In this series of articles we'll write about one or more Mario game per day, each representing a different year as part of our Super Mario 30th Anniversary celebrations.
Mario Kart: Double Dash! on GameCube played its part in shaking up home console racing in the iconic karting series, while Mario Kart DS introduced online play in what was just the second portable entry. These were solid foundations for Mario Kart Wii to build upon.
Ultimately it was a release that would introduce a host of new ideas to the franchise, primarily utilising the Wii's features which weren't available on previous hardware. Online play was prominent, including online Battles, but this entry also included its own Wii Channel in which you could view and challenge ghost Time Trial times and check rankings.
This entry continued the trend of its predecessors in boosting the roster, making it the biggest to date in the series. This included Mii support, with these little avatars being classed as light, medium or heavy depending on their settings when created on the system. These have become mainstays in the 3DS and Wii U era, but we shouldn't forget that the Mii concept was new and hugely popular in the Wii era.
Though the doubling up of the GameCube's entry was ditched, Mario Kart Wii did deliver key changes to the racing with the arrival of bikes. These had a very different feel to the karts, of course. Another new feature came in the form of tricks and stunts, which would be executed off jumps.
Of course, the key gimmick of this entry was in the motion controls, tapping in to what was a full-on craze driven by the Wii. Every copy of the game came with a plastic wheel, while third party accessories were everywhere. The tilt controls utilising the wheel - or not, you could also just hold a Remote sideways - certainly made the game accessible to a much broader range of players. They were also pretty darn effective, as evidenced by Nintendo Life alumni Martin Watts being annoying good at winning races in Mario Kart 8 using tilt controls.
While it's easy to write them off as cheap tat, amusingly the design went through a lot of iterations. The following is from the Mario Kart Wii Iwata Asks.
Konno: If we felt anything strange when holding the wheel, we told Ashida-san immediately.
Iwata: You say that you repeated over and over the process of making and testing prototypes. About how many models did you make before you reached the wheel's final form?
Ashida: Probably about 30. With regard to weight, we thought carefully about how many grams would best suit gameplay. When considering durability, we wanted to make something strong using thick materials, but increasing the weight by even 30 grams would have been considered too heavy for some people. We eventually designed it to be as light as possible so people could use it for a long time without getting tired too quickly.
Mario Kart Wii took the market by storm, becoming the second highest seller on the Wii behind Wii Sports. Though it is often criticised for its rubber-banding and a lingering sense that it arguably doesn't - in gameplay terms - stand with the best in the franchise, there's no getting around its extraordinary success. We suspect it'll never lose its place on the podium.
Comments (29)
Double Dash and MK8 are my favs, but MK Wii was pretty good.
This was my favorite MK for years, replacing the still awesome mkdd, until mk8 arrived. Yeah the rubberband AI was annoying but not as worse as MK64 or MKDD.
I personally could never get used to the wheel. Seeing how people would beat me using it online made me feel more embarrassed.
A lot "Gamers" hate this game with nothing but asburd and stupid reasons, but we all know that the real reason why gamers hated this title is because it was popular. The more popular and succesful a game gets, the more hated it becomes by "gamers".
This was the first Mario Kart I played on console since the original. Mario Kart DS was good, but I really wanted a console Mario Kart, and this was really good to me. I beat most of the cups and played online alot. I also used the wheel, which I felt was pretty good. I know some don't like it, but I never had a problem with it personally.
I skipped this MK lolz
@OneBagTravel
I skipped it too. I remeber seeing it on stores and it was a bit expensive since it included the wheel... So I decided to stick with my MK:DD copy
@Minotaurgamer . "The more popular and successful a game gets, the more hated it becomes by "gamers"". Only true if the game is causal friendly, even if stuff like time trials can be really competitive for good players.
This was my favourite MK until 8 came out, 7 might've had a chance had it included a VS. mode. I just really like that there are 12 racers not 8 which IMO leads to better scoring and less frustation (get hit a red shell right before the finish line in 7, 3 people pass you and you get half the points had you not been hit, in 8 you'd get like 2/3 or so of what you would've got).
