Mario Kart Wii, Better Than Double Dash? Yes!
First of all is the amount of items that can help you go from 12th to 2nd. It used to be that if someone was way ahead of the rest of you, you could hope that someone would get a blue shell, and if no one did than you had to try to catch up some other way. Now,not only is there more than one of these types of items but they also appear more frequently if you are in a bad position (places between 10 and 12 will almost definitely get a bullet bill and be shot up by at least 5 places) and less frequently if your in 3rd, 2nd, and 1st. It's almost as if the game makes it so that people who can't play the game enough to beat the grand prix mode are made able to beat expert players with less effort than before.
Another thing that bothered me is how all of the battle modes are all team based. There's not much for me to say on this since it's pretty self explanatory.
Allright now its time to talk about how the game did do better than previous installment.
First and foremost is of course online play. It's pretty awsome to be able to see how you stack up to other racers around the globe and it is probably one of the best organized online games that have come out for the Wii, but again the item distrubution makes it hard to really measure who is better and who lucked out.
Also even though many people liked the tag team aspect of Double Dash (I did too) I don't believe that the game suffers at all after having reverted back to 1 racer per kart.
All in all even with a couple of flaws the game has kept my attention longer than Double Dash ever did, and eventhough the single player modes can get frustrating (damn items!) it's still a blast to play if you've got a couple of race-ready friends to play with.