GamersInfo.net

Having had some uncertain experiences with some of Nintendo's long-lived franchises as of late, my one constant was the thrill of a new Mario Kart. I've been with the series for some 15 years now, and that kind of longevity is hard to shake. While I was lucky enough always to have a new console, whichever one I ended up owning, my friend had its rival. In this way during the 16-bit era, I never found the kind of split-screen chaos that resonated with me on the Sega Genesis (though there were a few games that came close) as on my friends Super Nintendo with Super Mario Kart. One after another, Mario Kart's come, and it's added to my repertoire of boomerang game experiences that always make me come right on back no matter how many other video games may distance me. So the time has finally arrived: did Mario Kart survive the ringer to come out clean and recognizable?

I have a long-time habit of starting games on lower difficulty tiers just to make sure I squeeze out all of that good replay value I possibly can. When I started Mario Kart Wii, I first raced on 50cc; knowing full well I could have gone straight to 150 and been perfectly prepared. This turned out to be a rather disorienting issue for several reasons, though nothing major that wasn't overcome after that new-game smell had dissipated.

Mario Kart, being of one of the simplest members of the racing genre, has really lent itself well to all players in an easy-to-handle way. Race around the track, avoid obstacles and take advantage of the lucky dip items distributed around the world. Good stuff, especially when you factor in that Wacky Races vibe of the entire experience: changing vastly from one five-second timeframe to the next. Playing 50cc was not only a forgotten experience of mine in a speed sense, but the added "training phase" of Wii wheel use was something of a game of cat and mouse between my expectations and the game's different demeanor. The demeanor I speak of is the lack of snaking, a technique I've been using since the Nintendo 64.

Now I'm under the impression that you should never really take away from a game franchise when moving forward, but it's very necessary to pinpoint what's important and morph it appropriately. Mario Kart's strength, as pointed out earlier, of being a game beginners and veterans could both enjoy has always been true. The fact that you can draw the surprisingly cool amount of depth from Mario Kart has been a testament to why other similar racers never toppled the king.

This brings us to snaking — the backbone to a good handful of Mario Karters world over. Snaking was a technique that allowed habitual power slides all the way around the course, and depending on the skill of the player, indefinitely — even on the straightaways. I was always a huge proponent of this, only because I loved spending that much time with the game. There were never contentions brought up with the ability, because any player given a small amount of time could easily develop it. This on top of the fact that even the people who just played Mario Kart occasionally, or didn't have that amount of interest, still had tons of fun and no one really cared.

Mario Kart DS brought online play to the franchise, and with it, a variety of attitudes on the subject. The game was great because it introduced online multiplayer to Mario Kart and let people experience (albeit in extremely limited ways) the chance to race people the world over. Whether it was the online multiplayer design from Mario Kart DS carried into the development of Mario Kart Wii, or just the results of Big N's focus group testing, snaking was deemed unacceptable by the powers that be and was nixed for the greater good. This had a negative impact on me because I definitely felt disenfranchised as a long-time player. Why should I have to dumb down my experience for the sake of complaints over an ability all players shared, and why should the game's depth suffer for this? I didn't agree with the decision of taking snaking out, as I felt it fundamental to the entire game. (Hell, I didn't even know it was called 'snaking' up until a few years ago.) That said... after spending enough time with the series I loved, I found that through this latest entry perhaps shows a few more warts than its predecessors, I've been able to at least look beyond a familiar vice for success and became very comfortable with what I found.

I had finished 50cc with good results and was very happy to see that they left the rating system intact from Mario Kart DS. E-A plus a 1, 2, and 3 star rating to really narrow down the players driving skills. I had tossed the Wii wheel aside after only a couple of grand prix races, as I felt the irony of adding to the supposed "end all beat all" of simple controls (Wii Remote) with a trial of patience utterly pointless. Sure — I've seen players online rocking the tracks pretty damn well, but as far as fast and precise turning for power sliding and item collection goes, the wheel combo just needed too much time to respond for any sense of accuracy. Compared to the two established and easy to manage control schemes — Wii Remote/Nunchuck combo, and the GameCube controller — it just wasn't worth it. .

