Look out Live, Nintendo’s Wi-Fi Connect is on the up and up. Nintendo UK just released some details on how they are going to handle Mario Kart on their free service.
It’s no surprise that this iteration of Mario Kart has online play since Double Dash was one of the few Nintendo games that had online capabilities on the GameCube.
While a unified friends list does not exist you will be able to build a Mario Kart friends list and play with them. You will also be able to go head-to-head against other players on a continental or global scale. Race and battle modes cap at 12 players, which shouldn’t really surprise anyone, any more than that and there’d be no room for your red shells.
What may surprise you is the Mario Kart Channel. It’s a channel on the Wii that allows you to view rank on a particular course against your friends and other players around the world. All without the game in your machine. The channel will also allow you to upload your time trial ghosts and challenge your friends. From here Nintendo has promised to host challenges for players with different competitions (i.e. go through the cones in under a minute) similar to what we saw in Mario Kart DS
Certainly all of this is a step in the right direction for Nintendo’s service. It’s great to see that Nintendo is focusing on online play at a developer level.
