I think this has more to do with the amount of time devs have had to work with the tech.  And devs have said the functionality has been being added to the SDK as time has progressed.  Hard to design and implement something when it hasn't been implemented on the platform yet.

Still good for party games imo. My wii act up occasionally when our friends come over to play and they never bitch about it so. Only hardcore gamers will whine about this methinks.

That's because Mario Kart IS the only kart game. People have been ignoring the ripoffs for 20 years but devs still don't learn.

I think BigPark must be pretty pissed Microsoft forced them to bastardise their cheerful avatar racer freebie into something so disappointing and semi-functional.

If they charge $50 for this, critics are going to maul it. If we thought the debate over ODST's value at full-price was pretty vocal, this would blow it away...

CTR , Modnation Racers and Sonic All Star Racing are all good games , so i don't know what you are talking about

Maybe he was black?

That doesn't make sense as clearly Lionhead and this project was pushing a lot of the early tech.  What seems to have happened is that MS has shifted focus from this to stuff like supporting Joy Ride, which is my complaint and issue.  Kinect is simply wrong for a racing title apart from perhaps to augment the experience with head tracking and yet it's getting time and money vs approaches that would leverage Kinect better as a platform that MS don't know how to market.

I look at this and I'm 100% sure MS are looking at Mario Kart and just assuming that people will have fun playing a kart or racing title with motion controls while ignoring the gulf in their chosen approach to support such control for a racer.

What about CTR for the PS1?

Kinda proves my point. Even CTR on the mighty PS1 could only manage Diddy Kong Racing numbers while Mario Kart 64 sold double that. If nobody could take down Mario Kart when it was at it's lowest point (7M on the GC) then the chances of a 'Mario Kart killer' when it's at 20M on DS and Wii are nigh on impossible.

actually diddy kong racing and crash bandicoot did great.

too bad rareware doesnt exist anymore or crash was sold.