Mario Kart Wii Written Review
Written by:Obsessed Jake
Mario Kart Wii review
Mario kart started out as a simple game back in 1992, and started Mario’s successful transition into the sports genre. Many series have tried to copy its greatness, but only few have succeeded. After many games on every major Nintendo System since, we have Mario Kart Wii. Is it a breath of fresh air? Does it feel the same as the last game? Is it a must have? This is Jake from ObsessedJam, and this is my review of Mario Kart Wii.
Alright, before I begin this review I am going to assume that all of you have played a Mario Kart game for at least five minutes so I don’t have to explain every agonizing detail about this game.
Graphics:
The graphics in Mario Kart Wii are honestly not that great. They have there moments for sure, like in the lit up streets in Moonview Highway, or the sunny tree tops of Maple Treeway. But there’s not much visually going on for Mario Kart Wii. Everything just looks smooth and shiny, and this can be a good thing. But in certain instances it shouldn’t. Take Donkey Kong for example. He’s an ape, a big hairy ape. Hairy is the keyword in that sentence. Instead it looks like Donkey Kong took a bath in Vaseline before he decided to go racing. And that is never a good thing. All of the other characters look very blocky, and sometimes they look worse then they did on the gamecube.
The graphics are aren’t much better then most games on the Wii unfortunately, and they are a far cry away from games like Mario Galaxy, Metroid Prime 3, and Smash Bros Brawl. The games’ saving graphical grace is its amazing art style. It’s a Mario game, so expect to see all of the characters that you grew up loving, and stages that are sure to bring back some memories. The Wii really brings out all of the colours and makes everything look so vibrant, and really makes you forget that Donkey Kong looks like a well oiled baboon.
Mii’s also make appearances all over the game, and are really cool to see. You might see them in the stands jumping and cheering, or advertising in the mall, or in the driver’s seat of a car trying to run you over. Every time you see a Mii you’ll say, “Hey, I remember making that guy!” I’ve always loved Mii’s, so seeing them in the game was a big plus for me.
Gameplay:
Everyone wants to know what’s up with this wheel. How does it work? Does it work? Is it better then the Gamecube controller? Slow down there, one at a time.
To use the Wii wheel, all you do is plug the Wii remote into it. The Wii remote sits in there snugly, so it’s incredibly easy to set up, and feels very comfortable. The B trigger sticks out, and you hold it to drift while tilting the wheel to turn. The D-pad uses your items and the 2 button is your gas.
The Wii wheel works…. But…. Man, this is hard. I don’t want to say that the Wii wheel is the biggest piece of garbage that my Wii remote has ever been in, but I don’t want to say that it is the most amazing, groundbreaking piece of gaming technology known to man kind. The Wii wheel will be a major hit or miss to a lot of people; you will either love it to death or want to watch it burn in a pool of gasoline. I would prefer to see the later of the two. I can’t stand the Wii wheel, for one reason and one reason only. Sometimes, and only sometimes, when I try to drift right, I drift left, and vice versa. I cannot stand this, and it really sucks when you’re playing online and drift the wrong way and get from 1st place to 8th.
My brother and sister however love the Wii wheel, and that whole drifting problem doesn’t happen to them. So don’t take my word on it that the Wii wheel sucks, that is just my opinion. Defiantly try it out, because who knows, you might love it.
So, if I hate the Wii wheel, what do I do? Well, use the good old Gamecube controller of course! Nintendo made a really, really smart decision and put in the ability to use every controller compatible with the Wii in this game! Wiimote, Nun chuck, Classic controller, Gamecube, hell, I’m sure you could use the Wii Zapper and get away with it. Out of all of these options, my personal favourite is the tried and true, the Gamecube controller. It’s honestly in my opinion the only way to go, and offers the smoothest control setting.
Off the record, somebody should really try playing the game with the Wii Zapper and make a video about it and post it on Youtube. That would be the coolest thing ever! : P
Now that we have all of the control options out of the way, it’s time to talk about the actual gameplay itself, and there are several big changes surprisingly.
First to note is that they have completely screwed over mini turbos, or power sliding. You no longer rock the control stick back and forth while drifting to charge up your boost. Instead, the game does it automatically for you. This normally wouldn’t be a problem, but it does it so freaking slow that it is impossible to do some of the techniques in Mario Kart DS. In Mario Kart DS, you could string these together and boost your way through almost an entire level. This was called snaking.
Another new thing is that you have two levels of boost, indicated by the colour of sparks on your wheels; blue and orange. If you let go at blue, you’ll do a little boost, if you let go on orange, you’ll do a bigger boost.