I beat every cup on every engine class using just the Wii Wheel. So it's very viable.
I did use it for a while on MK8, but I got frustrated at 150CC and decided to see if a regular controller would somehow help... but, there's no cure for item spam.
This is one of the best in the series, tieing MK8 but below the best, being MK64.
I loved the racing mechanics in this one, all though they feel broken and out of control compared to Mario Kart 8's, they were a lot of fun and using the Wii Wheel felt perfect. In Mario Kart 8 using the wheel feels weird so I just use the gamepad.
The online was fantastic, had some of the best online experiences with this game whether Racing or Battling in the series best Battle mode. I was constantly trying to raise my VR and it was really hard against those really good Japanese players.
The tracks were great too some of the best in the series like DK Summit, Cocunut Mall, Koopa Cape, Maple Treeway, and series best Rainbow Road.
One of, if not my favorite Wii game.
@NintyMan Yes, the most aggrevating thing about this game was the fact the bikes were so much better than the Karts. If you used a Kart online, there was a very good chance you would end up anywhere above 6th place.
Every series has its worst entry, and Mario Kart Wii is the bottom for this franchise. Not that it's a BAD game.
This was the game that made me love Mario Kart,I had 64 and DD but never really loved them as the single player got boring quickly.This one however I must have sunk 500 hours into at least,probably way more haha.Wish they had kept the time trial mode and separate channel though,seems like a backwards step with 8.
I had a lot of fun playing this game, especially online. I prefer Mario Kart Double Dash!! and Mario Kart 8 more, but this was a good addition to the Mario Kart series. Bikes were a lot better compared to karts, and I wish that it wasn't so unbalanced. Other than that, I always used the Wii Wheel, and I still use it to play Mario Kart 8.
The one thing I hated the most about Mario Kart Wii was how the rank point system worked. Losing and gaining 100-200 points a match was a very bad idea, in my opinion. I love Mario Kart 8's point system; much easier to understand. Overall though, I loved Mario Kart Wii, it wasn't balanced for sure, but the amount of characters and karts was awesome.
I love this game. This is the game that actually taught me how to play Mario Kart properly.
Why? The Automatic feature. By including that, Nintendo essentially gave every player training wheels with which to get a hang of the basic concept of navigating the tracks.
Personally, I consider this to be one of the weakest entries in the series. Aside from the aforementioned rubberbanding, the basic gameplay was also hampered by lousy item balance and the fact that the bikes aren't as fun to play (and are forced on you the first time through 100cc Grand Prix), yet provide an unfair advantage for those whom can master them. Also, I personally think the turning sensitivity is off on the motion controls and much prefer the traditional controls on the GameCube controller. While it did have an expanded roster, too many of them were lame baby and dry characters. The original set of tracks for this game also didn't measure up very well, in my opinion.
While the introduction of online play was great (although now no longer available), local multiplayer on the other hand was absolutely butchered. You can't race the Grand Prix in multiplayer, and the Battle Mode is awful with how you're limited (both local and online) to timed team matches (still an issue in MK7) and almost all the arenas both original and retro are overly filled with gimmicks and hazards so as to take away any remaining fun from that mode.
That being said, there were some positive developments as well. As mentioned above, its online play was excellent, it has good graphics, the controls maintained their usual excellence, it introduced retro tracks to the console versions, and it also brought the nice additions of tricks, easier powersliding without snaking, and drafting.
Overall though, I have to give the Wii's karting title to "Sonic and Sega's All-Star Racing." This time around, MK8 has fixed many of these flaws (although still has a lackluster Battle Mode), yet Sega has also upped the ante by expanding on their game including superior transformations and of course a good Battle Mode, so I don't think you can go wrong with either title this gen.
I remember my father coming home from a shop and, for no real reason, with Mario Kart Wii. That was probably the most excited my little brother and I have ever been after buying the Wii together (completely with cash money I might add ). Had a lot of fun with this one. Played it online a lot, which worked much better than on the DS, but also enjoyed local multiplayer with friends, as setting up friends on Wii games wasn't all that intuitive...
