Last week Mario Kart Wii online services went away. I am a fan of driving games and have had Mario Kart Wii since it came out in 2008. Most driving games only allow for perfection. If you take a corner badly or have a crash, then that is it. You'll have lost several seconds and have to start again for the position or time [1].
Mario Kart is very forgiving, using goodie boxes scattered throughout the tracks, containing random items. The closer to the front you are the more pointless the goodies are, while being further back gives the good stuff especially items that let you get closer to the front.
That all leads to a nice balance. Mistakes that lose position get you better goodies that let you recover. Players who aren't as good drivers also get opportunities to move up. You get three laps of hectic racing with everyone having a reasonable chance of a good scoring position. And the best driver can come last too.
The single player game, racing against the computer is ok but not that much fun. You need to complete various cups to unlock vehicles and characters. It just isn't that hard nor does the computer offer much challenge.
Online on the other hand is spectacular fun. You race against other people. Unlike the computer they do all sorts of unexpected things as well as cool tactics. This makes every race unpredictable and lets you use your own nefarious tactics. Fortunately Nintendo means there is no interaction with other players unlike the swearing, racism and misogyny reported on other platforms. Heck you can't actually tell it is even people other than they don't behave like the computer does. When playing you'll assign all sorts of motives to actions, be lenient or get revenge.
The engineering is impressive too. The players can be all over the world (and often are) which means it takes a while for position and speed information to be transmitted to all other players. Until later correct information arrives it has to predict where karts are to show you them right now. This is why you can sometimes think you hit or shelled someone but then nothing happens.
Online is what makes this game.
The Wii doesn't do code storage or online code updates, so Nintendo's developers had to get everything right first time for the CD. (By contrast Gran Turismo 6 for PS3 had updates every few days after release.)
There are two areas that Nintendo didn't get right. The first is balance - you expect characters and vehicles to be approximately equal. There are different attributes - eg one vehicle may have a higher speed, but lower acceleration or vice versa. These can still be balanced. Sadly they gave the bikes too much advantage, with the consequence being virtually all highest scoring players using a big player (eg Donkey Kong) on a bike.
The second area is the waiting. Each race is a multi-step process waiting to join a race, waiting for everyone else to join, selecting a track, waiting for everyone else to track select, waiting for the system to pick the track, waiting for everyone to load the track and then finally you get to race. A lot of this waiting could be combined to make the whole process be quicker.
Sadly near the end the distasteful topic of cheats came up. Some people reverse engineered what was going on and could for example shell every player as the race started, or avoid having anything affect them. Despite these "impossible" things happening, Nintendo never seemed to do anything about it.
So what is next? Wii U has a new Mario Kart coming out, but it isn't that good. And it costs over $300 because you have to buy a relatively unpopular system. I'm going to pass, and just remember the several years of multiplayer Mario Kart Wii for the fun it was.
| [1] | A notable exception is Excite Truck where you lose a fraction of a second in a crash, and even get points for how spectacular the crash is. When the game resumes you are still in the thick of the action instead of seconds behind in the dust. |