I have a very love/hate relationship with Mario Kart Wii.  I love it because it's challenging, fun, and finally has online play.  I hate it because I'm competitive and Nintendo really figured out how to bring out the road rage in me.  I never played the original version on the Super Nintendo, but I played the hell out of MK64 and enjoyed the interesting concept in Double Dash!! on the GameCube.  Now with the Wii version I'm falling in love all over again, and able to take my road rage online and across the world.

Mario Kart Wii is full of different modes that are full of replay value, especially for the hardcore gamer.  In the single player Grand Prix there are 32 courses split up into 8 cups of 4 races each.  Half of the tracks are updated from previous Mario Kart games on the SNES (Ghost Valley 2), N64 (Bowser's Castle), Gameboy Advance (Shy Guy Beach), DS (Delfino Square) and Gamecube (DK Mountain).  That leaves the rest of the tracks brand new to this game and range from easy and simple like Mario and Luigi's Circuit raceways, to annoying like Koopa Cape, to fun in Maple Treeway(which reminds me of Click Clock Wood from Banjo-Kazooie).  Bowser's Castle gets a facelift with interesting level design and of course a redesigned Rainbow Road returns.  If you don't have a wrist strap for your Wii remote already, you'll want one before racing Rainbow Road or you'll have a controller through your TV screen or stuck in the wall.  Some people love Rainbow Road, but I've hated every single one, and this one is especially annoying because of the increased aggressiveness in the AI.  I can't even count how many times I've been ran into and blasted off the side of the track.

The Grand Prix is where most of your time will be spent early on in the game and is where most of the hidden characters and vehicles are unlocked.  There are three engine classes to race, plus the Mirror mode after completing the 50cc, 100cc, and 150cc classes.  The difficulty in 50cc is easy enough that you can mess up several times without having much pressure put on by the CPU characters.  Even if you've played plenty of Mario Kart on previous systems, I wouldn't skip the 50cc class because it's great training wheels to get used to the motion controls using the Wii Wheel peripheral.  The Wii remote fits into the wheel horizontally and you control your vehicle like driving a real vehicle; left to turn left, right to turn right.  The motion control may seem overwhelming at first, but it takes some getting use to and at first may turn a lot of people off.  Mastering the game this way has its rewards and I couldn't play it any other way now. 

New to the game is the addition of motorbikes.  The 100cc class is bikes only.  There are only two bikes to choose from at first:  the standard motocross looking bike and the crotch rocket.  More are unlocked as you complete more cups in the Grand Prix.  Bikes handle quite differently than vehicles and I can see many people having a love/hate relationship with them.  Honestly I'd say that the regular karts are more for beginners and casual gamers while bikes are for more advanced hardcore gamers.  Whether you're playing with bikes or karts, there are several ways of racing and coming out on top.  If you pick one of the sports karts or the slick crotch rocket, you better hope you take every turn perfectly and avoid getting hit because while they're fast and have some tight drifting, the acceleration is similar to getting grandma and grandpa out of their lay-z-boy.

There are actually quite a few choices to make before racing between which characters to choose and which kart or bike you're going to use.  There are three character classes that every character will fall into:  small, medium, and large.   The vehicles are the same per weight class save for color schemes and minor cosmetics per character.  I tend to attract a lot of physical attention while racing, so I usually tend to stick with the larger characters like Waluigi, my favorite character in the game.  You can also race as Baby Mario, Toad, and a Koopa in the small class; Mario, Princess Peach, Luigi in the medium class; and Bowser, Wario, and Waluigi in the heavy class.  There are plenty of characters to choose from, somewhere around 25 or so after unlocking everyone.  Characters and vehicles don't make a HUGE difference, but the smaller weights tend to be harder to control when hit by bigger characters and may have trouble taking turns when there's a bunch of traffic around you.  There was one race where I chose Toad and his baby stroller kart and almost every turn I took in traffic I'd be knocked off the track or out of the group. 

Drifting makes its return in MKWii and a majority of the tracks seem to be designed with it in mind.  I've heard that some people thought that "snaking" was cheating, but it takes skill to use it effectively, especially down the backside of the treacherous DK Summit.  Drifting gives a little mini boost, and each vehicle varies on drifting and the amount of boost given.  So if you're more of a drifter it might be best to pick the karts with higher drifting and boost stats, though other areas like top speed and acceleration will be lower.

