So, I played Mario Kart Wii

I like how you described the graphics and UI as "childish" compared to Mario Kart 8

I believe this has to do with the fact having more bland and you could even say quite serious graphics simular to mario kart 8 would show the wii's limitations and imperfections more clearly.

The childish style the game has all around allows for those imperfections to slide under the radar, because that's kinda what defines the style.

We play MKwii because MK8 got rid of everything that made MKWii a great game.

All the karts drift far outside in a C shape, making optimization tedious and annoying in the fact that you have to go out of your way to anticipate how much your kart will go in the direction opposite of your drift.

All the bikes in MKwii had sharper drifting, and were different that karts because of their ability to wheelie at the price of a smaller mini turbo. For MK8 on the other hand, all the bikes have had their wheelies and difting + single boost mechanics taken away, making them behave exactly like karts now (kind of making them not bikes at all, but instead just resins of karts with different stats).

The shortcuts that involve difficult jumps or spindrifts (which is a technique that MK8 doesn't even utilize) are very high-risk high-reward in Mario Kart Wii, but in MK8 all of the shortcuts only save about a half-second of time if that, and are also insanely boring to pull off. All the shortcuts in the game exept for the one in big blue boil down to using a mushroom to drive across dirt (zero-risk small-reward). It's just so boring.

The vehicles in MKwii weren't as plentiful, sure. But every vehicle behaved significantly different from each other, whether it be inside vs outside drifting or off road efficiency or whatever. On the other hand, you play every vehicle in MK8 the exact same way you play every other vehicle. There is only minor stat differences in vehicles despite the fact that there is dozens of them. In MKwii your whole playstyle could change if you were using a different bike or kart, however in MK8 you play every vehicle exactly the same. It feels lazy.

On top of all those things, in MK8 you have to pay for online play, you can pull a coin as an item in 8th place, making a vacuum of mediocre items that do nothing to mix the game up but instead stagnate it, as well as a bunch of other significant details that make it worse than MKwii.

You can have a preference for the much better framerate and graphics, but the reason why MKwii holds up is because the core gameplay is that much significantly better than in MK8, or so people say.

Mario Kart Wii is one of the games that allows many controllers to be used (by default, not by "hacking")

• Wii Remote (with a round piece of plastic called a steering wheel)
• Wii Remote + Nunchuk
• Classic Controller (Pro)
• GameCube Controller.

That is how games on the Wii should have been. Motion controls optional.

I like Mario Kart Wii. It is one of the more modern looking games in my collection and had lots of good hours with it. And is has Mushroom Gorge: YES!

That said, there is something I don't like about Mario Kart Wii an that is the aggressiveness. The AI shoots so many devastating items at you.

Blue shell → BOOM! Accelerate again… lightning bolt → BOOM. Start driving again, get item and… POW → BOOM, lost item.
It is just too much. The only thing they forgot was some kind of meteor strike hammering two dozens of meteors on the players kart for half a minute to make all the AI Karts reach the finish before the player.

D-Pad (GC controller) via tricks could have been done by shoulder button plus direction input. I preferred Wiimote+Nunchuk for the game.

As a competitive Mario Kart Wii player for 10 years, I can tell you the reason why tricking is mapped to the D-Pad. It's because of low tricking, which is a tech strat that every pro MKWii player uses and loves. Low tricking is done by bunnyhopping before you hit the edge of the ramp, and then tricking as your vehicle is descending and touches the very edge of the boost panel. This wouldn't be possible if it was mapped to R, since bunnyhop and trick need to be compeltely different buttons for this tech to work. Also, this is more of a psychological thing, but the most likely reason you want it to be mapped to R is because you've played more modern MK games. For people who are able to take advantage of this tech it saves quite a bit of time in races and allows for much greater control of the vehicle.

We all have our right to opinions, so it's fine that you prefer MK8D. However, it is undeniable that MKWii is an infinitely more skill based game than any successors. I was already competing with high level players after my first few hours playing MK8 and MK8 Deluxe. There is very little tech in them (besides fire hopping in original MK8, that was pretty easy to learn). Those games are far too easy to play well that it gets boring. MKWii is the last MK game that it's hard to play well. The amount of tech you need to know to be able to play at a high level is crazy. If you don't believe me, try watching a clan war with a call and see how much coordination and skill all of these players have. MK8 and MK8D are luck based for the most part. It takes thousands and thousands of hours to be able to compete with high level players on MKWii.

Does this trick allow for two boosts after another at a ramp?

Thank you for clarification but doesn´t the GC controller have 3 and the CC 4 shoulder buttons? Still an odd choice, but I don´t mind the button mapping.

@UltraDolphinRevolution No, it doesn't give you two boosts, but it reduces your air time by allowing you to land earlier. In MKWii, being in the air is the slowest way to move. You go about 15% slower in the air than on the ground in a wheelie. For example, Daisy on the Mach Bike goes 95km/h in a wheelie, while going ~81km/h in the air. By landing earlier you can save (depending on the track and the amount of ramps) over 1 second per lap from doing this. When you're online playing against people you're evenly matched against, 1 second is quite a lot of time to be saving. And yeah maybe but that might be kinda awkward to have it as Z.

cool its fun

I think I know what you mean. I always thought being in the air is slower, but I didn´t have the details (kmh).

I've noticed a funny bit of perhaps unintentional hypocrisy whenever people begin discussing Mario Kart Wii in the context or skill or comparing it to Mario Kart 8.

I don't think many people will disagree with me when I say that Mario Kart has always been a family friendly franchise. In particular, Mario Kart Wii marked the biggest step towards accessibility towards a wider audience the franchise had ever undergone, and arguably ever has, with the introduction of motion controls, a special steering wheel accessory and the ability to use any controller the Wii could provide for. So it's safe to say that Mario Kart Wii was designed to be an accessible game that anyone can enjoy.

