Sometimes all the complaining about Nintendo's bad track record with adding online support to its Wii games seems overblown, but in the case of Mario Kart Wii, Nintendo appears to have dropped the ball and badly.
While the game doesn't street in North America until April 27th, it hit on the 11th in PAL territories. Within roughly 48 hours, an online glitch had been discovered and exploited, allowing players to post impossibly short completion times to the leaderboards for every track in the game. Courtesy of N-Europe, here's an image of one of the glitched leaderboards before Nintendo reportedly began removing glitched scores on Sunday.
Check behind the cut for more details on the cheating glitch, videos of the cheat in action, and the word on what Nintendo's doing about it.
The glitch is bizarre and surprisingly simple to execute. A player drives one lap of the race, then sits in reverse in front of the finish line. The game has a seizure and grants them a ludicrous completion time at the end of the race. Check out this video to see a cheating player's "ghost" perform the trick. Of course, you should never ever do this, and if you do, you're a first-class dickweed.
Speaking to European site CVG, Nintendo acknowledged the glitch but was vague regarding what they'd do about it.
"We have only been made aware of this in the past two/three days since release," Nintendo told CVG ... "At this stage we are looking into it," the rep added. Reports are claiming that Nintendo has already began deleting the dodgy times from the online leaderboards one at a time.
What is totally unclear at this point is if the glitch is going to be somehow fixed before Mario Kart Wii streets in online-happy North America. Removing scores one at a time could get painful given the sheer volume of new cheaters that could pop into existence on the 27th. I've begun the Herculean task of trying to contact Nintendo for comment, so we'll see what happens.
