10 Best Wii Racing Games That Still Hold Up Today

1 week ago 6

Published Mar 23, 2026, 2:39 PM EDT

Daniel has been playing games for entirely too many years, with his Steam library currently numbering nearly 750 games and counting. When he's not working or watching anime, he's either playing or thinking about games, constantly on the lookout for fascinating new gameplay styles and stories to experience. Daniel has previously written lists for TheGamer, as well as guides for GamerJournalist, and he currently covers tech topics on SlashGear.

When the Wii first released, one of the big draws of the motion-controlling Wii Remote was that it could serve as a more realistic controller for driving games. More realistic without being one of those expensive driving wheel peripherals, I mean. There were a lot of racing games on the console for this reason, though unfortunately, the vast majority of them were no-name shovelware that used that single gimmick and absolutely nothing else to siphon money from parents’ wallets.

Zack and Wiki Excitebots Captain Rainbow

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While there was a lot of racing chaff in the Wii’s library, though, there were a few genuine sheafs of wheat hidden in the pile. These were the games that, in addition to making good use of the motion controls, also remembered the importance of being, y’know, a fun and engaging racing game. If you were specifically hankering for a motion-controlled racing game these days, notwithstanding those on the Switch 2 that still support that format, these are the Wii games you could get such an experience out of, plus just plain-old good racing if you’d rather not get waggly with it.

10 Need for Speed: The Run

From West Coast to East Coast

Since the mid-90s, the Need for Speed series has made a comfortable, quiet living for itself in the peripherals of gaming, not exactly being the most noteworthy racing games, but remaining of a generally consistent quality. The Wii was home to quite a few Need for Speed games, including Need for Speed: The Run.

The Run has you competing in races all over the continental United States, featuring iconic locales like Las Vegas, New York City, San Francisco, and more. It’s a good-old-fashioned street racing game; hop in a car of your choice, get to the finish line first, and try not to crash. Your car takes damage from skids, impacts, and collisions with other vehicles, and if it gets too bad, you may have to sacrifice some time to make a pit stop.

Racing events are interspersed with all kinds of wacky occurrences, like one of your rivals pulling a gun on you and forcing you to escape, or cop cars trying to run you off the road. It’s kind of like Cannonball Run. Does anyone remember Cannonball Run?

9 Need for Speed: Nitro

Kickin’ It Arcade-Style

Most of the Need for Speed games emphasize a degree of realism, or at least Hollywood-style realism, with cars that can only go as fast as a car could realistically go. However, street racing games do have a few different shades, and some, like Need for Speed: Nitro, don’t mind sacrificing a bit of realism to crank up the fun factor.

Compared to its contemporaries, Nitro is more of an arcade-style racing game, closer in line with something like Cruis’n. Rather than trying to outmaneuver rivals, it’s a straight-up speed contest, with mechanics that complement that, like abundant Nitro, though there are still track hazards like cop cars that can damage your vehicle and reduce your top speed. There are a bunch of different race types to get into, so if you just want a drag race without the bells and whistles, you can totally do that.

The game is also very stylized, with more cartoony character models and angular environments. One of the coolest aesthetic touches is that, depending on which car is in the lead, the dominant color scheme of the track will change to match that car.

8 Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity

Outrunning Gravity

Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity

If you’ve been playing Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds and have no idea who the Babylon Rogues are, they were originally introduced in 2006’s Sonic Riders, a rather untraditional racing game that still has a pretty dedicated fanbase to this day. There were three games in the Riders trilogy, the second being 2008’s Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity.

Like its predecessor, Zero Gravity has Sonic and company riding on hoverboards called Extreme Gear. As you perform tricks and collect rings, you accumulate points, which can then be used to activate mode switches or transformations on your vehicle, as well as use the game’s signature mechanic, the Gravity Dive. By shifting gravity, you can make random bits of the environment float around while you start “falling” forward, getting boosts as you hit them and launching into previously unreachable areas.

Zero Gravity has a bit of a tricky learning curve to it, as the precise means by which you perform a Gravity Dive is a little unclear even with the game’s tutorials. Once you figure it out, though, it’s a lot of fun, especially since every dive is accompanied by lots of cool visual and audio effects.

7 Fast Racing League

The Mission Statement’s in the Name

Developer

Platforms

Release Date

Shin'en Multimedia

Wii

May 2011

In addition to its physical game discs, the Wii was the first Nintendo console to have fully-digital games available via WiiWare. Much like the game’s broader library, the majority of WiiWare was of… mildly questionable quality, but there were some gems to be found, such as the aptly-named Fast Racing League.

Fast Racing League is a futuristic racing game using hovering vehicles, in a similar vein to F-Zero. That was nice, since Nintendo forgot F-Zero existed for the entirety of the Wii and Wii U’s lifespan. The game’s primary gimmick was that you could swap your vehicle between two colored phases, and by running over panels with the same color, you’d get boosts, as well as automatically flip to different parts of the track like the ceiling.

While its gimmick wasn’t groundbreaking, it was a fun, simple way to keep you engaged in the race and the track while you built up speed. It was a one-of-a-kind experience on its platform, not being a kart racer or street racing game, and that was invaluable.

6 Need for Speed: Carbon

Nothing Like a Race Where there Shouldn’t Be One

A recurring concept throughout the Need for Speed series is that of illegal street races, with cars swerving and drifting through civilian roads in the dead of night, Initial D-style. Many games in the series use this theming to an extent, though for Need for Speed: Carbon, it’s front and center.

