Handicapped Mario Kart Wii tourney

First of all, keep in mind that Mario Kart already has a bit of built-in handicapping. The worse you are doing in the standings, the higher quality of items the game will give you. Doing well means you will only get weak items, and being in first place also makes you vulnerable to the blue shell.

As for further handicapping, at the end of a race, the only thing that determines how well you did is the amount of time it took you to finish. This means that any sort of reasonable handicapping will involve modifying players' finishing times. Just for the sake of explanation, I'm going to assume that you choose to improve weaker players' times, though adding time onto stronger players would have the same effect.

Now, because tracks are different lengths, you can't give a "flat" handicap in terms of a set number of seconds. A 30-second handicap improvement is much more significant on a course that only takes 5 minutes to finish than it is on one that takes 10 minutes to finish (this is moot if you're planning to have every race on the same course).

Due to that, it's probably better to do something proportional. You could give a percentage improvement, such as taking off 10% of their finishing time. Or perhaps another good alternative would be to allow the weaker players to replace their worst lap time with their best one (this is assuming that Mario Kart Wii shows all lap times).

Now, that being said, I actually suggest not doing handicapping at all. You stated that you'd like to make things "fair", but it's very important to realize that handicaps don't make things fair, they attempt to make things close. The only thing that's ever truly fair in a skill-based competition is that a better player will always beat a weaker player, and handicaps get in the way of that.

Handicaps may seem to make tournaments more enjoyable for weaker players because it gives them a chance, but it comes at the cost of making things less enjoyable for the stronger players. It's very frustrating to lose to someone that is clearly a worse player than you, solely because they have a large enough handicap to overpower the difference in skill.

Related to that is the difficulty in determining how much of a handicap to give each player in the first place. It's very difficult to accurately determine a handicap, and giving players too much or too little compensation can make things even more unfair.

So then how do you make a tournament that everyone can enjoy, even with wildly differing skill levels? Unfortunately, I don't know. You could try doing things like splitting the players into categories based on their skill levels, or just running the tournament in such a way that winning isn't the single most important factor. It's a very difficult problem, but the fact is that the only way something can ever be "fair" is if everyone has to play under the same rules.

A few options that spring to mind:

• Play tracks that the 'pros' don't know very well, if possible.
• Play characters that they are not used to or are considered bad. For example, using Bowser (low acceleration) on any small tight tracks, or using Toad (low top speed) on longer, straighter tracks.
• An embargo on using items for the better players. Although the game only gives good items to those further down the field, any banana skins you lay are likely to be difficult to avoid by newbies.
• Turn on manual drift for the pros, but don't allow them to use it :)
• More physical handicaps like sitting further away from the screen, playing with one eye closed (or an eye patch), controller upside down, etc are all fun too.

Another good idea is to turn on the team mode, mixing up better players with newbies. They can then get guidance from the pros as they play.

None of these suggestions are really optimal for a tournament - as Chad mentioned, a tournament is really designed to allow the best player to win. That being said, the following suggestions might help take a little of the focus off coming in 1st place.

• Run the first race for standings. Challenge the players to improve their previous time each race.

• Have each racer bet on the time they think they'll finish in. Score based on how close they came to their prediction. (No brakes during the final lap)

• and of course , if you are of legal age in your location,

  taking one drink for each person you beat

will level the playing field real fast.