Mario Kart Wii

Mario Kart Wii is the entry that opened the series up to the widest audience of all. The box came with a plastic wheel that the Wii Remote slotted into, and suddenly all it took was tilting your hands sideways to steer the kart. Tilt controls are deliberately forgiving, and a beginner gets the hang of it surprisingly fast, while experienced players could stick with a classic controller or the GameCube pad, which remained the more precise choice for fast racing. This dual approach is symptomatic of the whole console.

A new addition was motorbikes alongside the classic karts, each with its own drift behavior, and tricks performed with a flick of the remote when launching off a bump or a jump ramp, which grant a brief burst of speed on landing. The field expanded to twelve racers, which made races considerably wilder, since items fly in from every direction and the standings keep shifting right up to the final corner. Reworked tracks from older entries also made a comeback, so alongside new circuits you race on classics from both handheld and home consoles. Item balance was a subject of debate from the start, since the blue shell and the lightning bolt can turn a race upside down with practically no way to defend against them. Whoever is in first place statistically has the smallest chance of a peaceful finish, which some players loved and others found maddening.

But crucially, this was the first Mario Kart with properly working online play. Online races with twelve people, leaderboards, and ghost data of the best times kept the community playing for years after release, long after Nintendo had already moved on to later entries. Graphically the title is clean and legible, even though the Wii's resolution shows its age today, and the music alternates between upbeat Latin American and jazz themes that stick in your head. Mario Kart Wii became one of the best-selling racing titles ever, and to this day it's the ideal game to switch on when a group of people gets together and nobody feels like explaining anything.