Carbon has you driving a variety of real-world cars, souped up with unlockable upgrades, across all kinds of roads and highways in clandestine street sprints. Besides regular races, there are various other types of events, like drifting challenges, duel events against rivals, and canyon races where bumping against the side rails could have you flying off to your doom.

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Carbon also features a full single-player career mode with a standalone story, as well as a free roam mode where you can casually bum around the tracks and make a nuisance of yourself. Free roam mode actually uses a notoriety system, with cop cars coming after you for speeding, busting things up, and so on.

5 TrackMania

If You Build It, They Will Come

TrackMania: Build to Race

A certain sub-genre of racing game that’s picked up steam recently is the custom racer, wherein you can customize not just vehicles, but entire tracks from scratch. This kind of game is easier to achieve these days with more powerful PCs and consoles, but even the Wii, mildly underpowered as it was, could handle a bit of custom work thanks to TrackMania.

The Wii TrackMania, also known as TrackMania: Build to Race, features a solo campaign with over 200 canned tracks you can zoom around on, but more importantly, still maintains the series’ signature track editor, allowing you to create and customize your very own circuits and fill them with wacky turns and loops. Compared to other TrackMania releases of the time, it was a little paired down due to hardware limitations, but the core of the game remains, and it’s still fun.

The game featured full online play via Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection, and while those servers were still up, you could also download and play various DLC tracks, a practice even Mario Kart hadn’t gotten around to yet.

4 Excite Truck

Trucks are Quite Exciting

Any fan of classic Nintendo knows the name Excitebike, the motocross racing game from the NES. There was another Excitebike game on the N64, but the series went into stasis for a little while after that. On the Wii, it finally reemerged, but for the first time since its creation, the series shifted away from motocross and into beefier territory with Excite Truck.

Excite Truck was one of the Wii’s launch titles, opting for muscular all-terrain trucks and large-scale races across equally massive tracks. Rather than being a straight-up race, the way you win is by accumulating stars. You get lots of stars for crossing the finish line first, but you get a lot more from performing big jumps and flashy stunts. It’s not just about being fast, it’s about getting from point A to point B with as much style as you can, making strategic use of your on-board boost to pick up speed without overheating.

Something neat about this game was that, if you inserted an SD card with MP3 files into your Wii, you could play your own music files over the game instead of the regular BGM, a feature which only a couple of games on the console used.

3 Excitebots: Trick Racing

Robots are a Bit More Exciting

Excite Truck was the first attempt on Nintendo’s part to simultaneously hype up the Wii and give the Excite series a fresh coat of paint. A few years later, the next step would also be released on the Wii, albeit with a much bigger departure in style compared to that of motocross to trucks: one of Excitebots: Trick Racing.

Instead of relatively normal vehicles, Excitebots had you racing around in massive animal-themed robot cars, set on even bigger tracks than those in Excite Truck. Because the maps and vehicles were so big, nothing was really keeping you on the track. You could take any path you wanted to the finish line if you thought you could get away with it, and you usually could.

As with Excite Truck, Excitebots places more emphasis on the substance of the race rather than the finishing position. Performing tricks and stunts would get you stars, but you could also earn them from ramming into opponents, tearing up the landscape of the track, and even playing the occasional mid-race minigame like knocking over oversized bowling pins.

2 Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing

Battling the Plumber on his Home Turf

Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing

Obviously, as a Nintendo console, the Wii was Mario’s turf, full stop. While Sonic games had made their home on Nintendo consoles since the GameCube, they could never completely eclipse the plumber’s efforts on his home field. That said, there was one game that, while perhaps not a full overtake, made a pretty good showing of it: Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing.

A multiplatform release on the Wii, Xbox 360, and PS3, All-Stars Racing is a kart racing game primarily starring Sonic and his friends, alongside some selections from Sega’s back catalog like Samba de Amigo, Super Monkey Ball’s AiAi, Space Channel 5’s Ulala, and others. Gameplay-wise, it was a pretty shameless Mario Kart knock-off, but it was a really good Mario Kart knockoff, with snappy mechanics, colorful tracks, and lots of racers to choose from.

I think my favorite part of this game is that it’s positively oozing with personality. Every character has unique taunts based on their games, and they all get unique All-Star moves that let them rocket ahead from the back of the track. The game’s announcer is also a major smart-alleck, and I still miss him.

1 Mario Kart Wii

Set the Tone for the Series Going Forward

Of course, if we’re talking about racing games on the Wii, the discussion would remain unfinished without reference to the console’s patron kart racing title, Mario Kart Wii. I don’t think it’d be an exaggeration to say that this game was one of the major factors that put Wiis in homes, not to mention sold a lot of plastic steering wheels. To date, it is the second-best selling game in its series, eclipsed only by Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.

Mario Kart Wii was seemingly a return to basics after Mario Kart: Double Dash got a little experimenting, going back to single-character karts for the usual three laps, pummel-each-other-with-items formula. However, this game also introduced a lot of mechanics that would go on to become series standards; it was the first to offer motorcycles instead of karts, it introduced the streamlined, color-coded mini-turbo system for drifting, and it introduced performing tricks when going off of jumps.

Mario Kart Wii was also noteworthy for making the most effective use of the Wii’s motion controls. I can’t really explain why, but compared to just about every other game on this list, steering with the Wii Remote was remarkably responsive. You probably wouldn’t win any tournaments like that, but for casual play, it worked, and trust me when I say that just working was an accomplishment.