Thursday, March 06, 2008
New features, new channel, new game.
"Super Smash Bros. Brawl may be stealing all the thunder right now, but Mario Kart Wii is just a few months away, and Nintendo is starting to loosen their notoriously iron-gripped information blackout. Just this week, extensive new info on Mario Kart Wii's online features have popped up on Nintendo's UK website (via Joystiq), detailing the game's modes and the separate Mario Kart Channel.
For starters, Mario Kart Wii will allow up to two players on the same Wii to play others online. As with many online DS games, you'll choose to play against random opponents either Worldwide or Continental, or to play against Friends whose friend codes you've entered. In a neat touch, when you join a room with your friends, you'll see their Miis representing their location in the world on a globe similar to that of the Wii's Forecast Channel. In a not so neat touch, the site again reaffirms you'll only be able to chat with predefined messages. To summarize, this means Nintendo trusts you enough to know exactly where in the world your friends are, but not enough to potentially write a swear word in their online presence.
A copy of Mario Kart Wii will allow you to install the Mario Kart Channel, which can be accessed even when the game disc isn't in your system. Along with standard features like seeing which of your friends are online and keeping up with their rankings on leaderboards for every track, the Mario Kart Channel will also give you the option of downloading Ghosts and racing against them offline. You can download Ghosts of your friends' runs if they choose to upload them, or Ghosts of rivals -- players throughout the world whose best runs on a track are only slightly better than yours. You'll of course also be able to upload Ghost runs of your own. And lastly, the Mario Kart Channel will host Competitions, which are special race challenges you can download that are similar to the Missions in Mario Kart DS.
For all the jokes and criticisms levied at Nintendo for their lackluster online offerings, there really isn't anything crucially missing here that you'd find in the standard Xbox Live- or PSN-enabled title. Except, of course, for the self-censored communication limitations. But hey -- baby steps, right? "
--1up
Posted by Haze on 03/06 at 02:09 PM
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