Mario Kart Wii Preview

Every copy of Mario Kart Wii will come packaged with a steering wheel peripheral that houses your Wii remote in the center and gives you the ability to play Mario Kart Wii rotating the wheel left and right in the air. A hole on the left side of the unit makes it so players can still utilize the Wii Remote’s pointer functions for the menu system. But in the case of Mario Kart Wii, the designers made sure you can navigate the menus using the D-pad as well.

Mario Kart Wii will also have full support for playing using the Wiimote exclusively, Wiimote with the Nunchuk, Classic Controller, or a GameCube controller. The game will automatically recognize which controller you choose to use the moment it’s plugged in, and every best time will be noted with a specific controller icon to let everyone know just how you managed to get that score.

IGN staffers admitted to having a large learning curve due to the fact that you have to learn where the “dead zones” are. Since the Wii Remote isn’t attached to anything but your hands, you’ll need to feel around where the center point is, as well as learn just how far you can rotate left and right before your kart stops turning. The only “force feedback” comes from the Wiimote’s rumble. According to Nintendo, testers seem to favor the steering wheel peripheral over the other options. IGN had less than an hour to tinker around with Mario Kart Wii, not exactly enough time to get used to the new control scheme. But certainly enough to see that the controls certainly work, even if they’re a little awkward right from the start.

Mario Kart Wii begins with the same established Mario Kart structure: Grand Prix mode still features the same three different classes of difficulty: 50CC, 100CC, and 150CC, but now there are 11 other racers on the track instead of seven. Additionally, the game adds a new class of vehicles: motorcycles. Each character has six different vehicles right from the start, three karts and three cycles that alter the character’s different racing attributes. In Grand Prix, 50CC races are kart exclusive, 100CC races are motorcycle exclusive. 150CC races allow for the mix of karts and motorcycles.

Motorcycles seem to turn a bit slower than karts, but there are far more opportunities for boosting using them: by tipping the wheel controller back you can perform wheelies that will, after a certain amount of time, will kick in additional speed boosts.

Karts aren’t crippled from extra jolts of speed, though. Like in previous versions of Mario Kart, powersliding around turns enable players to get a nice surge of momentum if they pull them off correctly. Mario Kart Wii changes things around a bit by not requiring players to rapidly steer in the opposite direction of a powerslide to generate the boost power. Instead, the boost power builds automatically during a successful powerslide, and the longer you hold it the more boost you’ll get out of it. As soon as you let go of the powerslide trigger (the button on the back of the steering wheel controller) your kart will jolt forward with a surge of energy.

Of course, the question of “snaking” came up, whether multiplayer games are going to boil down to what’s happened with Mario Kart DS: players simply powerdrifting on every possible straightaway as rapidly as possible. Well, with the new powersliding mechanic it makes it difficult for quick fingers to get more boosts than the racers with slower fingers. So perhaps this is Nintendo’s way of combating the awkward “love it/hate it” snaking mechanic.

Mario Kart Wii also includes a new “trick” mechanic: at the top of a jump, if you flick the wheel upwards, your character will pull off a canned trick animation, and when the kart lands on the ground it’ll jolt with an additional surge of momentum (NES Excitebike style).

Mario Kart Wii will feature at least 32 tracks: 16 old-school from the series’ past, as well as 16 original, made-for-the-Wii courses never seen before.

What about items? Well, you’re going to get the traditional line-up of offensive and defensive weapons. The new items include:

- A POW block that will hover over your players’s head, and you’ll need to jump three times in a specific rhythm to get rid of it…or you’ll spin out.

- A cloud that’ll give your player a boost of speed for as long as you hold it, but it has the side-effect of zapping your kart with lightning which will shrink your kart if you hold onto it for too long. It’s an item that can be passed from kart to kart by bumping into your competition, almost like a shrinking hot potato.

Mario Kart Wii will be 12 player compatible over the internet. Additionally, the game will allow either one or two players per system, so when you jump online, you can play split-screen with a friend and compete. On top of the multiplayer focus, Nintendo will also introduce the “Mario Kart Channel” – currently, this channel is in-game only and not included on the Wii Menu (but that could change), and it’s used for players to check up on rankings and times, to upload and download ghost racers, to download tournaments and weekly challenges (like Mario Kart DS-style missions), and other cool network tidbits.

Mario Kart Wii will put four different profiles in the system save file, which means you can have four different racers on a Wii system…all marked by the Mii character chosen at the creation of the profile. The game has a seriously huge statistics tracking list for each player. The game will record all sorts of fun tidbits: Distance traveled, Total Race and Battle count, how much you’ve used the Wii Wheel, how many tricks you’ve pulled off, favorite character, favorite vehicle, favorite course, and favorite stage. Nintendo WFC friend race win/losses. Ghosts sent and ghosts received. There’s something called “VR Rating” as well as “Battle Rating,” both were set at 5000 points during our demo. It’ll track how many Wi-Fi races you’ve played and your Wi-Fi Battle mode win/loss record. It’ll track how many first place appearances, percentages of times in first place, how many times you hit someone, how many times you’ve been hit, your ghost race wins/losses, and how many tournaments you’ve played. Whew!

And as the statistics suggest, you’ll be able to play Battle Mode over the Wi-Fi Connection network. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a chance to tinker around with Battle Mode or race online during our short hands-on.

We’re sure we’ll be seeing lots more as we get closer to the game’s non-descript “Spring 2008″ release date.

Read More

Around The Net: