Title: Mario Kart Wii

The Good:

I have been playing Mario Kart since the good ol’ days of SNES, N64, GameCube, and Nintendo DS, all of them excellent games. If you haven’t played them, download an emulator and get started! The game-play is short, fast, and executed well. You can jump in and out of races quickly making it easy to fit into your busy lifestyle. The game is especially fun with your friends Grand Prix mode, which is the standard solo races, except allows up to 4 friends and computers to play. Battle Mode where you fight to destroy other peoples balloons, while trying to rack up the most points. Coin mode is when you battle for the most coins, the only way to gather more coins is by destroying your enemy and stealing theirs. The game brings back a lot  of good memories, all those long hours on the SNES. One of the major new additions to the game are tricks, you can wiggle your wii-mote while in the air to do some neat moves. Along with that you can also now pick custom cars, which is a neat new feature. They now offer motorcycles which allow you to do wheelies oooo…! Gone..is the annoying 2nd character in your car from the Mario Kart: Double Dash version (Thank goodness). 

The Bad:

The game has been around for many years, and no storyline of any kind? How did the kart racing come about? Why do we throw strange objects at each other? What is the overall goal of winning these races, other then getting a shiny trophy? Story line definitely leaves much to be desired.  The motion control wheel does not perform as well as the nunchuk/wii mote controller combo, or the classic controller. Not using motion control allows for better control and precision. In other words, the wii wheel is cool, but not worth buying 3 additional ones to allow your friends to steer. What the heck happened to jump, jump now can only be used in manual mode?  I used to love doing that to dodge attacks, jump shortcuts, etc.. extremely disappointing. Two player Grand Prix was my favorite playing with a friend unlocking andbeating all the tracks, this now appears to be gone for you can only do the main Grand Prix quest on your own. The battle modes although fun for a while, still leaves you feeling like something is missing. Additional levels have been added making it the largest collection of battle modes, but there is nothing different about them except you now have computer enemies that are extremely annoying.

Closing:

I would definitely recommend this game to mid-core gamers. It doesn’t take a lot of time to jump in and out to get a few games in. The difficulty level is just right and won’t make you frustrated. It does have its faults, but overall the game is still a great party game for all ages.

Game Length: Many hours of group fun!
Relationship Status: Up up up…
Health Risk: None really
Price: $49.99 New Wii – via Amazon
Final Verdict: 8.0 out of 10

If you agree or disagree with my review, please feel free to leave comments.