Back to the Grand Prix, now you're rated for each cup completed.  You can get a letter rating D through A, or if you've driven exceptionally well or better; a one, two, or three star rating.  Getting these ratings alone could take the completionist gamer a couple months to complete.  I got my first star rating on a cup in the 150cc class, and that was the best I'd ever raced.  I'm going to have to step my game up a whole lot more to get a three star rating on every cup, in every engine class.  Ratings depend on various things like how much time spent in first, how items are utilized, how many boosts, and many more that I don't know of.  In the 50cc class I was usually in first the entire race, rarely missed hitting a perfect turn, and was rarely hit by shells, bananas, and other item hazards and I still had mostly Cs and Ds. 

The Time Trial mode has also been tricked out with lots to do.  Instead of just racing each track and try to set the fastest track time, there are two types of ghost racers to unlock.  The first ghost is pretty easily attainable as long as you don't run into walls or anything, but the Staff Ghosts are perfect runs and a pain in the butt to beat.  I've never paid much attention to any Time Trial modes in games, but I've actually spent quite a few hours in this Time Trial attempting to unlock and beat the Staff Ghosts. 

The big draw about Mario Kart isn't necessarily about the racing.  A lot of it has to do with the course design and use of helpful and destructive items.  Not to mention an addictive multiplayer that gets even better with online play.  There's really no way of denying it; if you think you're the sh*t out of your friends, you're not worth sh*t online.  A lot of the items from past games return like the green and red shells, speed mushrooms, and star power.  Some new items include the Bullet Bill, which transforms you into a Bullet Bill and propels you around the track for a short amount of time, destroying everything in your way.  It's not a bad power up but sometimes it'll transform you back to your character in the middle of a turn and you lose valuable seconds trying to correct the turn.  The Mega Mushroom supersizes you allowing you to run over other racers, and the new blue shell flies up to first place and explodes, which any racer in the radius will also be affected by. 

I've never had as much trouble with the 150cc class as I have in Mario Kart Wii.  Nintendo really stepped up the difficulty.  Only in Mario Kart can you be in the middle of a turn and hit by a shell, ran into by someone with a star power-up, and hit by someone else speeding past you straight off of the course.  If you didn't have any anger problems before playing this game, you may very well lose your cool during certain moments in this game.

Multiplayer has always been the big kicker in Mario Kart games and this one doesn't change.  You can either race against up to 3 other players or race on teams to earn the most points.  The Battle mode returns, but has since lost its appeal from the hundreds of hours I spent playing Battle mode in Mario Kart 64.  There are close to ten different maps to play the traditional balloon game on, including a couple past favorites.  There's also a coin game where the goal is to collect as many coins as possible while avoiding other players attacking you and taking coins from you.  This mode has its moments during offline multiplayer, but online multiplayer it's annoying as hell and I avoid battling online unless I'm super bored. 

The online is my favorite addition to Mario Kart Wii, which I've been hoping for since the Nintendo 64.  There aren't any lobbies or anything to chat and make friends, you just choose whether to race against people worldwide or regional, pick which character and kart or bike you want to use, and race until your heart's content.  It would have been really nice to trash talk because Mario Kart is perfect for that.  You can also battle online, but I'm not a fan of the battling scenarios so I stick to just racing; a battle in itself.  You start with a score of 5000, and you gain or lose points after every race depending on how well you did and what position you placed in.   Once you get up to around 6500 points or more, you're expected to place in 3rd place or better, and so anything worst than that and you're pretty much guaranteed to lose points.  It's unreal the amount of skill some gamers have with Mario Kart.  I consider myself a pretty good gamer, yet I can't break the 7000-point mark for the life of me.  As fast paced as the racing gets in this game, there's surprisingly not very much lag.  You can also join tournaments where you race for your best time on whatever track and submit your best time.  Watching some of the best time videos on the tracks show that players use many track glitches and cheats to achieve the times they do.  Every once in awhile though you'll actually have incredibly skilled players.

The Mario Kart visuals have always been over the top with colorful characters and track designs.  The draw distance even allows you to see other parts of the track and even the racers driving by at the time if you're playing catch up.  The game looks fantastic, and the kart designs and level designs have improved considerably.  The sound effects are top notch, and little things like the sound of a shell about to come up behind you and hit you can make the difference between winning or not.  Each character has their own signature little catch phrases, like my favorite Waluigi quote with his villanous screechy voice "Imma gonna win!!" 

Overall
Nintendo does a lot right with Mario Kart Wii.  There are a ton of unlockable characters, much better variety of kart selections, the tracks are some of the best I've seen in the series, and there's finally online play.  You can play using the nunchuck and controller way, but it's just not that fun.  To get full enjoyment out of the game use the Wii wheel.  If you plan on having friends over a lot or have kids I also recommend picking up more of the Wii Wheels, they're like $10 or $15 at places like Wal-Mart or Amazon.com

Recommended: Yes