With a few weeks to wait for our friends across the pond to get their hands on Mario Kart Wii, I felt that I should take full advantage of this rare occurrence and give a few of my first impressions. Put simply, its still the Mario Kart you know and love.
The first thing you’ll notice are the weird controls. With the Wii Wheel, which should totally be called the Wii-eel by the way, you will encounter a lot of over-steer while you get used to the new scheme. It’s way too sensitive and you should expect wanting to put your Gamecube controller in as soon as possible. I am preferring the Gamecube controls but that may be my inability to use the goofy looking Wii-eel. Fine it doesn’t look that bad but it’s a simply a gimmick as it doesn’t really affect the gameplay in any way, shape or form. Saying that the Wii-Mote & Nunchuk combination works a lot better by making full use of the Nunchuk’s analog stick to steer your kart but meanwhile it still lets you use the full motion sensing additions like tricks and wheelies. Those are the two things you’ll miss while using the Classic or Gamecube control scheme’s. They seem like small things but you do get small boosts from both of them and in the upper difficulty settings, every advantage is key.
Speaking of the difficulty settings, Mario Kart Wii still has your standard MK 50, 100 and 150 cc modes which translate to easy, medium and hard respectively. Though don’t expect just different levels of difficulty what this version does is turn it into easy with karts, medium with bikes & karts and hard with just bikes. Although the bikes don’t change much, it seems an odd change to make.
So far the new tracks seem like great additions to the franchise and I’m already picking my favorites and you even have 16 old tracks from previous incarnations to make you feel more at home. Other additions such as Automatic or Manual Drifting and new powerups change the game slightly although a few of the new Power-Ups like POW (everyone just spins for a few seconds) or the Angry Cloud (That counts down and electrocutes who ever has said cloud) aren’t so appealing.
What Mario Kart has given me so far is a few more hours of quality time with my Wii and thats great although it doesn’t really take any risks and the biggest change that has taken advantage of the Wii isn’t really doing it for me right now. The bottom line, so far is that it is still Mario Kart and so far I’m having way to much fun with it.
Expect a full review, with in depth coverage of the online play, on the site within two weeks.
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