10 Video Games Utterly Ruined By RNG

6. Mario Kart Wii

The Mario Kart games are apparently governed by "luck," in that a skilled player can have a flawless run ruined at the last minute by a pesky blue shell, and a newbie can surge to the front of the pack after picking up a Bullet Bill.

But the power-ups made available to the player are actually dictated by a weighted probability mechanic, which adjusts according to the player's own position in the race.

As such, if you thought your pickups were entirely the result of a random dice roll, that's not the case at all, and this proves especially egregious in Mario Kart Wii.

The game's especially harsh probability matrix ensures that winning players almost never end up with a quality item, in turn allowing lesser players to steal a win by receiving an extremely high-powered item.

The ultimate by-product of this is that players who should win get screwed out of victory far too often, while those who have no business coming first steal it away without feeling like they've actually earned it.

Thankfully Nintendo listened to the vocal criticisms of Mario Kart Wii's overly draconian, rigged RNG system, opting for a more balanced and democratic probability set for Mario Kart 8, which neither overtly punished good players nor boosted bad ones.