Kart of Darkness

If you've gone remotely near to the interweb, any gaming store, or have a friend who is partially interested in gaming, chances are you've heard of Mario Kart, an edition of which recently was released upon that most childish of gaming platforms, the Nintendo Wii, providing yet another opportunity for obsessive fanboys/girls to vigorously pleasure themselves whilst staring at their favourite overused Nintendo characters, as opposed to filling their computers with gruesome deviantART images.

Fanbase aside, there are scores upon scores of problems with Mario Kart Wii. The actual driving for example. It's really slow feeling, all of the karts handle like shopping trolleys filled with concrete and assorted detritus, and you never get a decent power up when you need one, whereas the computer controlled opponents all use this games equivalent to the hydrogen bomb, so half the races are spent using an irritatingly shrunken kart. The bikes have the same powerup issue, as well as feeling really slow, and handling like an old lady on wheels, but are also impossible to point in a straight line, thus any levels with places to drop into horrible oblivion (for example, most of them) become an exercise is failure.

Feeling irritated at the racing side of the game, I wandered with glee through the menu screens (which are easy to navigate, unlike the tracks) onto the battle game. Which was similar to the racing game, and my chosen character appeared to do battle with nearby walls. Fucking yay. Good time had by all.

Having attempted this for some time, I realised that this game was not designed for single player use! And happily scooted over to the online play where I expected to have a fun time racing and talking with happy, friendly people from all over the world. Which got kicked in the head when I realised that I was racing against A.Hitler from Germany, whos avatar had an officers uniform and a moustache to match. Great. And the same qualms with the racing occured with the online game, except now I was racing a million sad lonely people who play this game so much that they know every track perfectly. That last part mightve just been me sucking, but I swear I'm not alone in the suckage of this game.

-Az