Mariokart Wii is a blast as a game. Three complaints about the online experience:

1. Friend codes suck. It’s a pain to use, hard to track down your own friends, and then after all is said and done, your friend code only applies to a single game title, so your Mariokart code won’t work with Smash Bros. It would be marginally better if you could manage friend codes on a website, so you could at least copy & paste.

2. If you want to play with friends, you can only play with friends. There’s no practical way to get you and your friend(s) in a public race. Either you have a private, unranked, friend match, or you play with strangers.

2. Voice is everything. I was playing online against strangers, and without voice communications, I felt like I was just playing against some computer AI. I missed the trash talking and such; there’s just something gratifying about taunting the person in the lead with a blue shell for awhile before launching the sucker. When I started playing with a friend, we ended up using our Xbox 360’s voice chat while we were playing. We went into a COD4 private match lobby and just stayed there. If you do the same trick, be sure to press a button on your controller after every race so your controller doesn’t go to sleep.

Anyway, my Mariokart friend code again is 0430-8679-3315, leave your friend code in the comments.

I’m sure glad that Marokart came out when it did. I’m sure XBox live is going to crash and burn tonight with the release of GTA IV.