Game: Excitebike: World Rally
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Monster Games
Price: 1000 Nintendo Points
Genre: Racer
Pro: Great nostalgic feeling, Nice simple use of accelerometer, Updated graphics
Con: AI players are still a bitch, not that much different from original, NO OFFLINE MULTIPLAYER!
Excitebike was always a fun game back in the day. So I figured with the remake, they couldn’t do but so much to it — right? Well 90% of the game is remade with an attention to detail that it makes me happy to be able to have played it. Unfortunately the final 10% is a glaring oversight, and one that basically makes this a crime against gamers from the late eighties and early nineties.
First, the good. Obviously the game has been updated graphically. You have several different choices as far as camera angles go, but the only one that worked for me was the original. Isometric camera is slightly disorienting to me and I found myself getting lost in lane changes. There are also a couple different colors that you can choose for your bike. None of which are extremely exciting in any way. They are pretty much just the cardinal colors of the rainbow, they do nothing for any other aspect of you racing ability. The problem is that you have to race and get better scores to unlock these colors.
This brings me to the actual racing. Excitebike was always a tad on the hard side. AI seemed to always be there to take you out first, and win the race second. Zooming down the track is easy enough, however should an opponent cross in front of you close enough to cause a breeze and you crash. Let me tell you that the AI controlled racers are still out for you. Once you crash you have to do what the Wii is most known for, waggle the wiimote. There are obstacles on the track but none of them seem to do as much damage as the AI controlled bikes. Other than the waggle recovery, the Wiimote is used pretty well to actually race. Holding the controller like a classic NES controller you simply push the “2″ for the gas, and the “1″ for a turbo boost. Remember that if you hold down the boost to long your bike over heats, putting a damper on your race. The actual wiimote function comes into play with the jumps. Tilting the controller left or right adjusts the angle of the bike in midair. The bonus is that if you adjust the angle of you bike to the terrain below you perfectly, you will get temporary speed boost. This will help you very much in the race.
Excitebike is not about who’s first, or last. As a matter of fact, you never really know what position you hold in the race. Excitebike is all about time. Finish with a time above bronze to move on to the next track and eventually the next class of race. If you finish under the par time for the course you will get the “S” class rating thus unlocking a bike as a reward. This is essentially the only way to move up in classes and move on in the game. Getting a time good enough to move on isn’t hard, however getting the “S” class time can be quite difficult.
Much like the original version of the game on NES, this one comes packed with a track editor. Once again, you can create your own custom track, full of jumps, speed boost, and mud holes. It’s still a lot of fun, but it just won’t be the same as before…
Finally, let’s move on to absolutely the biggest blunder and oversight of the game, and one of my personal pet peeves across the current modern crop of games. There is no offline multiplayer. Let me repeat: NO OFFLINE MULTIPLAYER. What, Nintendo!? All those memories you have of playing with you buddies in the same room with you, throw ‘em out the window. You cannot do that with this game. If you happen to have friends that own a Wii, AND downloaded this game you can still kind of get the same thing. It won’t be in the same room but at least you can still, uh… call your buddy and rag them. Maybe you don’t have friends that have Wii’s or that won’t spring for their own copy of the game. Now you may think, “No worries, I’ll just play online with the world.” Well that could be an issue too. I tried to connect to anyone so that I could get a race in against someone. I sat waiting for about fifteen minuets and never got a match. That doesn’t bode well for a game that USED to be all about fun interactions between friends.
There are games that remind you of your childhood. Nostalgia is a wonderful and sometimes depressing feeling. I can remember playing the original Excitebike back when we used to call games “cartridges.” My friends and I would play for hours, never really keeping track of who won the most games, just passing the controller around. We would make the most ignorant, and outlandish user created tracks, that could never and would never be found in real life. It was so much fun, when I heard this game was being remade my ears immediately perked up. Sometimes good memories need to stay just that, memories. Much like the recent rash of 80′s tv shows and movies being remade, some things would have been better left alone in the past. The good is really good with this game, but completely overlooking the multiplayer aspect is unforgivable.
Popularity: unranked [?]