A fantastic game until the hackers took over as a result of Wii homebrew. I still miss the online to this day as the hackers actually stopped on the last few days. Mario Kart 8 is only the better game because of DLC.
@BulbasaurusRex There is one huge problem with Sonic Transformed (the Wii U version in particular) and that's the online multiplayer being killed off as a result of Mario Kart 8 being released.
What I really like in Mario Kart Wii are the driving mechanics in manual mode, with its speed focused approach: you got great boosts both by releasing Mini-Turbos and by performing tricks, the tricks themselves were spectacular, especially the big ones, and with the wheelie you always had something to do even on straight sections. Of course, inward drifting bikes were a bit crazy with their impossibly good corner-cutting drifts and their overpowered wheelie that gave a boost greater than 1/8 of the actual speed.
The collision with walls and other objects were also quite "interesting" in their behavior.Having the driver screaming all the time was also a nice thing to make races more intense and to give personality to drivers (Yoshi's "Dadayoshi!!!" is memorable, fortunately it's there also in Mario Kart 8, although a bit hidden!). The only gripe I have with it is the frequency of race-stopping items (namely blue shells, lighting and POW blocks), that made the races more fragmented that they should be.
the tracks have very nice ideas and themes (with Toad Factory, Wario's Gold Mine, Coconut Mall, Maple Treeway and Grumble volcano and the tracks that change over time), but their art direction and overall presentation almost seem a step backward with respect to Mario Kart: Double Dash!! and unfortunately many of them also have shortcut glitches, some of them really track-breaking, which is something MKDD managed to avoid in 14 out of 16 tracks (and none of them were really track-breaking, by the way, they were mainly Lakitu-based shortcuts).
i cannot comment on Battle mode, which is something I have not directly tried.
On overall, I find Mario Kart Wii a very fun game, especially when items don't interrupt you.
@BulbasaurusRex You pretty much nailed every point there is to be made about this game, but one: it introduced the greatest abomination in Mario Kart's history, the Lightning Cloud.
Still play this game, to this day. Love trying and sometimes succeeding in pulling off these amazing shortcuts.
This game is how I fell for my wife. I had some friends come over to the dorm, because they wanted to play the Wii. Some girls came with, and they started playing Mario Kart. I left the room, and when I came back, one girl was thrashing all of my friends - and using the motion controls, a feat I thought impossible. She later raced against me and kicked my tail using the Wii wheel again, which is no small feat since I had plenty of experience unlocking everything in the game.It was in those moments that she set sparks on my wheels, and in my heart. Now we play Mario Kart 8 together and she still beats me.
I really don't like MKWii, to me 8, 7 and 64 are the very best of the series.
I think MKWii is one of the most underrated in the series. Even though at the time this game aroud I would've said Double Dash was superior, this did have a more lasting effect on me.
I had a lot of memories with this one, like joining a local tournament over summer break and clearing my way to the top like a storm. When I got to the finals, even the person I was up against didn't think he would win... then the course we did by random was Wario's Gold mine and... damn mine carts.
Though, in the end, I feel 8 enhanced this game in every way possible.
This is my favourite game of all time. Seriously.
My second least favorite MK (after Super Circuit of course). I never owned this game and when I got to play it, it was after playing MK7. Maybe that's why I don't like it that much, the collisions felt horrible and the bikes were broken. There's some nice tracks though
This game is so much better that MK8, in my opinion. I love this game and MKDD
@Dr_Corndog It also spawned one of the best things in MK history. The Mega-Mushroom... How I miss squishing other racers to that frantic tune... Bring it back I say!!!
I never got into this one. I couldn't enjoy the motion controls but the wavebird was perfect. But it felt like far too much of a lack of balance between luck and skill. DS and now 8 have a better balance but this one had far too much luck involved and being pelted by items repeatedly didn't do it for me.
I still play this on my wii, one of my favs
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