Note: This is a leaf post. That means it should be read like a leaf post, which for some of you, means
not reading it. It is probably longer than some of your high school english papers, filling up a full four pages in word, single-spaced. It's also kinda rantish. Now that that's out of the way, let's begin, shall we?
I don't see what the huge problem is? It's only a problem to you because Bikes ended up being better. If the removed all the bikes and just made them all karts with a few karts that stacked up to the bikes then would you complain it was 'Mario Kart *insert random uber kart here*? What about if the Karts could wheelie (for God knows why) and bikes couldn't? Then people would whine that bikes were a useless addition.
Mario Kart Wii was a good game. I found the level variety vastly superior to the 64 and GBA games and I felt the Retro tracks were a lot better this time too (giving it the edge over the DS) The big problem with Mario Kart Wii was the reusing of models to extend the cast (Funky and DK have the same animations for christ's sake) and the low budget character graphics. (Most of them don't have fingers...)
I guess my question is: What did Mario Kart Wii do wrong (in your opinion) besides make Bikes too good in the hands of a skilled player?
I thought you knew me better than that, gog. See, I don't care if a couple karts dominate all the others when I play mario kart. I don't care if a single kart dominates all the others, either. I'm not playing the game to play some specific kart that I like, or even a character for that matter, but rather because I like the general gameplay - I enjoyed MK64, MKDD, and MKDS all very much. In MK64, only yoshi, peach, and toad were viable characters (meaning if you had 4 players,
someone was going to be handicapped); in MKDD the only kart really worth using was the barrel train (and yet this is still my favourite MK game); and MKDS had about 4 good karts - egg1, dry bomber, polterguist, and rob bls. MKW has 3-5 good bikes, iirc, so clearly vehicle diversity isn't the problem here.
What
is the problem? The entire
bike mechanic. They threw out one of the biggest defining features of MK games - the MiniTurbo (henceforth, MT), in exchange for the wheelie system. I attribute this largely to MKDS's online, resulting in many scrubs complaining about "snakers" ruining the game. The reality is that "snaking" has existed since the days of MK64, and it's just that the majority of the populace didn't know about it.
I think most players knew about the glitch shortcuts in MK64, but very few actually knew that it was possible to perform something called a "Straight Stretch MiniTurbo" (SSMT) - which I believe the name to be fairly self-explanatory, so I won't insult your intelligence - on many courses to give yourself an extra boost where
most (read: casual) players would simply drive straight until they reached the next corner. This is largely because SSMTs were very difficult in MK64, as you get a rather large amount of angle on your powerslide. SSMTs are ultimately the basis for what would come to be called "snaking" in later games.
In MKDD, "snaking" was fully realized in the form that MKDS players know it as. You could tear up any course, being in almost constant MT. But no one had a problem with this, because of the lack of online and few scrubs being exposed to it. Typically, only those who actually cared enough about the game to get good knew about and were proficient with SSMTs. Despite having only one viable kart, MKDD did not have trouble with vs scenarios because it included 8 lightweight characters, enabling everyone to use the barrel train (or any light kart for that matter) if they so desired. Some vids of top level MKDD in action (note: vids are probably outdated):
Peach Beach 3lap
Dino Dino Jungle 3lap
You're not going to get races anywhere near that exciting in MKW, and those are just time trial runs.
Then came MKDS, the first online MK game, and unfortunately also nintendo's first venture into online play. As a result, it has a fairly poor online mode even for nintendo, but hey... it's better than nothing, right? Well, at the time, yes, it was. It gave players competition without having to turn to time trial sites, which was really all it needed to do. The problem is that the existence of an online mode also meant that scrubs encountered pros far more often than they would in your typical offline game, and when you have a company that is devoted to making their games "family friendly," it essentially sealed MKW's fate to becoming the watered-down MK game that it is.
Despite its online, MKDS did a lot of things "right." It allowed you to play any character with any kart, completely alleviating the problem of restricting players to only a few viable characters; you could play whoever you want, and you still had access to the best karts. It introduced retro courses to the mix, giving players the ability to play on old courses in the new engine, which in most cases lead to a completely new experience, doubling the number of playable courses in the game. It also kept the core game mechanics of MK intact, while merely expanding upon them, which is exactly what you're
supposed to do in a sequel.
Now, fast forward to today, and we have MKW, which pretty much takes what's been established to be set in stone game mechanics that define the MK series and flips it upside down. They
completely screwed up the MT system, making everyone take equally as long to charge one, essentially making them worthless on all except a few select corners, with no where near as much depth as in previous titles. No longer do MTs even really matter. In fact, what
does matter is the comparatively simple task of
being able to line your kart up for the next corner and then pressing up on the +pad. It's taken the excitement and technical prowess of the past MK games and totally killed it. The gaps in player skill are far less apparent, with most of the tracks in the game already close to being maxed out.
