Mario Kart Wii

Mario Kart Wii will include 16 new courses and 16 classic courses from previous Mario Kart games. For the first time ever, players have the option of racing with either karts or motorbikes. Players can also hit the road as their personalized Mii caricatures in addition to the handful of classic Nintendo characters found in the game. True to the series, the game features tons of racing, plenty of power-ups and oodles of objects for players to use to slow down other drivers.


Mario Kart Wii sets out its stall in the last corner of the first track in the Mushroom Cup, Luigi Circuit. There's a chicane, followed by a huge, wide, banked curve, which leads onto the finishing straight. Inside the chicane, off the track, is a ramp. The top of the banked curve is lined with a series of ten or so on-track zip pads.


So, if you have a mushroom item in store, the quickest route around the corner is this. You use the mushroom for a speed boost, short-cutting across the chicane. You hit the ramp and jerk back on the wheel, executing a stunt. This gives you a speed boost when you hit the track again. Then you hit the first zip pad, and get a speed boost. You hop and slide, counter-steering with the wheel, sparks flying, first blue, then yellow. You hold the slide as the zip pads give you speed boost after speed boost after speed boost. You hit the straight and come out of the slide - which gives you a speed boost.


If you're really lucky, you'll have been doing all this in line behind another racer, slipstreaming granting a speed boost. If you're on a motorbike, you can then pull a wheelie down the straight. This gives you... you get the idea.


With Mario Kart Wii, Nintendo seems to be making a world record attempt for the greatest number of boost mechanics in a single racing game. We haven't even mentioned the half-pipe track designs, where there's a strip of vertical boost along the lip of the track that sends your kart up in the air in a soaring, Tony Hawk-style parabola.


Mario Kart Wii has an obsession with ever-escalating speed that rivals the Burnout series, or even WipEout. You're constantly searching every inch of track for opportunities to go faster amid the classic confusion and slapstick chaos for which Mario Kart is known - albeit ramped up by the expansion of the field from eight to twelve racers. It's intense, addictive and powerfully exhilarating. It blends cartoon foolishness with a viciously random cruel streak. But beneath both is a deep, precise, and technically rewarding racing game that you can sink hours into in time trial alone. In other words, it's classic Mario Kart.


Well - mostly. Mario Kart Wii is very similar to its immediate predecessor, Mario Kart DS, considered by most to be the strongest Mario Kart since N64 days at least. But it has made a couple of controversial additions to the fifteen-year-old formula: stunts and motorbikes. In an odd coincidence, these were also the additions made by a very different racing game - Project Gotham Racing 4 - last year, and they were initially met with scepticism in both cases. In both cases, the scepticism turns out to be unfounded. If anything, Mario Kart Wii's stunts and bikes are better integrated with the game than PGR4's were.

Grand Theft Auto IV

Reviews
Rockstar's approach to showing the new GTA to the world is going to be different than before. "We gave a lot of access and a lot of information away about San Andreas in the months leading up to its release, to a point where, on reflection, we thought perhaps we didn't leave enough for the gamers to discover themselves. With GTA4 our approach is going to be slightly different - we're going to make sure there are surprises."


Grand Theft Auto IV is a new story about an immigrant arriving in Rockstar's version of New York, Liberty City, how this outsider exists and survives in an alien, foreign world, and how that world reacts to and interacts with the player. "With GTA4 we do believe we're creating something wholly new and unique."


The game's main protagonist, Niko Bellic, is an Eastern European that arrives in Liberty City on a boat. He's led a pretty dark, difficult and shady life and gets lured to Liberty City by his cousin Roman who says he'll have a chance to live the American Dream. Roman tempts him with promises of extreme wealth and houses with women and Jacuzzis - but it turns out to be a pack of lies. The truth is, Roman's got a fairly humble taxi depot business, he's got mounting debts, and he's attracting a lot of hostile attention from some unsavoury characters. He's not walking into the life of riches and glamour he was promised - and pretty soon, players will start to learn that his past is going to catch up with him.


So, is this new GTA storyline still going to be one main story thread? After all, for some GTA critics, it was always something of a stumbling block in previous games that things were presented as being all about freedom, yet, if you want to actually play through the game, you pretty much have to follow one storyline that then funnels you down one path - there aren't multiple endings or anything like that.


Cars driving past really sound - and feel - like they're going past you, as the engine rumbles and the car's blaring music fades in and out. If a car suddenly brakes nearby, you don't need to see it to know it happened. The varying volume and intensity of car horns and the constant hum of traffic noise is transfixing to listen to, and the frequent deafening rattle of trains hurtling through the subway honestly make this city sound as real as the ones we live and breathe in. Even the surfaces you walk on - regular sidewalk or a pebbly area - sound different and real.

The animation, in general, has been massively improved from the previous games. Niko's analogue-driven walking animation is fluid and real at different paces, and the standing still "waiting" animation that every game character has had since forever is in there. When he (or other pedestrians) get hit by a car, the crumpling of the body is convincing and quite alarming. "He's actually got a skeleton now," Brown points out. Approaching a car, Niko first attempts to get the door open with a couple of tugs. Finding it locked, he repositions himself to smash the window and open the door to get in - it's all really nicely animated. There'll be plenty of new car-jacking and hot-wiring animations, according to Rockstar.


And in general, the variety in traffic on the road - vehicle type and style - is such that you can see a whole lot more than just the basic make and colour of each car, like you put up with from a last-gen GTA. Traffic looks pretty much like it does in a real city.


GTA has always had the best cruise and chase driving mechanics around, and Rockstar says it's now further enhanced by utilising a brand new "vehicle physics package" - the idea is that it subtly improves the handling by adding a little bit more control and weight, while vehicles will also respond perfectly to the undulations in the road - indeed, we can see every tiny bump and shake of the car as it passes over this city back street we're slowly cruising down.


Summary
For Niko Bellic, fresh off the boat from Europe, it is the hope he can escape his past. For his cousin, Roman, it is the vision that together they can find fortune in Liberty City, gateway to the land of opportunity. As they slip into debt and are dragged into a criminal underworld by a series of shysters, thieves and sociopaths, they discover that the reality is very different from the dream in a city that worships money and status, and is heaven for those who have them and a living nightmare for those who don't.