From my perspective, there hasn’t been much to get excited about on the Wii lately. Super Smash Brothers Brawl includes some neat new characters like Olimario/Pikmin and even scored well on IGN, but not being much of a fighter fan, I didn’t think it warranted a full price purchase. After the mediocre Mario Kart for Gamecube, the Wii version hasn’t gotten me excited, either.
Until recently, that is. Mario Kart really lives and dies on it’s tracks and it looks like the Wii version will have some interesting new ones, like Wario’s Gold Mine. It will also include some retro tracks from the DS, Gamecube, N64, and even SNES.
In terms of features, they’ve dropped ’snaking’ which was a method of getting a boost by moving the control stick back and forth while in a power slide. You can still get a boost by doing a power slide, but you don’t have to do the back and forth motion. I think that will help balance things when playing with less experienced players. More importantly, they’ve added an online mode. You can play with up to 11 other racers, but there’s no voice chat option, so you won’t be able to trash talk while doing it. My understanding is that you can have 2 people on each machine while playing online. There’s also some bad changes. Battle mode can be played online, but there’s no option to play free-for-all. You have to play on one of two teams, whether playing online or off. It’s a strange restriction.
Mario Kart Wii releases on Sunday April 27th. There’s a video review available at IGN, as well as the written one. If this sounds like an advertisement, that’s because it is, in a way. I want as many people to race against as possible. I’ll try to pick it up on Sunday and let you know how it is.
As far as other games go, Okami looks interesting. It’s very similar to The Legend of Zelda, but includes a drawing mechanic that fits well with the Wii remote’s IR capabilities. It was released on the PS2 a while back, and was reviewed very well at the time, but I think just about everyone agreed that it should have been released for the Wii. The only thing holding me back from picking it up is that it’s as long as a Zelda game, and the last one took me nearly a year to finish.
Wii Ware games will start being released next month. These are games that have been designed for the Wii, but are available for download through the Wii Shop Channel. They also tend to be shorter, because of the 43MB size limit. Both LostWinds and World of Goo look interesting.
[Joe]
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