As you’re no doubt aware Nintendo has been talking up the online capabilities of the upcoming Mario Kart game and Nintendo Europe has managed to let another little feature out of the bag: Mario Kart text chat.

Yes apparently the game will support text chat, where players can create rooms and text chat to other gamers whilst waiting to play. The cool thing about this is it will obviously need a USB keyboard or be fairly annoying with on screen virtual keyboard. The bad thing about this is who really needs it? What is needed is full on lobby chat like on other online gaming services.

I’m not sure where this is going to go, for me it seems a fairly useless feature, after all, you can’t text and drive, even though some real life drivers might think it’s cool to do so. On the upside a nice licensed official Wii keyboard would be nice.

Update:
It’s actually worse than we thought. The text chat feature will apparently just be the ability to choose from some pre inserted text statements like “Hello” and other silly greetings and we assume emotions. This is even more lame than we’d originally envisioned, now there’s no need for an official Nintendo Wii USB keyboard.