Mario Kart Wii [Wii]

After pairing with your competition, you're prompted as to whether or not you want to vote on the next map played. If you say yes, you're taken to your own level select screen (with only the tracks you've unlocked available), and once selected are put in a roulette with every other racer's decision. If you chose random, a "?" shows up unless you're selected, in which case it'll reveal itself as any level from the game. Since there's a roulette style decision it doesn't come down to a straight vote, so even if four people chose Rainbow Road, your selection could win out via a roll of the virtual dice. No level-hogging happening here.

Item appearance (Kart allows for what equates to an aggressive, standard, or passive items set, but not an actual "item edit system") and CC speed are done on the fly once the game begins, but for the record we never saw 50cc, only 100cc, 150cc, and mirror mode. As another quick warning to players, anything goes when you're online – which can be seen in our direct-feed videos posted along with this hands-on – so if you play or watch online matches you're going to see unlocked characters, levels you may not have seen, participate in mirror races, or see content you didn't want spoiled. It's just the way it goes.

As far as online performance goes, Mario Kart Wii can boast a flawless 60 frames per second for single player online, and what appears to be a locked (or mostly locked) 30 frames per second for two player online. The single player affair is where the game really shines though, as the experience is extremely smooth, even going as far as to make people passing by ask whether what they were seeing was on or offline at all. We tried it not only at the summit itself, but also at the San Francisco and LA IGN offices, and the experience turned heads. It's worth a mention that Mario Kart Wii uses the same predictive online system as the DS version, so you'll see racers popping around at times or reacting late to what you're seeing, but it's a sacrifice to save the framerate, so as long as you're expecting it (and understand that the game isn't cheating you) it's still very entertaining. You might fire a red shell, for example, see it sail to a racer ahead of you, and then simply blip off the screen. In reality, they dropped an item or were dragging a defensive "?" block, banana, or shell, but you were too late to the party to see the action take place. It isn't the most realistic system, but it keeps the experience smooth, and you usually have to be looking for it to notice it's happening around you at all. If it didn't bug you on DS, it won't bug you on Wii.

Both the vs. and battle modes were pretty entertaining online, and it's due mostly in part to an overall point system that accumulates as you play. Not only will you be able to show off your new characters and cars in online mode, but there's also two scores to keep an eye on. When kicking off online for the first time, you'll begin with 5,000 vs. points, and 5,000 battle points. Every time you win or lose in an online match, you'll either gain or lose points for that specific event. This is also the system used to match like racers, so you aren't constantly going up against the best racers in the world. Instead, you'll often see players with a few thousand points above you, and a few thousand below. The biggest gap we had was our 6,000 points and a 9,000 point racer. Even then we beat them, and sent them a whopping 200 points lower in a single race. It was pretty satisfying. In vs. races, you simply need to place in the top half to keep your points going. In battle, just be on the winning team. You can more points the better you do as well though, so aim for first, and try to be the best racer/battler even in team scenarios.

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As a few quick mentions, you can also see players that are using the wheel online, and even those that used it so much they unlocked the golden wheel icon. It's a pretty neat little bragging right for those that put time into Nintendo's newest control scheme. As far as online battle goes, balloon and coin modes are random (just like the cc levels) if you're playing worldwide or region games, and teams won't auto-balance for battle, so if there are seven players it'll be a four on three. There's no free-for-all online battle mode though, so those looking for a more hardcore battle experience (either online or off) will be disappointed by that. Another interesting occurrence happened when we tried to leave the game mid-race. All home and menu options are disabled during a race, so the only way to "drop" and save yourself from losing points is to actually turn the whole system off; something we don't see many racers doing. Snaking is also totally removed, and when we tried to race backwards through a map, hitting serious players with shells and forcing them off the road the game actually booted us from the server via an automated, perhaps magical "anti-asshole" system. You may not like the restrictions of friend codes or the lack of manual drifting around corners, but Nintendo is certainly taking steps to make sure one jerk can't ruin the experience for everyone in a game, and that's commendable.

Overall our experience with Mario Kart's online offering was very positive. We've now got an import copy of the game, and are already trying to rise the ranks of online play again with our vs. and battle scores. Right now seems that more players are getting into vs. play rather than battle though (battle games are few and far between), but it's certainly an addictive, extremely entertaining aspect of Kart. If only Smash was as dependable and fun to play online as Kart is…

Be sure to check out our new direct-feed online videos below, and check back soon for more Kart coverage as we near the game's US release.

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