Oh, Mario Kart.
What have they done to you?
The Mario Kart series, in which Nintendo's famous mascot characters jump into go-karts and race each other on wacky tracks, has been one of my favorite series ever since the 16-bit days. Since Nintendo has only ever released one Mario Kart game for each of its consoles, the launch of each new version is always a big event, and hasn't ever been disappointing.
Until now. Mario Kart Wii looks great at first blush, adding motion controls and online multiplayer to the non-stop frantic racing action of the classic games. I can understand that the gameplay has been dumbed down a bit for the Wii audience, but in the process, they arbitrarily yanked out the series' best feature.
I am referring, here, to "Battle Mode." For my friends and I, the Mario Kart series has never been about racing around a track. Ever since the series' first installment, 1992's Super Mario Kart, the games have featured a fantastic gameplay mode that drops players into an open arena, then challenges them to defeat each other in mortal kart combat.
You drive around and pick up the goofy attack items for which the series is well-known: Green turtle shells that smash into opponents, mushrooms that give you speed bursts, lightning bolts that miniaturize the other players. And you attack other players, all the while attempting to drive away from and avoid their attempts on your life.
It is some of the best multiplayer gaming fun I have ever had, and it's been a staple of every entry in the Mario Kart series for the sixteen years that followed. Mario Kart Wii does in fact have a Battle Mode, but it's not what you remember. Tearing the game open, my friends and I quickly found that they'd utterly gimped it.
It's no longer a last-man-standing contest: Matches now last three minutes each, and if your kart takes too much damage, don't worry! You'll just respawn. Even worse, all battles are now played in teams of two. So while you can still have four human players, they can't all face off against each other -- and what's the point of that?
How could they do this? I can imagine why: Since the Battle Mode, like the kart races, can be played online, changing the rules in this way makes for a better online experience. If players drop out, it doesn't kill the whole match. And new players can be added in easily to existing matches. I get it. But there's absolutely no reason for them to cripple the offline rule set, too.
This is a game-killing issue for me, as it's just taken the potential fun that I will have with Mario Kart Wii from "months" to "hours." It's really too bad, as this is in all other respects a decent addition to the series. Mario Kart Wii ditches the two-riders-per-kart mechanic that didn't quite work in Double Dash on GameCube and adds more vehicles. Now, there are tons of different karts and, in a new twist, motorbikes that players can ride, adding a decent amount of depth to the proceedings.
Mario Kart Wii includes the Wii Wheel controller (right), a plastic shell that you insert the Wiimote into. Unlike last year's Wii Zapper gun controller, which was pretty much a useless piece of junk, the Wii Wheel does help your accuracy by stabilizing your hands and letting you turn the Wiimote just as if it were a steering wheel.
The Wii Wheel is a good idea insofar as the accessible design will help you wrangle your grandma into a race every now and then. But if you're a hard-core gamer, you don't want to use this thing.
The standard Wiimote/Nunchuk combo is the best Mario Kart Wii controller. You can use a GameCube pad, but it's a lot harder to pull off tricks. When you go off a jump and catch some air, you can waggle the controller to do a flashy aerial maneuver that will give you a speed boost when you land. If you're using a GameCube controller, you have to reach down and hit the D-pad to do a trick, which is as uncomfortable as it sounds.
As ever, Mario Kart racing is as much about navigating the crazy tracks (of which the Wii version has an astonishing 32) as it is about collecting the items that lay about the track and using them on your opponents to screw up their driving. Also as ever, if you are a skilled racer and sail into first place, you'll never get any good items -- just some measly shells and banana peels. Drivers who end up in the back will get all kinds of crazy stuff, allowing them to plow through other players and catch up to the pack.
This is another area in which Mario Kart Wii could have benefited from some customization options. You can turn items off entirely, or make it less likely that the unbalanced, powerful ones will appear. But you can't just go in and individually turn off the stupidest items. Why on Earth not? It would be a trivial thing to add, and like the Battle Mode disaster, would have made a huge difference to the gameplay.
The aforementioned online mode does work well, even though Nintendo still refuses to let people chat with their friends during a match, and still requires the input of sixteen-digit Friend Codes before you can add anyone to your friends list. But the gameplay is lag-free, and all kinds of races and battles are available to you.
With all these improvements, it's just too damn bad they had to have the best part of the Mario Kart series taken out back and shot.
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