But here's the bloody amazing stuff!
Woo, looks like I’ve been pretty negative towards Mario Kart so far but I don’t think anything I’ve said so far is unfair. Basically, as a single player game, I’m firmly of the opinion that you’ll play it through once, maybe go back and have another crack at the cups you didn’t ace and then, even if you haven’t unlocked everything, you’ll put it away. There’s just not enough here to keep you going back.But, and here’s a really big but… hook up someone else to play with and Mario Kart totally transforms into something really rather good indeed. You see, once you hook up another player, either online or on the same Wii, Mario Kart suddenly becomes a fun arcade racer again. You can turn down the AI ability to leave you both racing in a pack but with the Ai playing a minor role. You can team up to race as a team or just race against each other with no other bugger on the track. The battle mode takes on a whole new slant as you can again team up with human players or go head-to-head with AI support.
Click for larger imageAnd it has to be said that playing Mario Kart, either online or against someone sitting next to you is what the Wii and indeed Mario Kart is made for. Before, in the single player mode, Mario Kart felt just a tad tired and formulaic… an update to a well established series rather than anything wonderfully new. But the multi-player aspect blows all of that clean away.
Quite simply, as a multiplayer game, Mario Kart is damn near perfection. Remember those superb SNES two-player sessions? OR how about the madness of four player races in Mario Kart Double Dash on the GC? Or what about the sublime eight player races on the DS? All those moments and loads more are waiting for you in the wonderful world of Mario Kart multiplayer on the Wii.
Click for larger imageSince the code landed on my desk the Mario Kart disc hasn’t left my Wii and every evening for a week has been spent with all sorts of frantic four player races in the living room. And, even when no-one else is around, I’ve still been dragged back to play online against other racers all over the place. Lacking in this area at the minute is some form ranking match-up… which can work in your favour but most often means you’ll see the expert guy bugger off into the distance but everything else is very, very cool.
You can add friends through the still stupidly complex friends code thing, though you need yet another code to add them to your Mario Kart friends roster, but it does mean you know who you’re racing against. There’s even a dedicated Mario Kart channel which keeps a track of your ranking in a local and global scale, tells you when a friend wants to challenging you to a race and lets you send and receive ghost data to mates.
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