Nintendo have today released a new video trailer for Mario Kart Wii.
The first half of the video doesn’t tell us much more than we already know, however the more interesting stuff comes in the second half of the video, which concentrates on the online capabilities of Mario Kart Wii which all we knew about until today was that they existed, and upto 12 players could race at once. Anything beyond that was just an educated guess.
Racing online has the three of the four WiFi options from the DS version - Worldwide, Continental and Friends, and what they do should be obvious from their names. When racing Worldwide (and presumably Continental), as players are selected, their Mii's appear over in the appropriate location on the globe. Even better, the video only takes 5 seconds to find all 12 players, just a little bit quicker than the minutes to find 4 players on the DS version.
Are you feeling spoilt yet? If so, you're going to feel even more spoilt as the video also showed off the Mario Kart Channel.
There are four options here - Friends, Ghost Data, Rankings and Competitions. Ghost Data has two further sub options - Ghost Race and Downloaded Ghost Data List. The Ghost Race option appears to download a random piece of ghost data over WiFi which you then challenge. I'd assume that this is not truly random but instead picks a ghost data that you have a reasonable chance of beating - no chances of a new player getting the best time set worldwide on Rainbow Road.
The Rankings is also divided into two further options - Time Trial and Competitions. Time Trial displays the top ranking players Mii's on a globe not dissimilar to that of the Weather Channel. These can be shown for your continent, or worldwide. The Competitions
We saw the Competition Rankings option in the video however it's contents were not shown. The application of even the tiniest amount of thought would say that the Competition Rankings are related to the Competitions option on the Mario Kart Channel but that leads on to the question of what the Competitions section is
Whilst it should be very easy to determine what exactly competitions are from the name, the real question is how Nintendo will implement it. Will these be competitions set up by Nintendo from time to time and only happen once in a blue moon, or will gamers be able to set up their own competitions? Unfortunately, I suspect that the true situation will be the former given Nintendo's conservative attitude towards WiFi but I do hope that Nintendo do go that extra step
What do you think competitions are going to be then? Head over to our forums and discuss the issue at http://wiirate.co.uk/forums/t/327.aspx.
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