As you race your boost meter slowly fills up, and every time it does one of the four boost lights fire up and the meter resets. By pressing the B button your racer receives a boost of speed and one of the lamps is extinguished. Pressing B while already boosting uses another light but makes the boost three times as strong, to the point that if you store and use all four lights at once you go into zone mode where you drive at breakneck speeds and a form of weak auto drive kicks in as otherwise it would be nearly impossible to control. Boost power can also be diverted into restoring your car’s health by pressing the A button, at the expense of a boost light to fill up half of the health bar.

An incredibly welcome feature is the ability to play through the championships in the multiplayer mode, not only ones already unlocked in the single player but also playing through and unlocking new championships and racers as well. While in multiplayer mode the ally/rival system is no longer present, leaving the two players to decide what they are to each other themselves, but the rest of the game is left fully intact. The entire list of championships can be progressively played though and unlocked without ever having to play single player if you and a friend wish to do so together—a nice touch.

The game borrows most of its graphical style from the movie for better or worse, complete with dizzying tracks that make use of ramps, loops, and twists. The color palette is made up of a lot of neon hues, especially the track itself. While artistically attractive this design also makes obstacles and boost pads often harder to see, or worse yet distinguish from each other, than they should be. The cars themselves are detailed after their individual drivers, and spin and flip with grace that matches what images the term car-fu brings to mind.

If there is one area that the game suffers in it is on its audio. While the overly-dramatic soundtrack at first fits the action it suffers from the fact that none of the songs differ from the theme. Even on tracks that are atypically serene in their style complete with palm trees you are still racing alongside “blaring dramatic music track #5”. The racers all have a handful of lines that they say as they race, and have enough to the point that they are never overused but at the same time they are delivered with exactly the caliber of voice acting that is expected with lines such as “You race like you are ugly.”

It is unfortunate that the movie performed as poorly as it did, as the game is one of the better arcade-style racing games that have come out in a long time. The game has echoes of F-zero in its style and use of car-fu, essentially beating Nintendo itself to the punch of delivering high-speed futuristic racing to the Wii. Its status as a movie game is made a moot point, as not only does it stand well on its own but actually further fleshes out the arcade racing genre with its multiplayer championship progression and entertaining car-fu attacks. It has a few flaws, including a lack of online play, but ultimately it is one of the better racing games found in the Wii to date. Go Speed Racer. Go, indeed.

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