Yet there is a prevailing argument that Mario Kart Wii's core gameplay is "objectively" superior to Mario Kart 8, with one of the primary factors being that it requires more skill. Consider this for a moment; Mario Kart Wii strove to make the game as accessible as possible, and only a competitive audience remains for the game in 2020 - in other words, exactly the audience Nintendo wanted to avoid.
The Wii entry's only advantage over later entries is, supposedly, its precision and skill. As Paolosworld laid out for us, stats are more meaningful in MKW and shortcuts are generally higher risk higher reward. But is that not counter to the spirit of Mario Kart? Sure, you can argue that Mario Kart is designed to accommodate all play styles, but now MKW faces the opposite problem of MK8 being too simplified; join any online game as an inexperienced player and you will finish in last place, every single time, until you put time into the game.

Mario Kart Wii, in 2020, painfully lacks variety in skill level - making the game inaccessible for new players - and, ironically, the online mode is a counter-point to any argument about MKW having more varied vehicles as well. The obvious and blatant majority of players use either Funky Kong or Daisy on the same bike. This completely discounts any argument MKW might have about stats being meaningful, as arguing so only bites you in the ass - as the more significant stats in MKW mean that if you hope to compete, you can only use a small portion of the game's already more limited selection of cars and characters.
Indeed, playing online in 2020 will, without fail, matchmake you into a lobby with multiple players using the exact same Funky Kong/Daisy bike combination. How, in any good faith, can you call this more balanced than MK8?

To summarise my issues with MKW (and defence of this article), MKW is now a game dominated by the very audience Nintendo did not want.

- You quite literally can't play the game online worldwide without running into a group of people who take the game too seriously and religiously use Funky Kong or Daisy while taking every shortcut. This makes the game substantially less accessible than Mario Kart 8 and requires any player to practice the game, learn all of the shortcuts and only use the best vehicle/character combinations to avoid finishing last place every time.

- The fact that people will now only use the best vehicles/characters, rather than those they want, also speaks to the flaws in Mario Kart Wii's balancing system and points to MK8 as a much more balanced game. You simply cannot use anything but the most statistically strong combinations to compete in Mario Kart Wii, which is a serious flaw with the game's original aim of having options and accessibility.

There's no issue with playing MKW competitively. But when it is only played competitively, this represents serious flaws in the game and the community that is playing. Perhaps it is nobody's fault in particular that the only players left on a 12-year-old racing game take it seriously, but the problem remains and Mario Kart Wii is now only appealing to a small, niche minority of Mario Kart's designated audience, which makes it fail as a Mario Kart game.

@TheMrIron2

You have a point in saying that most players use the same vehicles in Mario Kart Wii, like any game that's played competitively, there is a tier list. I was just mentioning the variety in MK8 is lackluster in comparison. Characters have minor stat differences while vehicles represent large scale play-style changes, which is why the overwhelming majority of players use the Mach Bike, Flame Runner, Spear, or (rarely) Bullet Bike/Magikruser. With that said, you have to remember that all Mario Kart games favor High-Speed Low-Acceleration vehicles and MK8 is no exception. MKwii still prevails because even the few vehicles that fit the High-Speed Low-Acceleration category are significantly different from each other, unlike MK8.

As for the argument that it works as a standalone but fails as a Mario Kart game, I couldn't agree more. There's a reason why games like SSB Melee and MKwii are shunned by Nintendo, it's because they don't represent the target gameplay or audience for who Nintendo markets for.

My argument wasn't that MKwii is a better Mario Kart game, it was that MK8 took away everything that made MKwii a great game.

If anything, the high-risk high-reward shortcuts made the game more towards what Nintendo was going for, not necessarily optimized or practical, but hype as shit. And practicing a shortcut to improve your racing isn't what I'd call over-the-top-competetivness, although I agree MKwii does posses that.

I feel like the reason why MKwii is filled with only players that take it seriously is because it's an old game, but the only game in the series (besides MKDS to a smaller extent) that has enough potential to keep coming back too. Nobody who plays SSBMelee nowadays plays it casually for these same reasons.

Although MK8 is much less risky in it's game design, and made much better in the spirit of the Mario Kart franchise, MK8 will die as soon as MK9 comes along, while MKwii will continue to outlive them all.

Don’t put it back in the bin yet. You can help Dacotaco with testing the new priiloader

@TheMrIron2
"Only a competitive audience remains for the game in 2020 - in other words, exactly the audience Nintendo wanted to avoid."
This is completely untrue. I go on Wiimmfi and I can't manage to get into rooms with decent players unless I join a friend. The majority of people in worldwides are noobs. There is still a very strong competitive scene, but there is also many players who don't play competitively.

"Balanced" really depends on your definition of balance. In MKWii, the better players will always beat the noobs. That's how videogames are meant to be. If you're a socialist and believe everyone should be equal, then MK8 is more balanced. But if you believe everyone should have a chance to earn their positions at the top of the rankings, then MKWii is more balanced. Before Wiimmfi, the VR system was great and it matched you with people of pretty even skill. In MK8, it's basically just a measure of how much you've played the game, not how good you are. Admittedly Wiimmfi is not quite as balanced as WFC, but look at MK8 when Nintendo shuts down the servers and see how balanced that will be. Items have a much bigger role in MK8 and MK8D, and they matter a lot less in MKWii.

I think most of your arguments can be tossed up to the fact that one of these games is over 12 years old and has servers that are shut down, requiring modding to connect to them, while the other game is less than 6 years old and has free online servers that are still up and running.