Preview: Mario Kart Wii
by Kat Bailey on April 13, 2008
Go ahead, make fun of the wheel. Nintendo doesn’t care. In fact, it took only about ten minutes of playing Mario Kart Wii in an apartment common room for the first wide-eyed passerby to stop and ask if they could try. The wheel, like the balance board and the Wii’s other knick-knacks, are practically free advertising.
But while non-gamers will likely see the wheel as a fun and accessible way to play Mario Kart, more experienced players will probably shun it almost immediately. After trying out all of the possible control combinations with the new motorcycles and older karts, I found myself moving back to the tried and true Gamecube controller relatively quickly. The wheel felt good in my hands, but it simply didn’t feel like it offered the precision that I was looking for when it came to navigating the game’s trademark pitfalls.
It’s a shame that many gamers will probably follow in my footsteps, because it doesn’t seem like it would be too hard to get used to the wheel in fairly short order, but it doesn’t seem as if Nintendo made the wheel for experience gamers anyway. It’s a gimmick that will play extremely well with people who have never played Mario Kart before, and that will be more than Nintendo needs for this game to hit a million sold.
The game itself is a fairly solid interpretation of the casual approach that has served Nintendo so well over the course of this generation. More advanced tactics like powersliding have been simplified, so all it takes for a boost around a corner is to hold the jump button and wait for the familiar blue sparks to fly under the wheels. Meanwhile, techniques like snaking, the process of wiggling the joystick back and forth rapidly to achieve boosts on straightaways that some players thought was cheap, has been removed entirely.
It all plays very nicely, but most gamers will probably start to get the feeling of “been there, done that” in fairly short order. The blue shells and other items that have vexed players for more than a decade are still there, as is the traditional battle mode. As in a regular race, the number of players has been expanded to twelve, which can make for some chaotic battling, but it is mitigated by the new team mode somewhat. As usual, it’s a fun break from racing, though one who’s novelty seems like it will wear off fairly quickly.
Old battle battle courses return here, as do some of the better tracks from Double Dash and Mario Kart DS. Some didn’t seem to translate very well though, as one of the earlier SNES tracks had such poor draw-in that I found myself going off edges just because I couldn’t see far enough ahead of me. However, most of the Wii-original tracks were excellent, with a few supply an excellent roller coaster feeling that I had never experienced in a Mario Kart game before. Even without having unlocked all of them, my impressions were quite favorable.
Other new features included the bikes, which felt somewhat more unstable than the regular karts, but oddly more rewarding because they all seemed quite a bit lighter and faster. Able players can perform simple tricks on the motorcycles by shaking the wheel to get a boost, but as they are quite difficult to pull off on the Gamecube controller (a player has to press up on the D-pad while moving the thumbstick, if you can imamgine that), I found myself largely ignoring them. Regardless, I found myself using the motorcycles almost exclusively by the end, if only because they seemed to offer something new and different.
Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to try Mario Kart’s multiplayer modes, which is a shame because it offers one of the few instances where I would probably take online racing over racing against friends in the same living room. At this point, four-player splitscreen just strains the eyes, and when you get the whole screen to yourself, it makes even the less-powerful graphics of the Wii look like a revelation. However, with some sites reporting that players are apparently already finding exploits on some tracks for time trials, Americans may want to proceed with caution.
Overall, it’s more of the same, but did you really expect anything less from Mario Kart? In any case, it seems like another solid entry in one of Nintendo’s top franchises, and a decent purchase for anybody looking for a little more multiplayer action beyond Smash Brothers Brawl.
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