Perhaps the part of my Mario Kart 8 review I'm most excited to announce is this: Mario Kart 8 proves that Nintendo finally, finally truly gets online multiplayer. Mario Kart 8 is the best online multiplayer experience Nintendo has ever offered. And, unlike equivalent offerings on Microsoft and Sony, it's totally free. I have been truly, genuinely impressed with Nintendo's offering here, and I suspect Mario Kart 8 will be a major multiplayer staple for quite some time to come.
The cornerstone to Mario Kart 8 online is its ease of use, something which has generally eluded Nintendo multiplayer in the past. Friend codes are gone, thank goodness, and online matchmaking is pretty seamless, if a bit slower than I would like. Course selection is semi-random: everyone involved picks their favorite among four courses, and the game chooses randomly among those, so tracks with more votes are more likely to get picked. There's also a random option, thank goodness. This saves time, so you don't have to wait for everyone to look through all 32 tracks and pick one, and ensures everyone gets a say.
Racing is seamless and, in my experience, utterly lagless. And the game does a very good job of matching up players through its ranking system. Every player starts at 1000 points, and gains or loses points as they win or lose races. Higher-scoring players are matched with other high scorers and vice-versa. It's a good system, simple but elegant.
Online Battle Mode is terrible, but that's because, as we discussed in Part II, Mario Kart 8 Battle Mode is terrible on the whole. It's quite unfortunate, but so it goes: if you're online, you should be racing, not battling.
Mario Kart 8's online multiplayer has one feature that has become very rare in this day and age: simultaneous online and local multiplayer. That's right. Two players in one room can play online together at the same time. Both have separate scores, separate Miis. It's a great system, and takes a lot of the isolation out of online multiplayer.
Online multiplayer in Mario Kart 8 isn't perfect, though: it's a little lacking in the social features that PlayStation and Xbox owners are used to. There's no voice chat in general multiplayer, for instance, and you can only communicate with other players through a predetermined list of ten or so options (like "Hooray," and "This is my last race" and things like that). It's limiting, but at the same time extremely civil, and I don't mind it too much. I'm racing to race, not to chat. But the social online gamers may find it a bit bare-bones. It doesn't bother me, but your mileage may vary.
Your mileage... get it?
Our review continues in part 4!
