Mario Kart Wii: First Impressions

Midnight launches are fun! I’ve been to 3 in the past year, and Mario Kart Wii was quite a success. You know a game is special when you come home immediately and play it until you absolutely need to sleep. This isn’t much of a first impressions post – I’ve already won every cup in 50 and 100cc, so I have played quite a bit. Without further ado, here’s the rundown.

Controller Schemes: The Wii Wheel is fun. It’s just good old-fashioned fun. Is it the best way to be competitive in time trials and online? Probably not, although only time will tell. It is, however, a blast to use after the initial learning curve. I do wish the buttons were reassignable like in Brawl, but that’s only a minor annoyance. The Remote+Nunchuck scheme seems to be the best competitive set up, as it makes tricks very easy to perform and has the most intuitive button mapping. The Gamecube controller works in a pinch, but reaching for the D-Pad to trick is frustrating. The Gamecube controller is easily bested by the Remote+Nunchuck scheme. I have not used the Wiimote by itself, but I see no reason to try it when I have Wii Wheels lying around.

Graphics+Music: I will address these in one paragraph because I feel the same way about them: disappointed. Some of the new tracks look very nice, most notably Maple Treeway and Rainbow Road. Unfortunately, many of the older tracks are uninteresting and bland. Nearly nothing was done to spice up the backgrounds and roadways, and they end up feeling out of place next to the new tracks. The character models are horrendous. They look worse than the character models in Double Dash and almost as bad as those in Mario Kart 64. After the gorgeously rendered characters in Brawl, I was sad to see this large step backward. The menu graphics do their job, but are far from appealing. The music is typical Mario Kart music. Many old tunes return next to new completely unmemorable songs. None is orchestrated, and after the incredible soundtrack featured in Brawl, I couldn’t help feeling disappointed. Where are the classic Nintendo medleys? Why aren’t there multiple songs per track? Why is Nintendo still not orchestrating their music? There is no excuse for any of these things. Some would say I’ve been spoiled by the quality of Brawl. I say Brawl sets a bar that all future Nintendo games should strive to beat.

New Mechanics: The trick system is very fun. They are simple to pull off (with the right control scheme) and make searching for those hidden jumps even more rewarding. The bikes don’t take anything away from the essential “kart-ness” of Mario Kart. Look at Double Dash – we’ve been racing non-kart vehicles for quite a while now. Being able to pop a wheelie on straightaways but being easier to hit and not being able to get the super mini-turbo brings about an important tactical question and makes the selection between bikes and karts fun and competitive. The new turbos require no skill to get, unlike in the past few Karts, and subsequently feel less rewarding. In fact, the races seem less about skill than ever before, which brings me to my next point.

Items and CPUs: The items are more absurd than ever before with Mario Kart Wii. Luckily, they can be turned down or even off in multiplayer, but to get through Grand Prix and unlock the hidden characters, you must deal with some of the worst rubber band AI the series has seen and grow accustomed to getting hit with a blue shell, lightning, red shell, and POW block all while mere seconds away from the finish line. This description mostly applies to 150cc, where the AI is at its most ruthless, but it still happens in 100 and occasionally in 50. Thankfully, not many people play Mario Kart for its single player racing.

Multiplayer: Better than ever before! CPU players can be on or off and adjusted in difficulty, items can be tweaked (although I’d like options to turn individual items on and off as seen in Smash Brothers), and now you can set a number of races from 2 to 32 and play through them all with Grand Prix-style point rankings. If you get tired of your friends, the online multiplayer is robust and I’m so thankful to be able to say, completely lag free. While I still can’t join a Brawl match online to save my life, Kart worked perfectly right out of the box.

Ghosts and Rankings: Time Trials have the best new addition to the series – downloadable ghosts and world-wide leaderboards. Not only that, but your best ghost is saved automatically for every single tracks in the game. You can upload ghosts and send “Ghost Challenges” to your friends. And you can download and race the ghost of the current world-wide record holder for every track. This system will keep Time Trials fun for a very long time.

Overall Impressions: I am quite happy with this game. After looking past the sub-par graphics and music, I have found a highly enjoyable racer – decent alone and amazing with friends. The wonderful online component will keep this Kart fresh for quite a while. It’s no Smash when it comes to longevity or depth, but I wasn’t expecting it to be.