I haven’t played Mario Kart since the N64 version, but I’ve been waiting for this ever since I got the Wii. This thread practically has me drooling 
To confirm, the US release date isn’t 'till the 27th. The Euros got this one first (possibly because they STILL don’t have Smash).
I’m old enough to be nostalgic about it (6th grade when it came out), and I still say the N64 version blows it away. It’s everything the SNES version was but bigger and better-looking. I’ve replayed the original recently and there’s places where you can almost literally see the entire track at once while you’re racing. It’s a relic.
Agreed. The original was great… for a game from the mid-90s. There are moments of brillance of course (the Ghost House tracks spring immediately to mind), but it’s the only MK game that feels its age.
Mario Kart 64 holds up today and is as good as it was when it was first released.
We’ve pre-ordered it. I think it’s coming out on the 24th here, nicely timed for a long weekend. My cousins and I grew up playing Mario Kart 64 and we’ll be having them round the day after to play. All our Wii-owning friends have pre-ordered as well, and I’m looking forward to playing with them online.
A little more word on the snaking topic, if anyone hadn’t heard the buzz yet.
Snaking is sort of in Wii, but not. It’s much harder to do, and general consensus is that it doesn’t give much of an edge if any at all, and it’s much better to just play ‘normally’.
Thank God Nintendo really bit that one on the butt.
Not only do we not have SSBB yet, we don’t even have a release date yet. :mad: It obviously takes too long to translate from American to English :rolleyes: *
I’ve been playing MK:Wii for a few days now, it’s probably my favourite so far (although I haven’t player the N64 version much). It takes a while to get used to the controller, but once you do it’s much better than a normal controller IMO. The only thing I don’t like is the POW block weapon, it’s so annoying when it goes off because theres no way to avoid it. At least with a blue shell you can try and outrun it.
*I know its not the English translation thats the problem, it’s translating it for all the other European countries they sell it in, but I still don’t see why they can’t just release the American version over here first.
BIKES.
Bikes are ok. Tricks are easier to pull off, although I find the trick system in ExciteTruck was a bit more intuitive. This bikes handle strangely, and I’m having trouble using them… maybe if I just quit playing as Mario all the time, it’d help.
Also, several stages feel not like Mario Kart circuits, but actual Mario platform levels. Some tracks actually have bouncy mushrooms allowing you to jump over platforms and find shortcuts. A lot of tracks have moving obstacles (think Bowsers castle style thwomps etc), which you can drive past unhindered if you SHOW NO FEAR, as you would in a perfectly timed platform game where nothing hits you if you just fluidly run and jump.
RUBBER BAND FUCK OFF. It’s ridiculous in places. On the last corner of a 100cc race, SIX racers zoomed past me, SIX racers that I’d left eating banana half a track away.
Weapons wise… they all bring a smile to your face the first time you use them, like the BIG mushroom from New Mario Bros on the DS, which transmogrifies you into a BIG mario, allowing you to mill the shit out of all before you. My favourite, however, has to be the three-green-shell powerup, which is best as a Shield, and also… well, nothing brings a smile to your face like goosing the first place leader fifty yards from the finish with an immaculatly placed green shell, eh? It takes SKILL to hit people with green shells. You feel good about it. I take no pleasure from blueshelling someone.
If it were up to me, the weapons would be as follows;
Green Shells (1’s or 3’s)
Red Shells (1’s only)
Bananas (1’s or 5’s)
Mushrooms
Stars
THATS IT
No squids?
The red shells are broken, sure, but for someone like me who has no aim, that’s just about the only offensive weapon (other than the occasionally well-placed banana or fake item block) that I can use.
The only time I can reliably pelt someone with a green shell is when they’re almost right behind me, and I shoot it backwards. ^^;;;;;
Nintendo catered to the scrubs and removed snaking. That’s lame. Hopefully some day a developer will tell people to learn to play instead of just removing the stuff that separates the good players from the bad ones. Way too much of the latter going on.
This is a joke right? No one could possibly think drifting back and forth sideways on a straightaway is the correct way to play a racing game. Right?
Yeah, because God knows that’s how Mario Kart was meant to be played, right? Abusing the drift system and zipping through like that, manipulating it in such a way and justifying it by saying it’s an ‘advanced technique’?
Let me guess:
No items?
Final destination?
Fox only?
Hopefully some day a developer will tell people to stop trying to find ways to manipulate and gain unfair advantage by exploiting normal moves in ways they weren’t supposed to be exploited against everyone and just play the game right.
Though I’m sure they can make a special track just for you ‘good players’ (because the rest of us who don’t/won’t learn to snake apparently suck) where there’s no items and you can snake to your heart’s content.
This ‘bad player’ will keep using his items and having fun the way it’s meant to be plzkthx.
And if you’re so hell-bent on keeping your ‘1337’ snaking skillz to feel superior to the casual gamers, just stick with Mario Kart DS.
Did I miss where someone explained what snaking is?
It’s a little further up, but basically, it’s using the drift boost on straight roads and on not just turns, exploiting it to basically give the driver what is pretty much an infinite Super Mushroom. Players tend to be pretty yay/nay for the use of snaking.
It gets its name because the driver has to ‘snake’ quickly left and right tightly to get the boost to kick in.
If you have a proficient snaker in a race, you’ll know immediately: they’ll be overlapping you and zipping by at a speed that makes you think they’re hacking.
Yeah… the way the power boost worked in MK DS was perfect for the corners and absolutely sucked on the straight-aways. I wish they had gone a little less completely-simplify-this than they did, but it’s probably fairer than just leaving what had been the system for the DS version in place.
Is this game out in the US? Someone at work asked me if I’d played it. When I told her it wasn’t out yet, she told me she played it at a friend’s house. I don’t think she has any friends who are game reviewers or anything like that, so I don’t know how they would have gotten hold of it early.
There are a few options. They could have bought a PAL (European) version of the Wii and then bought a European version of the game… this is unlikely because games usually come out in North America (NTSC formatting) before Europe so I don’t see why any North American would buy a PAL wii.
They could have a Japanese wii and a Japanese version of the game also.
They could also have a modchip installed in their wii which would allow them to play games from other regions which they’ve either purchased or downloaded.
Maybe your friend was mistaken and was playing the gamecube version or the N64 version (which is available on virtual console).
As I recall from the 64 version, the shell to hit the 1st place would strike anyone in the way of it, which happened frequently, and you could avoid it from time to time, or keep a weapon behind you like a shell to block it. If done at an angle, you could sometimes avoid the hit.
I was also told that in double dash, if you did a boost just as the blue shell started to drop down on you, you could avoid the blast. I never actually manged to do it myself, but it might work in the Wii version.