I guess Nintendo didn’t like the idea of snaking and took it out, and at first, I didn’t like the fact that they took it out, and I still kind of don’t. I thought that it took a lot of depth out of the game. But then I discovered something brand new to the series: Tricks.
Tricks completely changed the gameplay for me, and made me… Almost forget about what they did to the power sliding mechanics. If you shake the Wii wheel, or press a button on the D-pad with the Gamecube controller after going off of a jump, you’ll perform a little trick, be it a flip or simply taking your hands off the wheel, and perform an automatic boost when you land. What makes this so important to the gameplay is that you can do this on any jump, no matter how small! You’ll find yourself constantly doing tricks of the smallest of bumps, and getting lots of speed out of it. Tricks are the coolest thing that I think they could have done to the gameplay, because it replaces the depth that snaking put into the series. That’s not all that they did though.
You can now use bikes in this game. Bikes differ from karts slightly, but they are still really cool to use. They accelerate a lot faster, they can perform wheelies that give them a slight boost in speed, and perform much sharper turns. On the downside, they are lighter then karts, and can only charge up there power slide to blue. Bikes are an unnecessary, but cool feature added to the series.
Items are back and just as much fun as ever. You’ll see every item that has ever been in a Mario Kart game here, even the items from the DS version like Bullet Bills and Bloopers. New items include the POW block that hits everyone that’s ahead of you, the giant mushroom from New Super Mario Bros. and some weird thundercloud thing that passes on to the person that you hit and zaps them with lightning. The items are fun, but you just can’t help but wonder why they didn’t put an item switch in this game. What if I want to have a race without blue shells? Or what if I want a race with no items? An item switch would have been really nice, but it’s not there.
In conclusion, the gameplay has been changed from the last games, but the core of it is still there. You’re still racing around crazy courses, throwing crazy items at each other to try to win. Thanks to the minor changes to the gameplay, and a bunch of brand new ways to play, Mario Kart Wii is one of the best Mario Karts of them all.
Sound:
The music in this game is amazing. You’ll find yourself humming these random tunes in your head throughout the day. It just has that catchy Mario feel to it, and half of the songs in the game are from courses from the past games so you’ll defiantly recognize some songs if you played any of the kart games before.
On the sound side, everything is fine. Nothing overly impressive, but nothing that will kill your hears. The characters do seem to talk a little too much at times, especially when you are stringing together tricks and power slides, but you learn to ignore this after a while.
Game modes:
All of the standard one player modes from the past games are here. You’ll spend most of your time completing the grand prix, which is twice as long as the console versions time around thanks to the new and old stages. Though, it has the same number of stages that the DS version had. Mario Kart Wii has 16 brand new stages, as well as 16 old stages from the other games. I’m really glad that they brought back some old stages, because I really liked the other kart games.
By playing through the grand prix you can unlock new karts, bikes, and characters. There are an insane amount of characters in this game, over 20. But some of them are just really stupid and shouldn’t have made it in the game. Like baby Peach, baby Daisy, and Funky Kong. There are some neat characters like Rosilina from Mario Galaxy, but that’s about the only interesting one. This is Mario Kart, not Smash Bros. We really don’t need all of these characters. I would have much preferred an extra game mode then two babies and a monkey wearing sunglasses.
The other main one player mode is the time trails mode, where you go to a course all by yourself with three mushrooms and try to get the highest score. After you do that you can save a ghost of your replay just like before, and race it to try to get a better score.
One thing that I’m really confused about is that you can’t have a friend join you in the grand prix. My brother and I had a lot of fun playing through the grand prix in double dash, it was a neat feature. So I don’t see why they would take that it out. Oh well, what’s done is done.
The two player modes are again, are they same as the other games. You have your standard races and your battle modes. There are about a dozen battle mode stages, half new and half old, and two battle types. There’s balloon battle, and coin runners.
Balloon battle has been changed from the last games. You can no longer have free for all matches. You have to be on teams, you have no choice. What the heck is up with that? What if I have three friends over and we all want to duke it out free for all? We could do it in Mario Kart 64, Double Dash, and even DS! This makes no sense to me at all. They could have had an option to do free for all, or team battle, like they did for all the other games! Taking free for all balloon battles out, one of the best multiplayer modes in gaming history, has to be the dumbest thing in this game. The team balloon battle is ok, but I really miss the free for all mode.
