardly scroll through the Mii’s using the control pad (I don’t believe this screen was made for usability unless you are using the Wiimote and could easily just point-and-click) to look at what people have gotten for times, and even download the ghost for the best racer in the view you’re looking at so you can watch the replay and/or race against them. Also, dun-dun-dunnnn, you can click on your own time for a track from this menu and you will be presented with the option to issue a challenge to someone on your MKWii Friends’ List by sending them your ghost. Very intuitive. Perhaps the worst part about the Rankings is that Nintendo failed to put these lists anywhere but in this channel, meaning that if you are ever practicing Time Trials you have no way of easily checking the leaderboards to see where your latest PR stacks up against the other times that are out there. You will have an option to Check Rankings, but after viewing the rankings your only course of action is to back out to the main menu, where you then have to drill through the main game menus again to get back to the Time Trials.
I’m psyched that we have another iteration of the Mario Kart franchise out, and I’m sure it will entertain me for quite some time to come since I’m still working towards some better GP ranks and shrinking a lot of my Time Trial times. Still, in some ways it feels like Nintendo rushed to get the game out the door without a lot of their usual final polish, and it shows with the haphazard way that the online system tries to work and with all of the accessory features that the game provides being poorly presented to the gamer.