Tonight I played a bit more Mario Kart Wii of course, and finished off the cups in the 50cc classification, which opened up the ability to use bikes in those races now. I even got the credit sequence, but I don’t think I’ll put this one on the ‘completed’ page until I’ve beaten at least the 100cc class. I got at least a one star rating in all of the cups except two, where I only got an ‘A’ ranking, and I’ll have to go back and redo those with a faster kart at some point.

Why bother when I’ve already won them? Well, for the unlocks. There are lots and lots of things like characters and karts to unlock, often with very specific criteria, like scoring star rankings on all of the races within a classification. I’ve got a handful of things unlocked so far, and I should be able to unlock the ability to use a Mii as a driver soon, but it’s going to take a while to get most of them…

I also played online for a bit and didn’t do too badly, gaining about 500 points on my online score, which seems to be set up like a ladder system around a median score of 5000. The friend codes still suck, but races against random people are easy to jump into and full of frantic fun.

I also did some time attack runs against the built-in ghosts, which will also eventually lead to unlocking more stuff. Some of the ghosts are pretty tough though, especially after you beat the basic one and unlock the ‘expert’ ghost for that track.