No more messing around

This week's been dominated by Wii U, with plenty of news, footage and excitement for Nintendo gamers. After all of the hype we need to relax, kick back, and go shell-crazy in Mario Kart 7, of course. We want to do this with you, so today is the second Nintendo Life Mario Kart 7 Community Event; this time, it's serious.

Last week we asked you to decide which community rooms you wanted to play in for both Grand Prix and Battle matches. Despite offering different item combinations you have spoken, and both rooms will be all-items affairs, as you all clearly love that spiny blue shell. All the more weapons to infuriate each other with.

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Like last time the action will start at the following times, but we expect there to be players around for at least a couple of hours: 9pm UK time, 10pm Central European, 4pm Eastern US, 3pm Central US and 1pm Pacific US. As for the community room details, we're using the same Grand Prix room as last time and an all-new Battle room, but check out the details below.

Grand Prix: NLife All Items — 00-2104-5343-9763

Balloon Battle: NLife Battles — 63-1489-1510-4932

Like last time there'll be some dedicated members of staff there to join in, and we'd like to provide our updated guide, below, telling you how to connect and general tips to avoid annoying fellow members of the community.

In order to get started with some Mario Kart 7 awesomeness with fellow Nintendo Lifers, simply open the game, select Online Multiplayer and then Communities. If you've played Grand Prix races with us before you may have 'NLife All Items' in your list of favourites. If not, select Enter Code and input 00-2104-5343-9763. If you'd prefer to get into some heated Balloon Battles instead, select Enter Code and input 63-1489-1510-4932 to enter the 'NLife Battles' room.

Now, it's common to experience connection problems with Mario Kart 7 communities, and if you don't then we can only imagine that you're hard-wired directly into Nintendo's servers. If you do have problems connecting or receive an error message, make sure your wireless is on and position yourself as closely as possible to your internet router. Please be patient and keep trying, because more often than not you will eventually get in.

There may be more than one room open at once, so remember the basic rules. Play nice, and if someone annoys you settle it like grown-ups... out on the track.

Finally, and we cannot emphasise this enough, DO NOT start the race until the room has filled up or there's agreement with the other players. If there are less than four people in the room, wait for a couple of minutes and the game will automatically start with bots taking the session to four players. If you start races early and against the will of other players, you'll not only become extremely unpopular, but also accumulate bad karma and go in community administrator Desiree Turner's black book. Nobody wants that.

There will be multiple rooms running at once, so some new rooms will need time to fill up with new players, please be patient.

We're really looking forward to more Mario Kart mayhem with you all tonight; we'll be checking the comments below, tweeting extensively on our Twitter page and generally being mischievous in the game itself. See you on the track.