If you’re a prospective owner of Mario Kart Wii then Nintendo UK has an update that should slightly turn up your anticipation. It’s no secret that Nintendo’s foray into online features for their games has been lacking in some of the core areas (voice chat? friend codes?). Well, Mario Kart Wii is trying to put a little meat on their bare bones offerings by giving gamers *drum roll* The Mario Kart channel!

What you’ll be able to do on this channel is access a plethora of functions like:

• ranking, which will tell you your track times in comparison to your friends
• sharing your time trials with the rest of the world
• competitions where Nintendo will personally invite players to take part in various challenges
• registering friends for the game and see if they’re online
• allowing you to race the Ghosts of the best players, or take on rival Ghosts of players slightly better than you

But the best part of it all is that, after introducing the Mario Kart disc to your Wii for the first time, you don’t even need to have the game disc in the system to have access to the channel. That’s some “now-gen” stuff right there! To check out a more complete list of features from Mario Kart Wii UK check right here.