The controls were nuanced and took real effort to master. Those games (along with F-Zero X, I'd argue) had an arcade-style appeal but with added texture and the depth of a sim - the thinking gamer's arcade racers. The controls still feel fantastic, though and although I've never been a fan of the original Excitebike, both this and Excite Truck on Wii are massively underappreciated racing games in my book. It arrived very late in the console's life (releasing in Europe in June 2001, over a year after its North American launch), and going back to it now reveals patchier performance than I remember at the time. In addition, Excitebike 64 included the original NES Excitebike, another 3D version of that game, a track editor and a bunch of multiplayer modes, including a giant soccer game mode (it's not exactly Rocket League, but it can be fun with four players). Shifting the gameplay from side-on to behind-the-rider 3D, the 64-bit entry melded the careful pitch and throttle control of the original game with the subtle mechanics of N64 stablemates Wave Race ° Snowboarding to produce something just as deep, rewarding and addictive as those racers.Ī solid entry in any one of those franchises would be a lovely bit of counter-programming for gamers who aren't utterly enamoured with Animal Crossing
#Excitebike switch update
In the late '90s Nintendo was looking for a way to update its old motocross IP and ended up throwing the keys to the Excitebike series at Canadian developer Left Field Productions, the third-party team who were behind the fondly-remembered NBA Courtside games. To me it represents exactly the sort of quality 'B-tier' game Nintendo hasn't put out for a long time - and the type of game Switch could really benefit from right now. In the catalogue of Nintendo-published games, Left Field Productions' Excitebike 64 is rarely held up as a stone-cold classic, but I have great memories of the game that launched in North America on 30th April 2000. In this Soapbox feature, Gavin reminisces about the old days when Nintendo made multiple racing games.Įarlier this week was the 20th anniversary of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, but there's another Nintendo 64 game that debuted exactly two decades ago, albeit on the other side of the globe.
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