I gave in and bought a Wii.

I played a decent amount of Wii at Alex’s back in the US. While it was fun at first, once the novelty wore off I realized it really lost its appeal to me. That all changed when Smash Brothers came out, followed by Mario Kart. I’ve been itching to play Mario Kart on a console again, and I miss the days of playing Smash with friends in college. Even if the guys here aren’t too keen on Smash/Mario Kart, there’s always online play.

From talking to Alex about his Wii, I realized that as of this writing Mario Kart hasn’t come out in the US yet. It came out here a few weeks ago, accentuated by the fact that I actually bought my copy used.

For those who are curious and haven’t had the chance to try it out yet, the Mario Kart wheel works surprisingly well. Just stick the game on auto-drift and go at it. I used it for the first few 50cc cups, and it worked just fine. Thing is, it wasn’t really as fun as I remembered Mario Kart to be. Due to there really being no tactile feedback (you’re tilting a controller back and forth in the air to steer with the game autodrifting for you), it really didn’t feel like I was doing much.

That all went away when I plugged in the nunchuck and turned on manual drift. Tactile feedback was back, I actually had to drift (and boost) manually, and it was fun again. It’s also extremely comfortable, having a controller in each hand and being able to rest your hands separately wherever you want.

It’s also pretty lame that the Japanese version of the Wii doesn’t come with Wii sports, but to count blessings, it’s still quite cheap compared to the hellishly expensive Australia/New Zealand ones that literally cost nearly twice as much.

The Everybody’s Nintendo Channel is pretty cool, which apparently is also not yet available in the states. You can download DS demos to your Wii then upload them via WiFi to your DS, among demo videos for Wii games and other such things. If I didn’t already have an R4DS I’d say that’s a damn cool feature.

Wii Friend code:
8367-0645-5827-7981

Mario Kart code:
0344-9614-5453

Smash Brothers code:
4339-2845-1087

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