Mario Kart Wii

Speaking of video games, as I was yesterday, the wife and I bought Mario Kart Wii at Costco (only $43! Woo!) It comes with the steering wheel attachment, which I decided is also going to make it easier to play the vintage games on Virtual Console–the WiiMote is otherwise a little small in my monstrous caveman hands, so having the Wheel to bulk up the controller will actually make it more comfortable to play.

Anyway, at first I thought, Oh, Awesome! The Wheel and motion-sensitive stuff really does make it easier to play the bleeping game. Analog-stick-as-steering-control is always either too sensitive or not sensitive enough, and the Wheel allows for a far more intuitive control, which is of course the Wii’s shtick.

And then I tried the blankey-blank motorcycles. They’re new to the latest version, incidentally, and at the beginning is the only way to play the 100cc level, until you beat it all and unlock the karts. The motorcycles are far more sensitive in the steering than the karts, especially when you do the drifting thing they introduced in Double Dash, which gives you the sparks and the speed boost and all that. In two nights of playing, I have steered myself into so many bleeping walls it’s unreal.

What’s cool, however, is the tricks. Every time you hit a jump of any kind, you shake the controller and your guy will do a little trick, and they’ve put in a number of half-pipe type sections of course so that you can jump high up one side, do some spin-o-rama move, and come down with a super speed boost.

And sometimes, sometimes coming down from one of those doesn’t send you flying off into some unfathomable abyss. And then it’s quite awesome.

Ironically, as much as the Wii has been billed as a party console, this is the first game I own for it that I’m really geeked about getting people over to play, or trying to play online. First, however, we need to get another WiiMote and wheel thingy so the wife and I can race each other.

Crossposted with klech.net