Crushing the Classics: Excitebike
Posted by Spooky M on May 26, 2006

Ahoy there, sorry for the long streak of nothingness that I've provided for you. I'm sure that it'll happen again, so let's go ahead and forget the lip service apology and have an article together, shall we? Good. This time around, I'm picking up one of everyone's favorites, and one my least. OH NOES! How can the evil man hate anything that was on the NES? Simple, because it sucked. Let's do a little less talking and a little more reading.

I put the game in, my hands quivering with anticipation. I press it down firmly and hit the power switch. After seeing a blinking grey screen, I take the game out. I give it a firm blow (olol) and put it back in. I get a title screen that looks glitchy and like it's been the wife if Ike Turner for far too long. I turn it off again, and I take the game out. I shake it, and it sounds like there is sand or something inside. I put the game in on the very edge of the inner slot of the system, and I force it down, grinding the top of the game. I say a little prayer, and hit the power button. HUZZAH! WE'RE IN BUSINESS!

Right off the bat, I'm pissed off. The title screen is a blatant smack in the face to
me, as it only has 3 options, and one of them isn't 2 players. How can anyone release a racing game at all if it doesn't have a 2 player option? There isn't even an Options selection on the menu. You mean to tell me that I can't choose my difficulty, set my controls, or even do a sound test on this game? Wow, they sure have taken the game out of my hands. I'm glad that I don't have to do any thinking here. Thanks, Nintendo. Aside from that, once you navigate the extremely difficult main menu, the sub menu of track selection is equally as depressing. You get *drumroll* five tracks. I'll bet the R&D at Nintendo was beat after this one, eh? But they're different! They're different colors! Oh joy! Sit on it, you bastards.

Diving right into the game, I notice something. I can't seem to put my finger on it, but it just seems kinda... I dunno... OH YEAH! Gay. You're a guy on a bike, and that bike is going from left to right. That's the whole game. That's what you dropped your hard earned lawn mowing and lemonade stand monies on. There are a ton of games that sport the phrase "Easy to play, difficult to master", but this one is more like "Easy to hate, diffcult not to throw out of your car window on the freeway going 88 MPH".

It's not all just fun and fury, oh no. Your bike overheats if you drive it too hard, which is easily solved by just pulling over for a few seconds. Realism all the way! I've never known a vehicle to just get cooler by stopping on the side of the road for that amount of time. In the real world, you have to pull over, pop the hood, find a rag to open the radiator with, open it up, realize that you haven't put anything in there in about 2 years, get pissed about that, walk to the nearest gas station, buy water and anitfreeze, mix it up, pour it in, start the car, let it run, and THEN you can go on. This would've added much more to the game experience.

I tried all of the 2 modes that it gives you, the option to race by yourself, which I
call "Bitch mode", and the option to race against an endless supply of generic racers, which I call "Bitches mode". In solo play, you simply race against the clock and try to beat whatever time they present to you. They might as well have just put a mouse on the bike and a piece of cheese at the end. In the other mode, you have 3 racers that you start with, and then about a thousand that you are racing against. If you just sit there, tons of bikers will pass you, and where they came from is never explained. If I wanted a mystery, I'd watch Murder, She Wrote.

So after getting bored of pretty much everything this game had to offer, I decided to try my hand at the creation side of the house. In this mode, you get a blank track, and you get to put all kinds of obstacles and traps and what not all over the track. After you spend your 10 minutes or so to design the track, guess what happens? YOU GET TO RACE ON IT! You can't save it, or email it to a friend for him to try, or post it on the internet, or anything cool like that. You just get to race on it. Oooh, sweet fucking heaven, Nintendo. Thanks for allowing me to do such wonderful things with your awesome games.

Let's do a quick rundown so you can see where I'm getting my bad taste for this game from.

Graphics: 3
Sure, they look like motorcycles, kind of, but how hard is that to fuck up? The tracks are plain, the audience looks like the witnesses on Court TV, and the backgrounds are the same thing over and over. This might have been ok when I was 5, but not now.

Sound: 2
No music. The only music you get is the themes when you win or lose, and the stage selection music. The motorcycles sound like an old man with a 44oz Mt Dew in his mouth, trying to gasp for air. The other random sound effects make my want to never hear again. It's all just a bunch of beeps and boops. Well, Nintendo, beep your mom, and boop your dad.

Gameplay: 0
You can litterally play this game by holding down one button the entire time. This game can be played by babies that have just been born. I need a little bit more challenge than that.

Fun: -5378297
I've had more fun in car wrecks.

So there you have it. Excitebike. Why they called it something that it's completely not is beyond me. Then again, if they had called it WasteofMoneybike, I don't think it would've sold too well. I'm not always right, but I'm never wrong. I welcome all hate mail.

Love you,
Spooky M