Mario Kart Wii Hands-on
We get a sneak peek at what Nintendo will be releasing later this spring.
by Craig Harris
IGN Wii
February 19, 2008 - Ever since Nintendo created the franchise for the Super Nintendo back in 1992, nearly every succeeding Nintendo video game system with the exception of maybe the Virtual Boy and Game Boy Color, natch has had a version of the go-kart racing game. This spring, nearly a year and a half since the system's debut, Nintendo will release Mario Kart Wii, the first motion-sensing rendition of the racer. In anticipation of Game Developers Conference this week, the company invited us to Nintendo's Redwood City office to check out the game in action and see just what's in store for Wii owners that are itching to zoom around with Mario and crew.
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. This steering wheel is nothing more than a plastic shell similar to the Wii Zapper released with Link's Crossbow Training the peripheral uses all of the electronics within the remote. The one button on the back is a physical switch that presses into the B trigger on the remote. The unit has been designed so that it's easy to swap your remote in and out, with a large hole in the back so that the remote can be popped out of the shell. While the remote's in the controller, 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.
Even though the steering wheel comes packed in with the game, you're not forced to use it. Mario Kart Wii will have full support for playing using the Wii remote exclusively, or the Wii Remote with the Nunchuk, or the Classic Controller, or even 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.
The Wii Wheel will come packaged with every copy of Mario Kart Wii.
But even with all the control options at our fingertips, we played Mario Kart Wii exclusively with the steering wheel peripheral exclusively during our short hands-on time with the game. This peripheral did, admittedly, have 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 Wii Remote's rumble, and admittedly the vibration isn't muffled at all when in the steering wheel controller. According to Nintendo, testers seem to favor the steering wheel peripheral over the other options. We'll have to take their word for it we 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.
That's right, it's now a 12-kart competition. 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. No more waggling the stick/control pad back and forth to generate boosts this time around. Whether that's good or bad, it was a little hard to tell in the short spin around a few of the game's courses.
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.
New vehicles include motorcycles that can boost by doing wheelies.
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. And then when you add the drafting mechanic where you'll gain more speed if you hover behind someone for a few seconds, there are plenty of opportunities for earning some serious overdrive in this game.
The player roster will start at 12 drivers. Right from the start the line-up of racers includes: Baby Mario, Baby Peach, Toad, Koopa, Mario, Luigi, Yoshi, Princess Peach, Wario, Waluigi, Donkey Kong, and Bowser. Even though there were no "question blocks" that hinted at hidden players, the menu selection seemed kind of "open," which leads us to believe that there are more characters that'll surface as you unlock them. Nintendo did confirm that you'd be able to race as Mii characters, but this was an option that wasn't available during our play session.
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. In our hands-on, eight old-school courses were unlocked: Peach Beach and Waluigi Stadium from Mario Kart Double Dash on the GameCube, Yoshi Falls and Delfino Square from Mario Kart DS, Mario Raceway and Sherbet Land from Mario Kart 64, Shy Guy Beach from Mario Kart Advance, and Ghost Valley 2 from Super Mario Kart. The tracks have been improved in visuals to match the capabilities of the Wii graphics engine but for the most part they retain their original appearance, right down to the SNES and Game Boy Advance tracks' Mode 7 flat surface, pixilated appearance.
And like the classic set of tracks, only eight original tracks were unlocked right from the start. The list includes: Luigi Circuit, Moo Moo Meadows, Mushroom Gorge, Toad's Factory, Mario Circuit, Coconut Mall, DK Summit, and Wario's Gold Mine. The one we played the most was Coconut Mall, a fast-paced race through a double decker shopping center, complete with outside parking lot (with Mii characters driving in and out of racers' ways) and escalators that'll give your karts an extra jolt of speed
or slow you down depending on if you're going up or down the ones going in the proper direction.
These new courses have tons of shortcuts to discover driving through stores in the Coconut Mall, for example, will lead you to some pretty spectacular jumps.
What about items? Well, you're going to get the traditional line-up of offensive and defensive weapons: green and kart-seeking red turtle shells, speed-boosting mushrooms and slippery banana peels (both individual and three-string kinds), and kart-shrinking lightning bolts. We even saw the power-up that turns your player/kart into Bullet Bill from the Nintendo DS game that puts your kart on a high-energy auto-pilot. A new power-up popped up during our playtest: 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. We're told of a new power-up that didn't show up during our play session: 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.
Using the steering wheel, power-ups are activated by pushing on the D-pad of the Wii Remote, and the direction is specific to what you want to do: need to fire off a turtle shell or throw a banana in front of you? Push up on the pad. Dropping an item behind you is pulled off by pressing down on the D-pad. And if you're keeping an item in storage, watch out: if you get hit by another player, your item will spill out of your possession and onto the track as an active item. If you lose a turtle shell or banana, it'll lay on the track as a hazard
mushrooms will be instant boosts if someone runs into it.
One cool addition is the ability to see (and hear) when a player's sneaking up on you with a power-up. When a turtle shell (or a powered-up racer) is zooming up behind you, you'll see an icon below your kart where the hazard is in relation to you. Your Wii Remote speaker will also start playing a warning sound to alert you to the incoming hazard. This definitely gives players the needed heads-up to race defensively.
During our hands-on, Nintendo also let us see what the development team's working on for one of the game's big features: online play. Mario Kart DS was the first official time the series hopped on the internet for worldwide competition, but Mario Kart Wii will clearly trounce the DS game in its upcoming features set.
First of all, 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.
That's a lot revealed in a single hour of Mario Kart Wii gameplay, but we're sure we'll be seeing lots more as we get closer to the game's non-descript "Spring 2008" release date.
Screenshots
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