Mario Kart Wiiiii!!!

As you may be able to tell, the new Mario Kart for the Wii is a fun game and I would recommend anyone with a Wii to get it. I had actually written a post about this last Friday, but it somehow got flagged as a spam post, not really sure why, but it was removed by Blogger and I didn't feel like writing it again at the time. Now I'm gonna make it a little shorter than it was, and I will try to make it not seem so similar so it doesn't get flagged again.

Ever since the original Mario Kart on the SNES I have made sure to buy each one that has come out since, and not only that, I have completed each one as well. This new one will be different though, as there is a lot more you have to do to finish the game, and it's looking to be much more difficult. In the former games it was just get gold in each cup and you won, now there is a grading scheme from A to F that rates your performance, so you can win gold but get a C ranking and it won't count for much. There are also 8 cups now rather than the usual 4 that I have come to expect. The first 4 cups are like any of the other games, brand new tracks that are sure to take a while to master. The other 4 cups contain all retro tracks, meaning tracks from previous Mario Kart games, and while some of them are from versions only released on the handheld systems that I've never played, it is fun to see the older tracks on there that I've raced on so many times before, especially the SNES tracks, and they even kept the music the same. With 8 cups each containing 4 tracks that adds up to 32 different tracks to race on, and should make for lots of play time.

The other thing I like, and I have noticed they are doing this with all the newer Mario sports games, is how much there is to do in order to complete the game and unlock everything. There are many unlockable characters and karts, and some of them are no easy task. Not only do you have to get gold on all the cups, but many require you to complete the cups with a certain rating as well, often better than an A score, which I wasn't able to accomplish on some of the 50cc tracks, let alone the more difficult ones. So far I have gotten gold on everything in 50cc, unlocked King Boo and Diddy Kong, and have moved on to get gold on two of the 100cc cups so far. It's looking like this game will have more than enough for me to do before I grow tired of it.

One last note is the multiplayer options. I consider the Wii to be mainly a multiplayer game system, as the games tend to be much more fun with more than one person playing. The problem is if you have friends that aren't comfortable with their gaming skills, they tend to not have fun playing when it means they lose all the time. Mario Kart has somewhat solved this problem by introducing a team racing mode. In this mode racers are split up into two teams, and your team points are added up to determine the winner, so you can do poorly as an individual but your team can still win. This instills a sense of accomplishment, even to bad players, if their team wins, even if they didn't do that well, because they contributed to it. I think this will get more people involved in the game and make for a fun time for everyone.

I highly recommend this game, especially if you like inviting people over to play, and the fact that you actually turn the wheel to control your kart just makes the game more fun for everybody.