Last Friday was Nintendo and Game’s Mario Kart Grand Wii event, offering players a chance to play the game a week before release and compete to win a one off Mario Kart themed car. Myself and a few friends went to the GAME in Nottingham to get an sneak peak of whats to come.
The day offered 4 player races on the Luigi Circuit track from the new game using a Wii wheel.
Firstly, I have to say the Wii Wheel is brilliant! They’ve got the controls spot on here. The controllers responsive, but not too sensitive that your constantly re-balancing yourself. Theres a reasonable dead zone in the center allowing you to easily travel straight while small turns let you weave in and out with larger turns allowing you to tightly maneuver corners. The game offers both manual and automatic power sliding for corners. In automatic, you simply turn the wheel pretty much 90 degrees in the direction you want to slide to activate it, while in manual, the slide and hop are activated by a combination of the 1 and 2 buttons. As for the other controls, 2 acts as acceleration, 1 is your brake and B fires any items you currently hold. A oes something but I can’t remember what as I never touched it. The wheel itself feels… well very wheely. It feels quite a substantial piece of kit even in my large hands, but is still incredibly easy to reach all the buttons. The B button has been brought closer to the edge of the wheel allowing easier access to your weapons. the wheel is lso pretty comfortable to hold, and being round it means that you can get a good grip an holding position however big your hands are. Basicly, it makes this fantastic game even better so well done Nintendo!
Now then, onto the actual game. I managed to play 5 or so races during the day and played as Yoshi and DK. The Luigi Circuit track we played was similar to that of the gamecube and DS, offering straights with two large bends with boosts around the outside, but this time the track doesn’t double back on itself.
Wanting to try the new features I used the bikes, which offer a new mechanic to the game, wheelies. When pulling off a wheelie you gain a small boost, but at the expense of any forms of control. This can make it hard to take a corner if you wheelie too long and also leaves you wide open to weapon attacks, but can sneek you ahead if used wisely. When combined with slipstreaming it can become quite a formidable tactic. I also found that the bikes could skim round the insides of a bend pretty well, but suffered from the lack of a proper power slide, which is now exclusive to the Karts. This makes them ideal for the large earlier courses filled with large bends and straights, but I think they may suffer in the later, bendier courses. Still it was great fun to try them out and will offer a new level of stratergy.
As with every new Mario Kart comes a range of new weapons. This game brings back many of the classic weapons such as shells, bananas, mushrooms and stars as well as the blooper and bullet bill from Mario Kart DS. New items include a mega mushroom, which doubles your size, squashing any opponents in the way, a pow block that spirals everyone out of control who do not hop at the right time and a thunder cloud, which acts as a single person thunder bolt which activates about 10-20 seconds, but can be transferred by bumping into another player. These new items seem to work well, apart from the POW block which affected everyone, everytime. This may have just been because none of us knew how to hop though.
To sum up, you need to buy this game. From what I played its as fantastic as any other Mario Kart, and with the promise of 12 player online, 32 tracks and a few subtle hints at a mission mode, its a must have. I cannot wait to try this out properly on Friday and will be posting up a proper review soon.