Take a look at the Luigi Circuit times for this time trial site:
http://www.mariokart64.com/mkw/coursec.php?cid=0&start=1
Notice something? The times are all incredibly close together. One time in particular stands out:
http://www.mariokart64.com/mkw/profile.php?pid=182
#36 on the list, set only two months after the game was out, and it's only .434 seconds slower than the #1 time set a month ago.
These times were set a year apart from each other.
Or how about that Grumble Volcano?
http://www.mariokart64.com/mkw/coursec.php?cid=22
Yes, those times are real. It's due to a terribly stupid glitch shortcut (SC) that somehow made it into the final product, which you can see here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18D3tgVzQqo
There's another track ruiner on Mushroom Gorge and last I checked up on the game, almost every course had some kind of SC (although not as bad as this). Now, I'm aware that MK64 had SCs on every single track, but to a point, that's excusable. It's an older game, and the sheer fact that it's so loaded with them actually sorta adds to its charm, essentially offering two completely different ways to play the game, as TT competitions were more based on an honours system back then, meaning you could play either SC or non-SC at your leisure. On this, though, it pretty much ruins an otherwise good track, especially when if you're going to compete you don't really have a choice about whether to play SC or non-SC. You
have to play SC, as only the fastest times matter if you're trying for a WR on the MK channel.
And yes, I did just say that GV is an "otherwise good track." I have nothing against the courses in MKW. As a matter of fact, the first time I played it, I was admiring each and every one of them, on how well designed they were. My problems with the game are really just too deeply engraved in its core engine.
The other thing that I hate MKW for is its horribly imbalanced item play. You're probably thinking "why are you playing MK if you don't like items?" It's not that there are items that is the problem. It's the way they're
implemented. Prior to MKW, we never saw anything bigger than an 8 player race, and when playing vs, we only ever saw 4 player matches at the most. Being able to have up to 12 players in a race on MKW wifi may sound epic at first, but ultimately it just means that (if they weren't already)
items become way overpowered, especially when you factor in MKW's general physics.
See, in MKDS, there was only
one really broken item - lightning. Bullet bill was stupid, too, but it wasn't as bad, since it could only royally screw you over if it was activated at the last second or if it hit you. Why am I not mentioning the almighty blue shell, the ultimate anti-competitive equalizer? Well, because blue shells weren't actually
that broken. You could dodge them by performing a MT quickly followed by a jump right before it hit you, completely neutralizing the blue shell while costing you maybe one or two tenths of a second in preparation time. It was only particularly useful if you saved it for the last lap and timed it so that it hit as a player was going over a pit or something, which actually requires that you use it smartly. Red shells were semi-broken if the player they were aimed at was unlucky enough to not get a green shell or banana, but generally weren't too threatening. Stars and mushrooms were useful for going over certain rough terrain, but since you could keep a boost going constantly from MTs, they weren't really valued for their speed bonus, but rather for being good in specific locations, or for their ability to ram another player; on a course like Figure 8 Circuit, mushrooms were one of the weakest items you could get. This is actually something else I could've included in the "what MKDS did right" section: its items were actually relatively balanced.
MKDD also had a fairly balanced item system, specials aside. Having specials like that without being able to select multiples of the same character wasn't too bright of an idea on the design team's part. Pretty much everyone who knew what they were doing rushed to the koopas, bowser jr, and diddy, leaving the toads and the babies as a second string selection. Much like MKDS, the speedboosting items were only useful for certain rough terrain (although arguably slightly moreso, for reasons I don't feel like getting into right now), and
both the blue shell and red shell were dodgeable.
Then we have MKW, which pretty much smashes, chews up, and then vomits back whatever semblance of item balance there once was. We see major regression with the blue shell no longer being dodgeable by anything but a mushroom (or perhaps some incredibly lucky timing going over a zipper (those rainbow speed panels)), which is pretty much nothing short of a miracle if you happen to have one when you need it, considering that with both lightning and the pow block running rampant, you'll probably be using your items as fast as you can. Oh yeah, did I mention that the pow block's frequency makes any strategic holding on of items pretty much worthless? Anyone worth their salt knows how to cancel the spinout, so if you were using it planning to knock your opponents out, you're using the wrong item, but what truly makes it disruptive is the fact that it will wipe out whatever item a player had when they got hit, which weakens the already weak items further (see: green shells/bananas, which were already situational items and primarily used for defense against red shells and occasionally attacking a foe when you got the opportunity), and makes the already powerful items even more so. Furthermore, speedboosting items are more useful than in past games, as they actually give you a boost worth mentioning even when you're not crossing rough terrain; when they're actually used intelligently, it results in fairly large gains. Basically, every item in the game is broken in some way, which when combined with the relatively low skill gaps, serves to create extremely luck-based races.
So yeah... you wanted to know what I think MKW screwed up? You got it. It's pretty hard to screw up a game's core gameplay as bad as they did with MKW, but somehow they managed to do it. I hate MKW about as much as I hate brawl, which should give you a pretty solid idea of how highly I think of it.
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