[quote name='ArthurDigbySellers']My wife and I play nearly every night and she loves to play online. Again, the multiple license file thing sucks since to use the car she likes, she has to play through the cups on her license just to unlock them to play online.[/QUOTE]
I was wondering if one license could unlock everything for the others. That's too bad.
I got to play online for the first time on Friday night. To the good, there was a surprising lack of blue shells and I absolutely buried 'em (200-11). To the bad, I didn't go online to dominate, I went online for tight races and competition. Plus, the track selection was meh: I've never raced N64 Sherbet and DS Yoshi Falls so much in my in life (3 times each IIRC).
The whole experience just reiterated for me that the bitching over snaking in DS was mostly people placing the blame for their performance on everything other than their own poor play. On Friday night, in snaking-free karting with MKW, most of the racing I saw was people who couldn't stick to the fast lines in the track, consistently missed item boxes, and wasted items once they had them.
My point isn't that everyone sucks, it's that SNAKING WASN'T WHY PEOPLE WERE LOSING. Just like in DS, you don't need to snaking to win consistently if everyone else is all over the place and karting stupid. I'm all for people having fun and karting however they like, but why did those people get to dictate the depth of game control?
To be honest, I don't know that the loss of straight-stretch mini turbos is that much of a loss. Maybe Nintendo even planned on including snaking but couldn't work it out with the Wii Wheel. I guess I'm just raising the point because I see it as a concrete, experienced-based example of how snaking never was a "problem" or "sploit". It was just frustrating for people in 4P races to be dominated by the guy in first (who sometimes happened to snake effectively). Now that there are up to 12P races, being dominated by the guy in first isn't such a big deal when there's a lot more other racers to worry about.