I get pretty competitive and really into Mario Kart, so the need to entwine my hand and arms with a device that seemed to just drip with inaccuracy if you started to feel a little drained was definitely a downfall. I would have used the GameCube controller if tricking and wheeling on the bikes weren't so damn fun and useful, but the Wii Remote here does a job great. In my mind, the Wii Wheel degraded my experience, so instead of riding a bike, I was stuck on a tricycle, and I felt stunted because of it. No fun, no gain.

After I had become accustomed to the Wii Wheel's issues, and the fact that I had to change up my game with snaking long gone, the next step was to put on my big-boy pants and try racing on the bike. The distinctions between the two are pretty nominal, which somehow make me favor the bike all the much more. The karts can get a bigger miniboost with a gold spark around corners, but the bikes can wheelie for the price of a smaller blue miniboost. The tracks this time around seem too spacious (almost to a fault); the bike's wheelie capability in speed will always seems to outdo the karts in my experience. Though, I wouldn't say there is a definite advantage to either — they're both fun to race with.

The obvious next step was going all the way up to 150cc and really noticing the tracks for how they were meant to be played. What became apparent fast, now more then ever (on account of the space given in the courses themselves), you can easily see the tracks that can be construed as item courses and the tracks that are the obstacle courses. The item courses usually turn out to be the easier fare for most, with minimal challenges to avoid, and tending to degenerate into dizzying torrents of shells and lightning bolt storms for all involved. The obstacle courses are my favorite, as they usually reside within the Retro Cup series of Grand Prix races and do a great job of really testing the Karter's ability to run the track successfully, and not be bogged down by the notion that one blue shell will ruin your world and give way to the competition. While the Grand Prix races aren't formally given the nomenclatures I've referred to here (item and obstacle), that's always been the understanding in ranking tracks I've had.

The tracks here seem like they have definitely been padded down from past Mario Kart's in terms of difficulty level. Most courses are so vast that you have so many opportunities to avoid your opponents; using shells and getting down a good banana are harder than ever. I don't buy the argument that larger tracks are required for the larger amount of people being on them, as the old-school practice of cramming everyone through a tighter space, even in Double Dash, had a satisfying feel of getting the better of your opponent, and cursing them out all the same when they got the better of you. While the overall style of most of the past Mario Karts felt like a king of the mountain with your friends in a sand pit, Mario Kart Wiifeels like everyone put on their safety gear and mouth guards and started bouncing around in a foam room — less rugged, with a strange equal opportunity mantra for everyone's well-being.

Some of the tracks like Koopa Cape and Toad's Factory felt like the designers were really embracing how much fun they could induce in one lap, while others like Dry Dry Ruins and Moo Moo Meadows were just an exercise in how you can get players from point A to B without wowing them with any kind of fantastic happening in between. The Retro Cups still rank as my favorite, with most of them being heavy turn fests to test your power sliding wits and providing plentiful obstacles with a good hint of item placement mixing together for some of the best racing tracks you could ask for.

With the maximum number of players being upped to 12 (from the previous standard of eight Karts to a track), two new elements are introduced. The first: more artificial intelligence and human players can enjoy racing together online, and the second: more AI and human players can enjoy wrecking you together, as is generally the case. The added space also gives way to lower places for opponents, meaning more god-like items to thwart first-place competition. While this does give a bigger glimpse of hope to those who don't always see the gold, having run two and nine-tenths of a race perfectly and then getting reamed with every item in the book to fall into 12th place seems a tad ridiculous. This is truer on mirror mode then anywhere else, as the AI random gambit of items seems simply brutal. You have to stay on your toes the entire time in hopes of excellence; all they have to do is wait till they get three blue shells ... just because. You would think it's not as a big a deal, maybe just a little gripe or whine, but it becomes apparent quickly the higher you move up. That said, this is really the only major flaw with the 12-person online mode, so it works out well overall.