The other battle mode is Coin Runners. In this mode, coins are scattered throughout the level and you need to collect them. If you get hit, you lose half your coins. This mode is simple, and fun to play. There is only one problem with it though. You have to have teams! I cannot tell you how much it pisses me off that they didn’t include the option to play good old everyone versus everyone, free for all battle mode games. If we can play Mario Kart with the Wii remote and Nunckuk, then we should be able to play free for all battle modes.
The last of the game modes is the online modes. I have to really give it to Nintendo; they really went all out on the online features in this game. After seeing the dismal graphics and the oh so disappointing team battle mode, the online modes really made me excited.
Twelve players online at one time, versus or battle mode, with no lag at all. Racing online is amazing, and it’s so cool that before you find a match you get to see which countries that your opponents are playing from.
Before you find a random match, a giant globe pops up, and as people are being located you get to see there name, there Mii, and what countries they are from. Mario Karts online play makes Smash Bros. Brawl’s online play look like a joke. Not only can you play people randomly from all over the world, see there name and there country, but you also get a rating for how good you are. You start off with 5000, and if you do well in a race the score goes up, and if you do badly it goes down. This makes you actually want to play random people to try to get your score as high as possible to show off.
You can also play against friends, by adding friend codes but it’s still cool. You can see your friend’s status, and send them a message to invite them into your game. Did I mention that there was no lag at all? I mean absolutely no lag. Online is as smooth as it can be, and it is the reason why I am giving the game such a high score.
There are also leader boards for the time trails, and you can even download the top ghosts for each of the 32 tracks! Good luck beating those.
There is even a Mario Kart Wii channel that lets you go straight to the games online modes without even booting up the game. Finally, a game that makes respectful use of the Nintendo Wifi connection… Now why aren’t more games like this? That’s a rant for another day though.
Conclusion:
If it weren’t for its amazing online mode, I would honestly say skip Mario Kart Wii. It’s a fun game, but it just feels way too similar to the other ones. The giant leap in the online front however makes it a must buy for any Wii owner with Wifi. So, if you don’t have Wifi, then I guess you can give this game a rent. But if you have Wifi then you must buy this game.
Pros:
A fun party game that can be played with anyone
Lots of characters
Bikes and tricks change the gameplay
Lag free, amazing online mode
Cons:
The graphics are weak. They could have been much better.
Power sliding has been gimped noticeably.
TEAM BATTLE MODES ONLY! WTF!?
Overall: 9.0/10
Mario Kart Wii review
Mario kart started out as a simple game back in 1992, and started Mario’s successful transition into the sports genre. Many series have tried to copy its greatness, but only few have succeeded. After many games on every major Nintendo System since, we have Mario Kart Wii. Is it a breath of fresh air? Does it feel the same as the last game? Is it a must have? This is Jake from ObsessedJam, and this is my review of Mario Kart Wii.
Alright, before I begin this review I am going to assume that all of you have played a Mario Kart game for at least five minutes so I don’t have to explain every agonizing detail about this game.
Graphics:
The graphics in Mario Kart Wii are honestly not that great. They have there moments for sure, like in the lit up streets in Moonview Highway, or the sunny tree tops of Maple Treeway. But there’s not much visually going on for Mario Kart Wii. Everything just looks smooth and shiny, and this can be a good thing. But in certain instances it shouldn’t. Take Donkey Kong for example. He’s an ape, a big hairy ape. Hairy is the keyword in that sentence. Instead it looks like Donkey Kong took a bath in Vaseline before he decided to go racing. And that is never a good thing. All of the other characters look very blocky, and sometimes they look worse then they did on the gamecube.
The graphics are aren’t much better then most games on the Wii unfortunately, and they are a far cry away from games like Mario Galaxy, Metroid Prime 3, and Smash Bros Brawl. The games’ saving graphical grace is its amazing art style. It’s a Mario game, so expect to see all of the characters that you grew up loving, and stages that are sure to bring back some memories. The Wii really brings out all of the colours and makes everything look so vibrant, and really makes you forget that Donkey Kong looks like a well oiled baboon.
Mii’s also make appearances all over the game, and are really cool to see. You might see them in the stands jumping and cheering, or advertising in the mall, or in the driver’s seat of a car trying to run you over. Every time you see a Mii you’ll say, “Hey, I remember making that guy!” I’ve always loved Mii’s, so seeing them in the game was a big plus for me.
Gameplay:
Everyone wants to know what’s up with this wheel. How does it work? Does it work? Is it better then the Gamecube controller? Slow down there, one at a time.
To use the Wii wheel, all you do is plug the Wii remote into it. The Wii remote sits in there snugly, so it’s incredibly easy to set up, and feels very comfortable. The B trigger sticks out, and you hold it to drift while tilting the wheel to turn. The D-pad uses your items and the 2 button is your gas.
