Nickelodeon Kart Racers 2: Grand Prix

I like to think I'm an RPG enthusiast, but I haven't played one in a very long time.  I just can't bring myself to start a 50+ hour game when I know I won't find time to finish it.  These days I'm more into games that don't require a commitment.  I'm a sucker for two things:  Button masher fighting games, and halfway decent kart racers.  

Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of the latter.  Of course the best kart racer starts with an "M", and requires a Nintendo system to play.  For those of us who don't keep up with the latest Nintendo systems, it's hard to find a kart racer of similar quality.  Impossible, actually.  But until I break down and buy a Switch, I'm making do with what's out there.

You wouldn't think my needs are hard to meet.  All I want is to race vehicles while throwing objects at each other, and the physics need to "feel right".  But that's the hard part, apparently.  The people who design budget kart racers just don't put the same effort into the physics as the people who design NASCAR/Formula-1 racing simulators.  You end up with a lot of games where driving doesn't feel much different than walking in an action game.

But it gets worse.  For a kart racer to really stick with us, my wife and I have to agree on the feel.  We've been playing Beach Buggy Racing for a couple of years now, and we're really itching for something new.  (Shameless plug:  Subscribe to KJ's Twitch Channel where we play at least a couple of times a week.)  We tried Crash Team Racing a while back, but it didn't click for us.

Most recently we tried Nickelodeon Kart Racers 2: Grand Prix.  It's not bad, but it's probably not going to replace Beach Buggy Racing in our household.  At least not yet.  

I never played the first Nickelodeon Kart Racers game, but all the reviews say it was terrible.  The recently-released sequel is considered a vast improvement, but it's still not getting stellar reviews.  

But here's the thing:  The biggest complaint I keep seeing in the reviews?  It rips off Mario Kart too much.  Seriously, why do reviewers assume that everyone already owns a Nintendo system?  I'm desperate for a Mario Kart rip-off.  For me, the plagiarism a feature, not a bug.  

NKR2 is a solid kart racer, despite what other reviewers are saying.  It has more than enough characters and tracks, it's colorful and fun, and you can tell a lot of love went into it.  It has unlockables galore, and every race gives you coins you can use to buy items, so it always feels like you're making progress.

The customization is pretty insane.  Before you race, you pick a driver, which also determines the shape of the car.  Then you pick three members of your pit crew, tires, engine, tailpipes, and paint job.  The first crew member determines your car's special weapon, and the other two crew members give you passive effects, like automatically getting a second item each time you pick up a power up.  There are a whopping 70 pit crew members to pick from, though most of them have to be unlocked.

It has a decent roster.  Not being ten years old, I was afraid that there wouldn't be enough characters I recognized.  However, its roster of 28 drivers spans several decades, including the Ninja Turtles, Ren & Stimpy, CatDog, Hey Arnold, The Last Airbender, Spongebob, Rugrats, and a few others.  Heck, the Ninja Turtles alone are enough for me.

It also has a decent number of tracks.  Eight cups, four tracks each, making thirty-two tracks total.  It has the standard types of tracks you see in every racing game, along with tracks themed after certain cartoons, and a few slime-filled Double Dare style courses.  It also has an arena mode with two arenas, a time trial mode, and a challenge mode where you complete challenges to unlock more goodies.

Some reviewers complained that the graphics aren't up to current gen, but honestly they're as good as I need a kart racer's graphics to be.  It has better graphics than Beach Buggy Racing, which, as I've mentioned, I've been playing weekly for more than two years.  

So it's better than people are giving it credit for.  Still, all is not perfect.  I have three complaints:

1. Drifting.  I'm not the only reviewer to mention this.  NKR2 tries so hard to copy Mario Kart's controls, but it just doesn't get drifting right.

2. Chaos.  Sometimes there's just too much going on.  Brightly animated courses, dripping slime, constant items flying by...  It's like driving through a neon circus.  Trying to figure out what's going on during the more frenetic races makes me feel old.

3. Physics.  It gets it a lot closer than some kart racers, but it still just doesn't "click" for me the way Mario Kart does.  It took me a few races to really get used to how much pressure I needed to put on the stick, and when I went to play Beach Buggy Racing again, it took a few races to unlearn NKR2 so I could get back in the BBR groove.  Also, even on the fastest setting, NKR2 doesn't feel as fast as I would like.

Despite those drawbacks, I still think NKR2 is a solid kart racer, easily worth $15 to $20.  Unfortunately, it's being sold for $40.  So if you like kart racing, I'd say add it to your wishlist, and hope it goes on sale.