After having spent ample time with the Grand Prix and single-player offerings, multiplayer was next on the menu. I knew that it had been changed, but as it turns out, the changes weren't anything game breaking. The multiplayer offering remains one of the most reliable aspects of split-screen (and surprisingly online) gaming as it did in times past. While split-screen gaming is sadly becoming a thing of the past, Mario Kart has always been about getting friends in a room and having a blast while shouting at each other because this shortcut was missed or about how there's no way that shell shot will land. I cannot count how many times before and after Smash Brothers that my friends and I have enjoyed hour-after-hour marathons on a Nintendo system with the aid of Mario Kart, and how much energy you can get from those sessions. It remains a go-to game, even in today's rather online-oriented world. While I will admit to missing the hitch of having two players in one Kart for a crazy co-op extravaganza, I'd say that even with only one other person the split screen is still superb, and the game does well to offer team races so that you and another, or many others, can race with, against or in betwixt AI opponents keep the longevity of the multiplayer portion going.

In at least one respect, Nintendo has done something downright progressive and has offered an online racing experience to enjoy when you're done pulverizing your friends offline. While I've lambasted the Wii's online support as nothing more then a glorified shopping network of retro titles, Mario Kart's online multiplayer gives me very slight hope that Nintendo might not need all of the social capabilities that Microsoft has and Sony is working on. The user interface is incredibly comfortable and very obvious in representation. Logging online is a snap, but doesn't provide you with an array of options, giving a little in a big way by even offering the chance to race people from around the world.

I've only ever experienced a slight frame-rate drop when playing online during peak hours, and when I play a little later on in the night, it's lag-free and as smooth as playing with 11 other people in the same room as you. I was so excited when I got online and discovered how much of a departure from the Smash online experience it delivered that I stayed playing for hours and hours before I realized it was 1 a.m. Not only is it possible to add a friend's Mario Kart code for personal races and battles, but also by going to your friends list, you can hop in easily to their game and play with them next round, no matter what. While all of this seems rudimentary to Xbox Live users, or anyone who's been gaming on the PC for the past decade, such simple advances and lag-free play for Mario Kart really sets a bright benchmark for the Big N's online future. The delivery of a endlessly addictive online experience with bare-bones lag-free play and friend integration launches Mario Kart Wii's replayability into the stratosphere as one of this generation's best offerings that will be around till we get our hands on Nintendo's next console.

While I could go on about the bright color scheme they used for Mario Kart Wii, and how the visuals still don't live up to mind blowing "next-gen" technology, everyone who owns a Wii knows what they've got. The games will look good; it usually just takes unique art direction to get special nods. Mario Kart Wii looks the way it does, and that's fine; anyone going in looking for some eye candy is truly missing the point of what the Wii is about — or in severe denial of what good art direction has done for most of the best-looking Wii games. The audio missing the mark seems like a bigger grievance, as the hectic sounds you hear in Mario Kart usually complement what you see on screen so well. While retro noises are inserted just right and the old tracks still maintain their signature sound, my ears weren't in too much trouble, as I could still hear when a red shell was about to give me a nice how to do, and the sounds are still crisp, even if in the baby characters voices may be a little too LOUD AND CLEAR. (Baby Peach is still too over-the-top cute...)

So after what seemed like a lifetime since launch, Mario Kart Wii was definitely a lot to get used to. I went from utter shock towards what seemed to be a molestation of one of my favorite franchises, to a complete change of tune: now I can't wait to enjoy continuing with Mario Kart. Yes, the Wii Wheel is garbage to me, and yes, the tracks seem to be idiot proof, with favored over skill with the 12-person item barrages. Next, the game's depth has seemingly been toned down with the excision of snaking, and what a blow it was. Still... after I saw past all the rotten decisions Nintendo made by trying to jazz up my Mario Kart, I just remember what a beat the game carried to begin with, and soon found myself enjoying split screen and now online gaming in fun ways I didn't think I was going to. With online tournament times, worldwide ghosts and easy-to-match friend races, Mario Kart Wii gives you a lot of gaming for your time, and that's always an awesome thing.

I will mourn the passing of snaking and will remain hopeful that Nintendo will realize that they can put faith in a good game, and that doesn't mean they have to discard confidence in a great product to catch everyone's eyes. Everyone is going to want to play if it's fun, and not even the Big N's strategy to include the majority can change this. Anyone willing to give the game a chance and look beyond the few mis-steps will be happily rewarded with the core content offered, which means Mario Kart Wii just barely gets splashed by Nintendo's blue ocean strategy. After all, a little water never hurt anyone, anyway.