Iwata Asks: Mario Kart Wii
Saturday, April 5th, 2008 at 2:27am by Jake
Iwata is back! This time interviewing Kenichiro Ashida (lead of Wii Wheel project), Hideki Konno (producer), and master, Shigeru Miyamoto (General Producer) for their most recent game, Mario Kart Wii. They jabber on about everything under the sun concerning the MKWii development process including Wii Wheel prototypes, online ranking, understanding Nintendo’s “bridge” titles, why MKWii has motorbikes, and so on. One interesting question brought up was the advantages of the Wii Wheel control scheme vs veteran Gamecube controls.
Konno: “… we came up with a way of addressing that. We provided an incentive for using the Wii Wheel. When you battle someone you don’t know, and in the rankings as well, a Wii Wheel icon appears to the right of your nickname on the screen.”
Miyamoto: “When someone using the GameCube controller gets passed by someone with the Wii Wheel icon, they’re really chagrined. But just like with the Mii Contest Channel for contests, where the number of parts for faces are limited, it’s more fun when there are restraints. When you can get a great time using the wheel, you’ve got a lot of bragging rights.”
Be sure to click over to Wii.com to check out the full interview. Japan and Europe get Mario Kart on April 10th and 11th while US gamers have to wait for April 27th (at least we have Brawl). Personally, I will be using the GC controller all the way. Don’t get me wrong, motion controls are neat and all, but steering with the remote has yet to be “nailed”.
What Mario Kart Wii control scheme will you be using? Wii Wheel, Remote with Nunchuk, Gamecube, or Classic pad?
April 5th, 2008 at 3:42 am
Sorry to say, but I won’t be getting Mario Kart Wii. The speed of the game seems to hover around the slowness of Double Dash, and I’m too unsure about this game. I’m going to Gamefly it to test it. I usually don’t mind change in games, but they’ve effectively killed part of the skill and the fun I had in Mario kart games with the charge meter for boosts.
In Mario Kart 64 I could get a boost on nearly every turn, the same is true with Mario Kart DS, and even for the short period I owned Double Dash. I don’t think boosting was this dramatically changed just to kill snaking. With this game they’re promoting the heck out of its’ Wii Wheel use, I’m sure the motion sensitivity of the Wii controller wasn’t good enough for traditional boosts. Either that or it caused people still new to gaming to simply shake the controller instead of properly turning it causing frustration.
Snaking could have easily been killed by having the game cause a spin or burnout if used too much consecutively in short amount of time. That way it could be used quickly on a small series of curves, but cause any reward it could give on a straight road to be completely lost. They could have also stopped carts from changing their direction during the mini-turbos, that way it would immediately only be effective for turns and pretty much death on straightways. It would of probably would have been called 1, 2, 3 system or something like that. This may become the first Mario Kart game I don’t buy.
April 5th, 2008 at 3:45 am
Ack, I was logged into the wrong name. I found another pc with my old username and settings saved on it. That’s me above.
April 5th, 2008 at 3:59 am
I’ll probably be playing with the wheel, motion worked great in excite truck and I only expect it to be better in mk. I’m really looking forward to this game, but then again I’m in the minority that thinks that besides the battle mode MK64 was crap and that Double Dash is all around very good. I won’t be able to play it till the middle of May though since I’m at school and the Wii is with my family. It’s gonna show up for them from Amazon at release so my little bro will have some time with it before I come home, should be good fun.
April 5th, 2008 at 7:26 am
I’ll try Wiimote at least for a while. I finally played Brawl last night and really did fine with the Nunchuk + Wiimote configuration.
April 5th, 2008 at 8:57 am
I will experiment with the control styles to see which one I like the best. The only difference is that if I bring it online, I have noticed my Wi-Fi gets flaky if I plug in a GC controller. Troubleshooting.
April 5th, 2008 at 10:29 am
I’ll try with wheel, but I will probably stick to the mote-chuk. 1, I think the wheel will be a lot of fun, but not as precise as a full control scheme; and 2, I’m lazy and don’t want to have to take the sleeve off my wiimote pop it into the wheel and then replace when I’m done.
April 5th, 2008 at 11:23 am
Check out the last page in the interview!
“By the way, a new character has joined in from Super Mario Galaxy, so I hope you look forward to it… ”
Who could that be…?
April 5th, 2008 at 12:14 pm
“When you can get a great time using the wheel, you’ve got a lot of bragging rights.”
Is it just me, or does that quote essentially say that the wheel (and thus the wiimote) is inferior to the GC controller?? It’s just like if they said:
“It’s so much harder to perform well with the wiimote than the GC controller. Isn’t that awesome?”
If you ask me, they should have made the actual current generation controller their priority in perfecting. This makes it seem to me like they didn’t.
Oh well, still PUMPED for the game!
April 5th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORING
/laughs
April 5th, 2008 at 9:35 pm
The speed has actually varied a lot but hold up no one has really played this game on the higher speed classes yet. Xplay admits this and it’s easy to see thats what every one is playing. Just like the first mario kart it was slower until your actually got ready for the speed of the high classes. I’m sure this is in there because online play would get real boring. But who knows I’ll wait for it to come out.
April 5th, 2008 at 10:17 pm
I wonder how will Nintendo make a button to break, and go…
April 6th, 2008 at 12:38 am
I suspect I’ll end up using the Wiimote+nunchuck…IF I buy it.
I’m really disappointed over the whole Team-Only Battle Mode thing. That’s just…wow. So incredibly stupid, I don’t know if I’ll really buy it as a result, since Battle Mode is mainly why I play Mario Kart.
April 6th, 2008 at 11:13 am
@ Eric H.
Just because it’s a harder control, doesn’t make it inferior, just more difficult.
I’m going to have to give all the control schemes a chance, I suppose. I did just that with Brawl, but ended up staying with the Gamecube controller, just because I was already used to it. But, like peshue said, Excitetruck had awesome control, albeit it took a while to get used to, and I might be willing to give that more than a chance. I’m going to have to hold off for any criticisms until the game comes out. Then, you can trust me, I will have a list. I always do.
April 6th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
um… I don’t even have Mario Kart DS yet, or Brawl (dodges bullets) so I’m not really worried about this.
April 6th, 2008 at 3:46 pm
paq: That “new character from Galaxy” bit was the highlight of the interview for me.
April 7th, 2008 at 3:07 pm
I think the new character is going to be Rosalina, who shoukld have been in Brawl. SDhe has some neice powers that would have made here a decent unique character. even if she does look like a slightly-less hotter version of Peach. She does look cooler.