A total experience and challenge to the most hardcore gamer!
Ok, now for the game.
You'd been cheated and busted in an ilegal race, now there is someone offering you an agreement where you need to recover all the territories from the several gangs by, obviously, racing them. All of this in order to find out who cheated you.
As for the novelties, now you'll be forming a crew with other racers, each one have special abilities and can provide you with several bonus on your career.
For the race types you'll find the classic circuit, sprint, speed-trap and checkpoint race (from MW), and the return of drift which can be very tricky! Also the canyon race where you have to follow closely your rival and pass him/her if possible, and next you'll lead trying to leave your rival in the dust and not be passed at all.
Ok, now the obvious graphics and sound department. I need to tell you that I'm playing in a conventional TV set, but the city and the car models look very polished, and some effects are very nice and complement each other in a great way. I haven't seen the GC version but if that really looks like the Wii one, wow, the GC is far more amazing than I thought!
The soundtrack is not good at all, and is difficult to appreciate it while running as, even configuring the volume, the sound and car effects dominate a lot. It would be nice for this game too allow custom soundtracks like Excite Truck.
Finally the gameplay. There are several control configurations as you may heard, but I really want to focus in just three main variations:
1. Using just the wiimote to drive (buttons facing up), 1 and 2 to accelerate and brake/reverse, and the pad for nitro and ebrake, as weel as other commands.
2. Using the nunchuk to drive (tilting), and wiimote to accelerate/brake/reverse.
3. Using the analog stick to drive and wiimote to accelerate.
I gonna put it like this, my favorite configurations were 1 and 2. The third one is, I think, for the hardcore gamer unwilling to learn a new way to play, but it fails. The other two really can get frustrating and, surely, you'll try to reach for a stick in several moments, but ther won't be need to as soon as you can pass the first races. Thr drift is a whole new challenge, at least from my experience.
Two bad things about the controls, the nunchuk is REQUIRED to several operation in some menus, which can be very annoying if you opt to drive using only the wiimote because you'll have to plug/unplug the nunchuk each time. The second complain is about the menus usage wich, oddly enough, can't be pointed with the wiimote but are operated in amore traditional way like assigning buttons to all selections.
Overall is a great driving experience and very rewarding as you get used to the controls!!