Wii U - First Impressions

I got a bonus at work for having been there 15 years (yay me).  Don't worry, we're doing responsible stuff with the majority of it.  But I also wanted to splurge a little and get something just for myself.  So I, uh, got a Wii U.

I know, I know.  By most accounts, the Wii U is the least powerful (and least successful) of the three current generation systems, and I worry that I might be buying a failing product.

But as I get older, I find that I'm just not connecting with modern gamers. I have no interest in the first person shooters that dominate the XBox and Playstation systems. And when I do see an Xbox/Playstation game I actually want (like Alien: Isolation), it's usually also available on the PC.  But these days I'm more into playing retro-style games, and remakes/sequels of the games I played on my NES back in the 80s.

The Wii U is a really nifty system.  The tablet-like controller works very well, and seems like something all systems should do in the future.  They don't necessarily need to come with their own proprietary tablet controller like the Wii U, but I definitely think all future PS and Xbox systems ought to release apps that link the system to your iPad/Android/etc tablet (or even phone). Given how many things we do on video game systems now that don't even involve joysticks (Netflix, etc), controlling them with a tablet is a no-brainer.

A few minor complaints.  Setting up the system took forever, what with downloading and installing updates, and transferring everything from the old Wii to the new system.  And it is surprising that a new system in this day and age doesn't play DVDs or Blu-Rays.  And of course the game selection isn't very good yet, but I can live with that.  I only buy about one console game every six months anyway.

I got the bundle that comes with Mario Kart 8 and Nintendo Land.  Mario Kart has never looked better, and the tracks are extremely creative this time around.  I love the antigravity areas and the pretty underwater effects.  Even the retro tracks have lots of new features to keep things fresh.  The controls are spot-on perfect, and you can still use the wheel controllers from Mario Kart Wii.  It has a robust selection of characters and vehicles, and the DLC makes the selection even better.  I especially love the Legend of Zelda DLC.

Honestly, Mario Kart 8 has quickly become one of my top ten favorite games of all time.  No, better than that; I believe MK8 is one of mankind's top ten greatest achievements.  I'm not sure where it falls on the list, probably somewhere above the telephone but just below the Cheesy Gordita Crunch.

Nintendo Land, on the other hand, isn't exactly knocking my socks off.  Like the Wii's "Wii Sports" disc, Nintendo Land is pretty much a tech demo - a collection of shallow mini games designed to show off what you can do on the Wii U Gamepad.  I've only tried three or four of the games so far, and none of them made me want to play them again.  However, some of the reviews rave about how fun it is as a multiplayer game, so I'll hold off judgement until I've had a chance to play it with others.  I will say that all the tutorials are driving me nuts.  Nintendo Land could very well be called "Tutorial: The Game". 

So far I'm incredibly happy with the system.  If you want to friend me on the Wii U or any other system, here's all my friend codes:

MiiVerse: Fury1958 
3DS: 1306-5310-8353
Steam: 1958Fury
XBox 360: MattAndKJ

Mario Kart Wii

I love my Wii, and I love most of the games I've played for it so far. Of course, the best of the best - Wii Sports, Zelda, Metroid, Mario Galaxy, Super Smash Bros Brawl - are the ones made by Nintendo themselves. They're the only ones who really know how to get the most out of their system. So it's no real surprise that Mario Kart is a hit.

But what a hit... I can honestly say that this is the most fun I've had on the Wii so far. Of course the game is fun, it's Mario Kart - they could have repackaged Mario Kart 64 with some updated graphics and I'd have been happy. And to some extent, that's what they did - there's really not a whole lot of new content here. But the overall package is so enjoyable, that I can't complain.

Well, okay, I can complain. There are a few major flaws that would absolutely cripple it, if it were a non-Nintendo title.

For one thing, I hate the way you lose your items whenever you crash, get hit, spin out, get electrocuted, fall, burn, blink, sneeze, or think about cabbage. In the older Mario Kart games, it was a good strategy to hoarde the best items when you get them, and use them at just the right moment. For example, if you fell off the course but you happened to have a mushroom boost on you, then you could get going again in a flash. In MKW, falling off the course makes you lose that mushroom. It's so easy to lose your items in MKW, that the best strategy is to try to use your items as soon as you get them, before somebody hits you with their items.