The Wii wheel works…. But…. Man, this is hard. I don’t want to say that the Wii wheel is the biggest piece of garbage that my Wii remote has ever been in, but I don’t want to say that it is the most amazing, groundbreaking piece of gaming technology known to man kind. The Wii wheel will be a major hit or miss to a lot of people; you will either love it to death or want to watch it burn in a pool of gasoline. I would prefer to see the later of the two. I can’t stand the Wii wheel, for one reason and one reason only. Sometimes, and only sometimes, when I try to drift right, I drift left, and vice versa. I cannot stand this, and it really sucks when you’re playing online and drift the wrong way and get from 1st place to 8th.
My brother and sister however love the Wii wheel, and that whole drifting problem doesn’t happen to them. So don’t take my word on it that the Wii wheel sucks, that is just my opinion. Defiantly try it out, because who knows, you might love it.
So, if I hate the Wii wheel, what do I do? Well, use the good old Gamecube controller of course! Nintendo made a really, really smart decision and put in the ability to use every controller compatible with the Wii in this game! Wiimote, Nun chuck, Classic controller, Gamecube, hell, I’m sure you could use the Wii Zapper and get away with it. Out of all of these options, my personal favourite is the tried and true, the Gamecube controller. It’s honestly in my opinion the only way to go, and offers the smoothest control setting.
Off the record, somebody should really try playing the game with the Wii Zapper and make a video about it and post it on Youtube. That would be the coolest thing ever! : P
Now that we have all of the control options out of the way, it’s time to talk about the actual gameplay itself, and there are several big changes surprisingly.
First to note is that they have completely screwed over mini turbos, or power sliding. You no longer rock the control stick back and forth while drifting to charge up your boost. Instead, the game does it automatically for you. This normally wouldn’t be a problem, but it does it so freaking slow that it is impossible to do some of the techniques in Mario Kart DS. In Mario Kart DS, you could string these together and boost your way through almost an entire level. This was called snaking.
Another new thing is that you have two levels of boost, indicated by the colour of sparks on your wheels; blue and orange. If you let go at blue, you’ll do a little boost, if you let go on orange, you’ll do a bigger boost.
I guess Nintendo didn’t like the idea of snaking and took it out, and at first, I didn’t like the fact that they took it out, and I still kind of don’t. I thought that it took a lot of depth out of the game. But then I discovered something brand new to the series: Tricks.
Tricks completely changed the gameplay for me, and made me… Almost forget about what they did to the power sliding mechanics. If you shake the Wii wheel, or press a button on the D-pad with the Gamecube controller after going off of a jump, you’ll perform a little trick, be it a flip or simply taking your hands off the wheel, and perform an automatic boost when you land. What makes this so important to the gameplay is that you can do this on any jump, no matter how small! You’ll find yourself constantly doing tricks of the smallest of bumps, and getting lots of speed out of it. Tricks are the coolest thing that I think they could have done to the gameplay, because it replaces the depth that snaking put into the series. That’s not all that they did though.
You can now use bikes in this game. Bikes differ from karts slightly, but they are still really cool to use. They accelerate a lot faster, they can perform wheelies that give them a slight boost in speed, and perform much sharper turns. On the downside, they are lighter then karts, and can only charge up there power slide to blue. Bikes are an unnecessary, but cool feature added to the series.
Items are back and just as much fun as ever. You’ll see every item that has ever been in a Mario Kart game here, even the items from the DS version like Bullet Bills and Bloopers. New items include the POW block that hits everyone that’s ahead of you, the giant mushroom from New Super Mario Bros. and some weird thundercloud thing that passes on to the person that you hit and zaps them with lightning. The items are fun, but you just can’t help but wonder why they didn’t put an item switch in this game. What if I want to have a race without blue shells? Or what if I want a race with no items? An item switch would have been really nice, but it’s not there.
In conclusion, the gameplay has been changed from the last games, but the core of it is still there. You’re still racing around crazy courses, throwing crazy items at each other to try to win. Thanks to the minor changes to the gameplay, and a bunch of brand new ways to play, Mario Kart Wii is one of the best Mario Karts of them all.
Sound:
The music in this game is amazing. You’ll find yourself humming these random tunes in your head throughout the day. It just has that catchy Mario feel to it, and half of the songs in the game are from courses from the past games so you’ll defiantly recognize some songs if you played any of the kart games before.
