El Vaquero

Issue date: 5/28/08 Section: Entertainment

If you are familiar with the mascot kart racing genre you'll know the Mario Kart series. Not only is it a widely popular series, it's the series that essentially invented the genre with Super Mario Kart back in 1992. Now Nintendo has brought the series to the Wii for the first time with Mario Kart Wii.


While Mario Kart Wii is another decent entry in the series thanks to the excellent Wii Wheel control scheme and well implemented online play, the whole experience is hampered by a major sense of déjà vu. However, many people will probably be able to look past this issue and enjoy Mario Kart Wii.


The basic premise of the Mario Kart series has always been focused on letting people race as their favorite characters from Mario's universe. You can play as characters such as Mario, Luigi, Bowser, Princess Peach, Yoshi, and many more. From a game play perspective, character selection is not as important as the kart selection, with each kart having its own strengths and weaknesses.


By introducing bikes, Mario Kart Wii vastly increases the number of available vehicles compared to the series' previous entries. The bikes don't handle all that differently from the karts, but they can perform wheelies, which gives them slightly increased speed at the cost of steering capability.


Just like previous entries in the series, your main goal in Mario Kart Wii is to finish at as high a ranking as possible while punishing your opponents with power-ups such as red and green shells, the dreaded blue shell, lightning bolts, bananas, and more.


Over-powered power-ups have always been a part of the Mario Kart formula, but Mario Kart Wii takes the term "over-powered" to a whole new level with the bullet bill power-up.


All considered, the bullet bill power-up is a bit too powerful in that it lets a racer get close to the lead in one go, with no racing skill required. The other strong power-ups are at least balanced out by the fact that you do need some racing skill to make the most of them.


Mario Kart Wii offers a healthy number of modes for single-player, multi-player or if you have an online connection for your Wii system.


In the single-player mode, the main attraction is Grand Prix, which has you racing against 11 artificial intelligence opponents (AI) in a preset lineup of four courses. This is the mode to play if you want to achieve most of the game's unlockable content, which includes additional characters, karts and tracks.

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