Big Wii-l Keep on Turnin’
Monday, April 21, 2008 1:08 AM
You’d think the Wii’s nunchuk and wii
mote would be neat enough for most folks, but new controller peripherals keep popping up.
Most, like the third-party Wii sports packs that turn your wiimote into a baseball bat, tennis racket or golf club, offer no impact to gameplay at all. I guess they’re supposed to look cool but mostly they say ‘I have so much spare cash, I also hire Elliot Spitzer’s call girl to roll my joints in hundred dollar bills just for shits and giggles.’
Sure, the Wii Zapper looked neat, but it failed to be more than a semi-nostalgic throwback to the ol’ Duck Hunt light gun because it only worked well with shooting gallery games which get pretty dull pretty quick.
But late this week, Nintendo is releasing a peripheral that’s attached to a game people actually, y'know, care about—Mario Kart Wii.
The packed-in Wii Wheel is but a plastic shell for the wiimote to pop into—as opposed to, say, the upcoming Wii Fit balance board which promises an entirely unique experience—but it does actually enhance the Kart experience.
Now it would be easy to slam Nintendo for forcing the purchase of the peripheral by bundling it with the game, but unlike the Zapper’s Link’s Crossbow Training, this is at least a real game and clearly Miyamoto wants the wheel to be as integral to this Wii-teration of Mario Kart as the guitar is to Guitar Hero while still allowing hardcore gamers to chose their own controller.
Plus, as we learned from Excite Truck, motion-sensitive steering with a sideways wii-mote feels a little loose so using the Wii Wheel makes it more like driving even if it’s still not as tight as the old analogue controllers.
Fanboys, of course, will hate the wheel—viewing it as a sop to the casual gamer—and they can just go ahead and use the classic, GameCube or the nunchuk for a more traditional control scheme. But while using the steering wheel might require less skill—even Nintendo admits it’s not the best choice for clocking the fastest times—it does add a new, er, twist to a game that otherwise features the same fundamentals (and even some of the same “classic” tracks) it has for the past 15 odd years.
Besides, who cares if the haters hog the high scores, the Wii Wheel = fun.