Mario Kart Wii - Cheating, Hacks, and Disappointment

I’ve been a huge Nintendo fan for nearly 20 years. I’ve owned every Nintendo console and countless games. So, you shouldn’t be surprised that I (finally) picked up Mario Kart Wii. I even picked up an extra wheel for my wife and the occasional friend to play along.

I played for most of the night of my purchase. The next day, a friend came over and we ended up playing for a solid two hours. It wasn’t until we gave the online play a go that we started to see something funny going on with the game.

The first thing I noticed was that some racers where able to use items before anyone could have possibly gotten an item to use. Straight from the starting line, one racers was tossing fake item boxes left and right.

I also noticed that some racers where absolutely untouchable. The icing on the cake was the most recent Tournament I participated in. In an event that would take a good gamer 90 seconds to complete, the “Top 10″ scores where under 30 seconds. Upon seeing this, I decided some web searches were in order.

After some quick research, I discovered that Mario Kart Wii was all too commonly subject to being hacked. The most common hack being unlimited items which quickly end races and spawn unrealistic time trial times.

Am I surprised that people are hacking a video game to cheat others out of a win? Certainly not. Am I surprised that Nintendo allows this to continue to happen? Yes! Nintendo needs to show that they care about maintaining the integrity of their products and, most of all, show that they care about their customers. Doing anything else shows a weakness that I find disgusting.

I can’t speak for PS3 games, but anyone with a Xbox Live subscription would never see such obvious cheating and hacking persist for very long. Honest gamers, who each paid hundreds of dollars for a console and games, aren’t able to enjoy their games as they were intended. Not only are gamers getting cheated out of a satisfying gaming experience, they are getting cheated out of their hard-earned money.

Nintendo needs to take action against the cheaters and hackers who play online (Ban Hammer, anyone?). If hackers want to monkey around with their games at home, fine, but keep it local and let those who just want to have a good time do just that.

So, I guess I’ll start to get more Xbox games from Gamefly, which you should check out ( ).