Transcription
[Music]
Mario Kart Wii is a fantastic game. People still play it regularly, even though it came out way back in 2008. It must be a pretty polished game to still be active after all these years, right? Absolutely not.
Wheelies in Mario Kart Wii allow you to choose to drive either a cart or a bike. Carts can charge up super mini turbos, which are the same as regular mini turbos, only they last a bit longer. Bikes can only charge up regular mini turbos, but in exchange, they're able to wheelie.
Wheelies are way better than super mini turbos. You can hit a higher top speed while in a wheelie, so as a result, you see loads of wheelies in every world record and every high-level race. You're going straight, wheelie; you're using a mushroom, wheelie; you have a brief couple of frames in between drifts, wheelie.
The only real downfall to wheelies is that you can get wheelie bumps from other players, which slows you down. But it doesn't make up for the fact that wheelies completely break bikes and invalidate carts.
If this wasn't bad enough, inside drift among the vehicles in this game is another issue. They all have one of two drift types: either outside drift or inside drift. Outside drift is like what you see in any other Mario Kart game; it looks somewhat like drifting does in real life. Inside drift, on the other hand, allows you to take turns much tighter in most cases, and it's far easier to use.
On top of that, inside drift is exclusive to bikes, but only some of them. They must have given inside drift to the slower bikes to balance them out with the faster ones, right? No, the fastest bikes for all three weight classes are all inside drifts. The slowest ones are all outside drift. All carts are also outside drift. This makes outside drifting vehicles almost entirely irrelevant outside a few glitch categories.
Speaking of which, shortcuts—most Mario Kart games have some unintended shortcuts here and there. For example, Mario Kart DS has four, Mario Kart Double Dash has eight. Do you know how many Mario Kart Wii has? 23. Mario Kart Wii currently has 23 glitch categories, and that's excluding the ones that haven't been pulled off in real time yet.
If we're factoring in the TAS shortcuts, there is only one of the 32 tracks that doesn't have a glitch. Yet some of these shortcuts save ridiculous amounts of time too, which is why they're called ultra shortcuts. Ultra shortcuts are a special class of shortcut. To give a brief explanation, they cut off large portions of the track, but due to a bug in the game's lap counting system, you can still get them to count the lap if you hit the right checkpoints.
This bug allows for stuff like this to happen—yeah, wall clips. If you position your bike along the very edge of a wall, you can wheelie into it and get bounced up into the air. This allows you to reach heights that would usually be impossible, which are actually used in many different shortcuts.
The off-roader—remember how I said that only bikes are able to wheelie? Well, this is mostly true, but for whatever reason, when this specific cart, the off-roader, gets a boost, the front end of the vehicle lifts up just a little bit. This doesn't have the same speed-boosting effect that wheelies do, but it allows the off-roader to wall clip.
This makes it possible for the off-roader to pull off some shortcuts that other carts can't. For example, the ultra shortcut on SNES Ghost Valley 2, which you just saw. Sadly, the off-roader is so slow, has such bad drift, and is just all around such a terrible vehicle. The ultra shortcut on SNES Ghost Valley 2 actually loses time over the regular cart world record, which uses the Wildwing.
Mushroom pads—outside of custom tracks, you'll only find mushroom pads on Mushroom Gorge. But that doesn't stop them from being broken. When you launch off a mushroom pad, your speed is locked until you hit the ground. This was probably done to make the cave section more functional.
So what if you bounce off a mushroom pad, but instead of hitting the ground, you hit a [Music] wall? And yes, this is used for an ultra shortcut.
Broken wheelies—I've already mentioned that wheelies themselves are broken, but what I haven't mentioned is that there's an actual occurrence in the game known as a broken wheelie. A broken wheelie happens when your vehicle is tilted back and you land on ground that's slanted the opposite way from which your vehicle is tilted. If you hop right when you land on the slanted ground, your vehicle can get thrown backwards.
This is most common on tracks like GC and DK Mountain when you're going down the mountain and you try to start a drift only to have this happen. And yes, you can also use this for an ultra shortcut.
Horizontal walls—there are many instances in all different tracks where there are small walls angled horizontally. For whatever reason, when you hit one in midair, it allows you to pass through regular walls until you hit the ground.
Ground—this is actually used in many different shortcuts. Barrel rolls—a barrel roll is kind of hard to explain. Just know that when you get one, your vehicle turns upside down like this. And do I even need to say it at this point? Of course, you can use this for an ultra shortcut.
Cheat codes—they aren't really a problem anymore due to Wi-Fi banning people and preventing them from trolling in public races. But back in the days of Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection, it wasn't horribly uncommon to find online rooms like this.
This next section consists of random other stuff that doesn't really affect the regular game. Split screen character glitch—in split screen multiplayer, you aren't supposed to have multiple players using the same character. You can get by this by having each player individually select the same character, then going back to the previous menu, then going back to the character select screen.
It also comes with some weird visual effects like this. Bump fest—in this game, the weight of a vehicle affects how far it moves when it gets bumped. Given that there are only a couple of competitively viable vehicles in the game, we hardly see this mechanic come into full effect. But when you put the heaviest and lightest vehicles against each other, you can get some pretty dramatic [Music] results.
Super grinding—this is a bizarre glitch that's only possible with tool assist. By hopping on every other frame, meaning 30 times each second with perfect rapid tempo, you're able to get your vehicle stuck in the ground, building up tons of speed. With enough momentum, you can use this to launch out of the ground, gaining tons of air. And you guessed it, it can be used for ultra shortcuts.
It can also be used for hopping over the blue halfpipe ramps scattered across various tracks. Super hopping—like with super grinding, this is only possible with the use of TAS because of how precise you need to time it. I still don't fully understand how this works, but if you're using an outside drift bike and you hop with perfect timing, you can build up immense speed and glide through tracks way faster than any human with any regular vehicle.
Wario bike super [Music] sliding—honestly, dude, I pretty much don't have anything to say about this. My mind is thoroughly blown. You use the Wario bike, and you get stuck in the ground, and then a bunch of frame-perfect junk, and you go really fast. That's about it.
So I think we're going to end it here. I know there's just tons more stuff I could go through, but it would really take forever to go through all the quirks, glitches, and imbalances in this game.
To wrap this up, is Mario Kart Wii broken? Absolutely. But this doesn't mean it's bad. In fact, the glitches and the imbalance have given this game a lot of its character, and many people, including myself, love to see this game being pushed to its full potential.
So yeah, it's a bit of a broken mess, but it's just about the most fun broken mess there is. Thank you all for watching. I love you guys, and I hope to see you in the next [Music] one.