The best arcade games like Mario Kart Wii are Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Mario Kart 64 and Crash Team Racing. Below are 9, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to arcade costs you.
Filtering to arcade means you want short runs and a score, not a campaign. It is the right filter when what you liked was the one-more-go feeling.
What you get: A complete experience in twenty minutes, and a skill you keep. Arcade design is measured in the moment after you lose.
What made Mario Kart Wii worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the arcade part of that answer, and only the arcade part.
The definitive entry — 96 tracks, anti-gravity, and online that works.
Battle mode is the reason, and the nostalgia is real.
The kart racer with the highest skill ceiling, and it is enormous.
Karts, hovercraft and planes, with an actual adventure mode.
The best non-Nintendo kart racer, and the track design is superb.
Two characters per kart, and the most distinctive entry.
If you want the accessible competitive game with a real ceiling.
Kart racing built around team play rather than individual placing.
For racing with no items at all, and no forgiveness.
Story and progression. Arcade games repeat on purpose, and if you want to be pulled somewhere they will not do it.
The full list is on games like Mario Kart Wii — 9 picks, no genre filter.
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. The definitive entry — 96 tracks, anti-gravity, and online that works.
No. Mario Kart Wii released on the Nintendo Wii, but a recommendation is only useful if you can play it, so the picks above span platforms and eras. What they share is the genre and the reason.
They were designed to end. A machine that let you play for an hour on one coin did not earn its floor space, so difficulty was the business model.
Constantly, mostly by small teams. Several of the best beat-em-ups and run-and-guns of the last decade are new games built on forty-year-old design rules.
By hand. Each pick was written for the full Mario Kart Wii list first, on what the game actually does, and this page is the part of that list that is arcade — never a genre tag lookup, which is how "best racing games like Super Mario 64" used to be a page on this site.
Or read the arcade guide for where to start in the genre generally.