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The finish line is in sight, and so is an easy win in the cartoon racing game Mario Kart Wii. Sweet, sweet victory, almost enough to make up for all those humiliating defeats to gloating 12-year-olds in Super Smash Bros. Brawl … And then a spinning turtle shell takes my little car out. An octopus-like creature squirts black ink all over the screen. Through the Rorschach inkblots – they look like failure – I see a huge cannon shell blast past my stalled go-cart. Right before the checkered flag waves, the shell morphs into a blond princess on a motorcycle. She is first, a dog with a spiky shell is second and I end up sixth.

Sixth! Mario Kart Wii, like life, is not fair.

When it drives into stores this weekend, however, it will be a guaranteed hit on what is now the bestselling next-generation console in Canada, Nintendo's Wii. The tiny white rectangle has surpassed Microsoft's Xbox 360, making up for that system's one-year head start, and it has left Sony's PlayStation 3 in the dust. The difference between these three is summed up by this week's vehicular showdown at game stores: Mario Kart Wii, rated Everyone and goofy as they come, arrives Sunday, and Grand Theft Auto IV, the often mean-spirited, Mature-rated PS3 and 360 game, will give shelves a smack on Tuesday.

Aside from having the family market primarily to itself, most of the Wii's success is down to what are called first-party games, titles that Nintendo creates for its own machines. The Japanese company has a roster of franchises, like Mario Kart, that got their start in the eighties and nineties. Nintendo updates these games for each new hardware system, but it tinkers rather than reinvents. Old hands get updated features for games they grew up with, and new generations of players are carefully brought up to speed.

For its part, Mario Kart follows a pretty simple formula: Players choose a character from Nintendo's long list of animated plumbers, princesses and primates, and then race around tracks that borrow obstacles and backgrounds from the Mushroom Kingdom canon. Being nimble around corners is often not as important as the timely use of items such as flingable shells and banana peels.

This new iteration lets players use their Miis – created characters that live in each Wii – and charmingly throws other Miis into the audience or the trackside statuary. The game adds motorcycles to the cart mix, and it also takes advantage of the Wii remote, a motion-sensing controller, to enable jumps, spins and then turbo boosts when you waggle your hands in the air. The package includes a plastic steering wheel (made for small fingers) that fits around that remote, but the game can also be played with classic or GameCube controllers as well. Along with retro tracks from Mario Kart games past, the varied control schemes help this new instalment tick a lot of nostalgia boxes while still appealing to today's under-12 set.

The single biggest change and improvement comes when you take Mario Kart Wii onto the online highway. Based on the game's early results in Europe and Japan, this is Nintendo's most effective stab yet at allowing players to compete against each other from remote locations. The game doesn't slow down when you go online, even with 11 other players in a race, and it uses a point system to match up drivers with similar skills.

My favourite touches are the “ghosts”: You can download other player's replays – their vehicles and drivers are see-through, hence ghosts – and learn from some of the best Kart drivers around. Ghosts provided by Nintendo developers, including company president Satoru Iwata, are also part of the single-player experience.

As a whole, Mario Kart Wii is a prototypical Nintendo creation. Parents often complain of entertainment products that are designed to wrap around commercials, or be ads in and of themselves, but this game exists completely within Nintendo's fun and trippy universe.

Unfortunately, that also applies to several areas where the game and the system overlap with the real world. You can't choose to buy Mario Kart Wii without the steering wheel if, say, you are sick of plastic peripherals, or if you simply prefer another control system. And to get the most out of its online offerings, you have to turn on the Wii's 24-hour download service, WiiConnect. With so many of these machines, almost 900,000 and counting in Canada, I think WiiConnect wastes a lot of electricity and it should not be a mandatory part of any game's features.

The other issue with Nintendo software dominating its own hardware is that worthy games from other creators can sometimes get lost in the hoopla. For example, Mario Kart will draw the lineups this weekend, but the best Wii game this month may end up being a translation of a 2006 PlayStation 2 title called Okami, which arrived much more quietly last week courtesy of Capcom.

It is a Teen-rated, visually gorgeous game, like a flowing, interactive Japanese painting, and it tells a long, involved story about a legendary wolf spirit who reappears to clean up a polluted landscape. On the PS2, Okami used a conventional controller to apply brush strokes to the screen, but the Wii remote, with its point-and-click abilities, was tailor-made for such applications. Okami fits the Wii perfectly, and it was already a special, important game.

The Wii's popularity has been built on Nintendo's successful past and its ability to draw in new players to games such as Mario Kart with innovative controls; experiences like Okami, however, can send those players – and perhaps a Nintendo executive or two – into the big world outside the Mushroom Kingdom.