Short Review: Mario Kart Wii

Mario Kart Wii. We’ve all been waiting for it. Does it deliver? eh…

Okay first things first. The wheel. The wheel is fun. It makes it feel like you’re really interacting with the game. This is good times. Unfortunately, it also takes a lot of the precision out of handling, and if you’re like me, you’ll often find yourself sliding the opposite of the way you mean to, and directly into a wall. Not good times. Dumped it after about 10 races.

New stuff: The Bam is the bane of my existence. I hate it. Bikes are cool, wheelies are good times.

Honestly I can’t for the life of my understand why they made some changes though. 1. No multiplayer grand prix. What the f’ing hell? What made grand prix tolerable was that you could have a buddy run interference against the cheating AI so that you could unlock stuff. Now, to unlock new characters or carts, you have to do it alone. This can be incredibly obnoxious as even if you hit every shortcut and run a perfect race in first place the whole time, chances of you eating 4 red shells in a row at the last corner is very high. Again, not good times. Nothing makes me curse like Mario Kart, as Kelli will attest.

While I know that some people love playing random people on the internet, and Mario Kart is okay for that, I hate doing that, mostly because of shitcockery.

What I want to do is play online with my friends, and enjoy all the same love of playing in the same room with them. But it’s a huge pain in the ass to do this.

Anyone used to Xbox live knows how this should work. But no. What we get is 12 character friend strings. I add yours. You would then think your wii would just ask you to accept me as a friend or not. Nope. I have to give you my 12 digit string, then we connect up. uggh.

To see if you’re online, I have to manually connect to WFC. I can’t remain connected to WFC while playing single player, waiting for friends to show up online. So you can’t see if I’m playing Mario Kart right this second. I have to be connected to WFC just sitting there waiting for you to connect to WFC. Lame.

Once we are both connected, we can bust into a VS mode or battle, which is good, except there’s no microphone for us to talk to each other. ugh. Oh yeah, and you have like 4 seconds to choose your character and kart or the Wii will choose one for you, including the choice of manual or automatic slides. Ugh. Super lame.

The really weird, strangely limited multiplayer, and insane rubberband singleplayer make the game hard to love at times. There are still good times to be had though.

Over-all I’d give this guy a 3 star review with hopes that Nintendo will allow a downloadable update to change some of the crappy decisions they’ve made.

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