Chris W

Lonesome Traveller

Game: Mario Kart Wii
Developer: Nintendo EAD
Publisher: Nintendo
Rating: 3+ (PEGI), E (ESRB)

Co-operation and competition go hand in hand; working towards something with others, against a common obstacle, gives rise to life’s greatest achievements and rewards. Ultimately it's competition that remains at the heart of all play, but Nintendo, in its renewed energetic rush towards family activities, seems determined to push co-operation and inclusion above all else.

As a result, Mario Kart Wii hinges on those concepts, to the extent that it’s useless without them. Try competing in a grand prix against cpu opponents, and watch as weapon after weapon crashes down on you as you near the final corner, rendering the game savagely unplayable. In the absence of voice chat, raising the number of vehicles to 12 may have seemed like a good idea for fostering amusement online, but once you try challenging for the cups all you’ll find is that the number of racers throwing items at you has increased by over half.

It’s certainly not that collaboration improves everything, either. Replacing battle mode’s tension-driven Last Man Standing premise with teamwork and infinite respawns has left a dull, subdued experience, mechanical and repetitive from start to finish. While Mario Kart has never been about the battles, this must surely be the final nail in its coffin.

On the other hand, time trials, those strangely individual contests, benefit immensely from a little mutual assistance. Encouraged to download - and if you initially ignore the option, forcefully presented with - the ghosts of other, slightly faster racers from around the world, you’ll unwittingly find yourself a part of a vast support network, ruthlessly plundered and shaped from the self-same competitive efforts it engenders. An endless, interactive tutorial, it’s an elegant system that works well.

But to witness the true strength of co-operation, head back to those races and turn on the team option. With weight of numbers no longer against you, what was hopeless alone becomes second nature with an army at your back; what was an unforgiveable last-corner laceration against the individual becomes a gallant war wound to be circumvented and reciprocated by the many. If the freneticism of TimeSplitters' bot-based death matches, the camaraderie of team-based Halo, were to be directed into a vicious, pure-blooded racer, this would be it, for there's a primitive, guttural pleasure in stealing a 1-2-3-4 win against that cheating computer scum, one which binds in the living room just as strongly as it does on the racetrack. Especially, as all agreed, when three of you are reptiles on motorcycles.

Mr Ric Squid

Unlock Your Potential

The Earth is flat. Hitler would never dare to invade Poland. The next REM album will be a return to form. If there is one thing the history of we shoe-clad monkeys has taught us, is that it's pretty easy to get it wrong.

Of course, none of the above howlers quite matches the sheer wrong-headedness of suggesting that games developers should stop including locked content in their games that requires solo play to set free. "It's not fair", people bleat; "I want all my stuff now! Give me the tracks! Give me the maps! Give me the ability to play as a cyborg chimp with a flame-thrower!". If I might offer some advice: stop talking. Otherwise you run the risk of sounding like a sugar-addled tweenager furious that Daddy won't let you pull the legs off insects until after you've done your homework. Except that in this case the homework is playing a fucking video game; it's designed to entertain you, which only adds to the impression of dealing with a spoiled Haribo-stuffed child. There's a reason why locked content is such a spiffing idea; it's because it adds to that entertainment by giving you a sense of accomplishment. It's the same principle as not letting you play Level 10 of a game until you've beaten Level 9 (try objecting to that and see how far it gets you). If you spend your time alone at the console cursing your solitude, you might have picked the wrong game, but I wouldn't really hold that against its designers. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't enjoy knitting, but that doesn't mean I hate sheep.

Yes, playing with your mates is fun, but it's hardly the be-all and end-all. I'm sure Freddie Flintoff thinks cricket matches are more fun that bowling practice, but I bet he knows which of the two sharpens his talent. If you're not interested in learning a new skill, then that's your prerogative, but are you sure this is the pastime for you? I hear you can get Twister pretty cheap now, which comes with a wipe-clean map that means even if you never bothered practising to eat, your constant drooling won't pose too much of a problem.

"But wait," the mewling continues. "Won't these light-shunning hermits become Gods amongst men at their chosen game? How can we puny mortals hope to contend with their vastly superior abilities." Well, maybe you can't. Probably, actually. But why would anyone think that video games should somehow automatically offer a level playing field? You think Alex Ferguson spits out his deep-fried Mars Bar every time he hears the opposing team has had the temerity to get some training in between games? Well, probably he does, but then he's a paranoid Glaswegian, and I'd argue you shouldn't be using him as a role model. People are supposed to have differing degrees of skill, because we don't live in a dictatorship of identical clones, in which Clone A (somewhat hypocritically) puts to death any of the other clones that differs from him. If you don't want your head handed to you, learn the game. Harping on about others putting the work in seems to be based on a ridiculous lowest-common-denominator concept of "fairness". I'm not going to put down my copy of Super Smash Brothers just because you only play it with your house full of mates and your belly full of cheap cider.

In fact, I'm not even sure games should have handicap systems, but many of them do, which is proof that a) games designers are far more forgiving than I am, and b) you've run out of arguments. You might as well whine that a game is too easy on Easy mode, too. Just find the difficulty selection screen, scroll down, and stop bothering me.

Or perhaps you'd rather we did away with locked content entirely? In fact, let's do away with completing games altogether. Instead, every time your untrained jittery fingers condemn your character to a violent death, the screen could light up with the phrase Never mind: all that matters is that you tried your best. Maybe then a furry hand could emerge from the top of your console and pat your head patronisingly, like you're a wounded puppy with learning difficulties. We could move that one step closer to a utopian society in which no-one feels a failure because we've cunningly removed the very idea of success. Life would be bliss.

Well, apart for the marauding guerrilla bands comprised of people who actually bothered to become proficient at something. They'd be a bit of an issue.

I might join them myself, actually: after three years I can take down cyborg chimps with flame-throwers like a demon.

Mr Ric is a multi-limbed freelance writer with a penchant for maths, games and anger, amongst many other things. You can you admire his rants on a wide range of topics at http://squidfromspace.blogspot.com/