And you will get hit often. Which brings me to my next complaint - the newest items are just too powerful. And since it's now 12 racers instead of 8, items are getting used constantly. The way MKW is programmed, the player in the lead gets the worst items, and those bringing up the rear get unblockable psycho-uber WMDs. In theory this is a good idea. In the older MK games, if you found yourself in 8th place in the third lap, then there wasn't much chance you'd place above 7th. With MKW, there's always hope. Now you can go from last to first in the final stretch of the last lap, just by getting the right powerup. And everybody targets the guy in front. So now, when you're the kart in first place, you spend most of your time flattened and shrunk, with a storm cloud over your head, a shell on your ass, and a squid in your face. You're almost better off staying in second for most of the race until the finish line is in sight.

Sometimes it bothers me that I'm not feeling the speed. Often I don't feel like I'm moving any faster than you can run in any given Mario game. And with some of the game's gimmicks (the one where you bounce off mushrooms comes to mind), I almost feel like I'm playing something besides a racing game. Maybe Nintendo needs to make a "Wii Fan" peripheral that blows air in your face, depending on how fast you're going.

Unless I'm missing something, there's seems to be no two-player GP mode. That's too bad, because I always enjoyed unlocking the cups with a friend. You can still race other people, both online and off. But without working towards something, those kind of matches feel a little empty to me. MKW has a lot of new characters and vehicles to unlock, but you have to switch to single player to unlock most of them. And when you unlock things, it only unlocks for the player who unlocks them. So KJ and I will each have to master every GP and time trial by ourselves, if we both want all the characters and vehicles. There's a lot of stuff to unlock (14 characters and 18 vehicles, I think), so doing it twice is a pain. And from what I've read, a few of the characters/karts are going to be a downright pain to unlock.

But despite my complaints, most of the time I'm having too much fun to care. I've seen some mixed reviews of MKW so far... Well, most reviewers have loved it, but a few have made the same complaints I mention above. Also, Nintendo has been accused of just going through the motions for this one, and saying that this is actually a step down from the much more innovative "Mario Kart Double Dash" for the Gamecube. I never played MKDD, so I can't really say if that's true. In fact, I haven't played any of them since the N64 version, so I can only see MKW as a huge improvement.

Sidetrack - Should reviewers base their reviews on previous games in the series? After all, if MKW is only a disappointment to those who played Double Dash, then how many people is that, really? The Wii console has probably outsold the Gamecube several times over by now. This question has bothered me for over a decade. When Capcom released "Super Street Fighter II" for the SNES, EGM gave it a bad review because they were tired of Capcom re-releasing the same game over and over, with only a few improvements. While I agree with the sentiment, I think a game should be reviewed based on its own merits. If a game receives a high score, then a few months later they release a version that's the exact same except for a few improvements, how can it get a lower score? That's letting personal politics get in the way of your review. There might be someone out there who didn't buy the previous versions of the game, who is trying to decide between the second or third version. Then they see that the second version got a better score than the third version, and don't realize that the reviewer was just trying to punish the game company with a bad review.

Another example, and one that never fails to piss me off: When a game is released for a couple of systems I don't own, and gets killer reviews. About a year later, it finally comes to the system I do own, and every review I find says, "Well, it's as good as ever, with a few improvements even. But we've already played it on Systems A and B, and we've moved on. We've beaten it so many times that we're bored with it now, so we're giving it a low score." WTF? Not everybody owns all three current consoles. How about a review for those of us who haven't played it yet? I'm a late adopter. I tend to wait for the prices to come down before I buy something. So I don't mind playing games with last year's graphics. Heck, I still regularly play games with last decade's graphics.

Anyway, sidetrack over, back to MKW. The online mode is a lot of fun. It's hard to say what's different, except that real people are a lot less predictable than computer AI. And knocking someone off the track is somehow more fulfilling when you know there's another human at the controls, than when it's just another bot.

The wheel works a lot better than I thought it would. I personally do better with the classic controller, as it's what I'm used to after all these years. But I have played with the wheel, and it's pretty responsive and a lot of fun. KJ does great with it, and it's all she uses. I just might have to buy a second wheel when I get the cash.

So if you have a Wii, and you've enjoyed any of the Mario Kart series in the past, you should pick this one up. It's flawed but fun. I wouldn't buy a Wii just for this game, but I wouldn't buy a Wii without it.

Anyway, if any of you also have a Wii, and want to add me to your friends list and whatnot, here's my Nintendo codes. Like Smash Bros, Mario Kart Wii requires its own code, different from the Wii console's friend code. Remember that I have to add yours as well, or nothing will happen. So if you put in my codes, you also have to send me yours.

Wii Console Friend Code:
7045 1920 7172 8881

Smash Bros Code:
4468 0854 8798

Mario Kart Wii:
Matt 0387-9165-2538
KJ 1504-6091-8383