On the sound side, everything is fine. Nothing overly impressive, but nothing that will kill your hears. The characters do seem to talk a little too much at times, especially when you are stringing together tricks and power slides, but you learn to ignore this after a while.
Game modes:
All of the standard one player modes from the past games are here. You’ll spend most of your time completing the grand prix, which is twice as long as the console versions time around thanks to the new and old stages. Though, it has the same number of stages that the DS version had. Mario Kart Wii has 16 brand new stages, as well as 16 old stages from the other games. I’m really glad that they brought back some old stages, because I really liked the other kart games.
By playing through the grand prix you can unlock new karts, bikes, and characters. There are an insane amount of characters in this game, over 20. But some of them are just really stupid and shouldn’t have made it in the game. Like baby Peach, baby Daisy, and Funky Kong. There are some neat characters like Rosilina from Mario Galaxy, but that’s about the only interesting one. This is Mario Kart, not Smash Bros. We really don’t need all of these characters. I would have much preferred an extra game mode then two babies and a monkey wearing sunglasses.
The other main one player mode is the time trails mode, where you go to a course all by yourself with three mushrooms and try to get the highest score. After you do that you can save a ghost of your replay just like before, and race it to try to get a better score.
One thing that I’m really confused about is that you can’t have a friend join you in the grand prix. My brother and I had a lot of fun playing through the grand prix in double dash, it was a neat feature. So I don’t see why they would take that it out. Oh well, what’s done is done.
The two player modes are again, are they same as the other games. You have your standard races and your battle modes. There are about a dozen battle mode stages, half new and half old, and two battle types. There’s balloon battle, and coin runners.
Balloon battle has been changed from the last games. You can no longer have free for all matches. You have to be on teams, you have no choice. What the heck is up with that? What if I have three friends over and we all want to duke it out free for all? We could do it in Mario Kart 64, Double Dash, and even DS! This makes no sense to me at all. They could have had an option to do free for all, or team battle, like they did for all the other games! Taking free for all balloon battles out, one of the best multiplayer modes in gaming history, has to be the dumbest thing in this game. The team balloon battle is ok, but I really miss the free for all mode.
The other battle mode is Coin Runners. In this mode, coins are scattered throughout the level and you need to collect them. If you get hit, you lose half your coins. This mode is simple, and fun to play. There is only one problem with it though. You have to have teams! I cannot tell you how much it pisses me off that they didn’t include the option to play good old everyone versus everyone, free for all battle mode games. If we can play Mario Kart with the Wii remote and Nunckuk, then we should be able to play free for all battle modes.
The last of the game modes is the online modes. I have to really give it to Nintendo; they really went all out on the online features in this game. After seeing the dismal graphics and the oh so disappointing team battle mode, the online modes really made me excited.
Twelve players online at one time, versus or battle mode, with no lag at all. Racing online is amazing, and it’s so cool that before you find a match you get to see which countries that your opponents are playing from.
Before you find a random match, a giant globe pops up, and as people are being located you get to see there name, there Mii, and what countries they are from. Mario Karts online play makes Smash Bros. Brawl’s online play look like a joke. Not only can you play people randomly from all over the world, see there name and there country, but you also get a rating for how good you are. You start off with 5000, and if you do well in a race the score goes up, and if you do badly it goes down. This makes you actually want to play random people to try to get your score as high as possible to show off.
You can also play against friends, by adding friend codes but it’s still cool. You can see your friend’s status, and send them a message to invite them into your game. Did I mention that there was no lag at all? I mean absolutely no lag. Online is as smooth as it can be, and it is the reason why I am giving the game such a high score.
There are also leader boards for the time trails, and you can even download the top ghosts for each of the 32 tracks! Good luck beating those.
There is even a Mario Kart Wii channel that lets you go straight to the games online modes without even booting up the game. Finally, a game that makes respectful use of the Nintendo Wifi connection… Now why aren’t more games like this? That’s a rant for another day though.
Conclusion:
If it weren’t for its amazing online mode, I would honestly say skip Mario Kart Wii. It’s a fun game, but it just feels way too similar to the other ones. The giant leap in the online front however makes it a must buy for any Wii owner with Wifi. So, if you don’t have Wifi, then I guess you can give this game a rent. But if you have Wifi then you must buy this game.
Pros:
A fun party game that can be played with anyone
Lots of characters
Bikes and tricks change the gameplay
Lag free, amazing online mode
Cons:
The graphics are weak. They could have been much better.
Power sliding has been gimped noticeably.
TEAM BATTLE MODES ONLY! WTF!?
Overall: 9.0/10
Comments