Retronomicon 07.28.10: Excitebike

Posted by Lee Price on 07.28.2010

The Retronomicon takes a look at an NES title that brought the joys of motocross to a captive young audience!Join 411's Lee Price as he looks at Excitebike!

Hello lads and ladies and welcome to yet another edition of the most eclectic retro column in the immediate area, the Retronomicon. I, as ever, am your host Lee Price and this is yet another adventure into the murky deeps of retro gaming. My personal gaming has been a little lacking this week. Being busy at work all the time is really cutting down on the amount of time I can spend fiddling with my joystick, so this week has basically seen me play a bit more of Monkey Island 2: Special Edition, as well as rekindling a quick love affair with Football Manager. Football Manager is the perfect game to play when you don't really have time to play, as you can leave it running in the background while you do stuff, and come back to micro-manage when you need to. Having said that, given the propensity of many of my US cousins to see football/soccer as a boring game, I somehow doubt that many of them would find the appeal in what is essentially a massive number cruncher revolving around the sport. However, as is always the way, to each their own. Personally I would be lost in a world of NFL as well so I could understand a lack of appeal. And now I'm rambling, so I need to stop so that you guys can get reading the...




Comments

One comment. One measly stinking comment and it didn't even have anything to do with the game. Methinks a serious Treasure education session is needed amongst the 411 readership!

Seriously though, Sin and Punishment is a game that is well worth giving a crack. It may not be the most well known, but it is made by Treasure and it is awesome. I urge anyone with a few spare Wii Points to pick the title up, especially if you love a good shooter.

Anyway, to the comment. The one solitary comment. About adverts. Here's Comment Board Poster;

"I do love a good game commercial. This is a damned sight better than the Zelda one from last week."

Bite your face. The Zelda commercial was classic.

Bite my face. How is this even possible? I mean I can bite my lip and that's part of my face. Does that count? What sort of freakish, Herculean jaw structure must I be able to have to bite my own face.

And the Zelda commercial kinda blows. Just saying.

Seriously check out some of the Japanese Zelda commercial then compare them to the human Milhouse having a geekgasm over Zelda with the "friend" who was so blatantly in the middle of stealing the poor tykes NES before the cameras started rolling and he made pretend like they were friends.

Or maybe I'm reading too much in to it?

Anyway enough of that nonsensical babbling, because I appear to be doing a lot of that lately. So instead we shall continue in what is apparently a run of retro games from Nintendo systems that I have going right now. So strap on those rose-tinted specs because this week the Retronomicon looks at Excitebike.



The Background

The year was 1984 and the Famicom was riding high in Japan. Fresh off almost single-handedly saving the gaming industry, thanks to the touch of genius that was Super Mario Bros, Nintendo could practically do no wrong. Seriously, this was the era when Nintendo established a ton of characters, mythologies and games that would continue to be loved nearly two decades down the line. There are few companies that can claim to have enjoyed as solid a golden period as Nintendo did in the early days of the NES.

Chief name amongst all of the talented personnel at Nintendo was Shigeru Miyamoto. The man is a literal living legend in the gaming community these days thanks to his influence on the Marios and Zeldas of the world. Even when he wasn't chief designer, having his name associated with a product is an instant credibility boost to a game. However he doesn't just have his finger dipped in the pies of the major titles to come out of the Nintendo camp. Mr Miyamoto is listed as the developer or designer on a host of titles that may be considered the second tier of the Nintendo gaming lexicon.

And it was with one of these titles that Shigsy managed to capture the attention of a certain niche of gamers. While the Marios, Metroids and the like had either experienced, or would experience, massive success, Nintendo were also producing a game that not only aimed to emulate the world of motocross, but to also somehow make it playable on the limited technology of the NES. They managed it with Excitebike.



The Game

Excitebike managed the capture the attention of those who played it because it was gaming at its most simple and addictive. You could just pick up and play Excitebike, which would ironically leave it open to scorn from today's "hardcore". Back in the days of the NES though, it was all about getting the best possible game out of the source material and with Excitebike the best possible thing that Nintendo could have done was attempted to capture the essence of motocross rather than try to simulate it perfectly.

So those who read me semi-regularly know that whenever I start a Retronomicon I like to wax lyrical about the plotline to kick things off. Which kind of leaves me a little bit stuck with Excitebike. There is no plot. There is no career mode. There are none of the bells and whistles associated with many a racer today. You don't take control of the plucky underdog in his quest to conquer the world of motocross, one race at a time. You simply get on your bike and ride, either on your own or against some CPU opponents. And it is this simplicity that I will keep coming back to because Excitebike is the perfect example of a game that was good because it doesn't try to cram in unnecessary features.

So if there's no story to slog through, let's get right to the gameplay. The player is presented with a choice of two game modes, A or B. Game mode A is essentially a practice or time trial mode depending on how you look at it. You play the track on your lonesome, trying to set the best possible time you can without wrecking your bike in the process. The gameplay trope that is usually the bane of my existence comes into play as well, as you are timed. Luckily racers are one of the few genre types that can get away with this sort of thing as it actually adds a decent competitive edge to the title and encourages you to keep plugging away until you hit the target.

Game mode A is where you will get to grips with the gameplay before going off to play against the CPU. To be good at Excitebike you need to get a handle on two things, your bike's temperature and how to not land on your spleen after a big jump. Master these two aspects of the gameplay and you are well on course to toppling the challenges that Excitebike has for you.

Its not that easy to master though. The bike's temperature, which rises whenever you accelerate, must be kept in consideration at all times if you are to complete the course. Accelerate at the wrong time and you will leave yourself without enough gas to get to the end of the course. Accelerate too much and the bike overheats, forcing the player to sit out for a few seconds while the bike cools down again. Its a delicate balancing act, and a good player will always ensure that they keep the bike's temperature steady so that they have enough juice to make it over some of the bigger jumps.

The jumps are where the main excitement of Excitebike comes in. The game is nice enough to provide you with small bumps to tackle at first, where you can get used to the game's rotation system in which you can rotate backwards and forwards in the air to ensure a safe landing. Rotate too far backwards and you end up introducing you arse to the tracks. Tilt to far forward and its your face instead. Its a precarious balancing act, just like the handling of the temperature gauge, and your judgement has to be spot on if you are to topple the highest lap times. And the jumps only get bigger as the tracks get harder.



This only serves to add depth to the game though, as the player must always consider what may lie up ahead and ensure they keep prepared for it, while also going as fast as they can at the same time. Players are further hindered by the appearance of obstacles on the track itself. Hitting one of these slows your bike to a near halt until you navigate round it, but luckily you can manoeuvre up and down the track to avoid these hazards. Nintendo are also kind enough to grant you with a small reprieve in the form of arrows on the track that immediately reduce your bike temperature. A combination of memory, skill and tactics are required to hit the best possible times. Then its time to introduce some other bikers.

Game mode B plays much like mode A, except that there are now a few more bikes on the track attempting to beat you. It adds the competitive edge that every racing game needs, while also giving the player something a little bit different from racing the same 5 tracks over and over again. On top of this, the CPU bikes now act like moving obstacles. Hitting one from the back will cause you to slow down as though you had just hit a track barrier. In a dick move from Nintendo, if a CPU rider hits you in the back, you end up falling off your bike. The term Nintendo Hard exists for a reason and its cheap ass tactics like these that fit right into that category.

But you can forgive the game because it is almost always so much fun. Even if you are playing at a basic level, you can still quite easily get to grips with the mechanics of Excitebike. It operates on the "Easy to Learn, Hard to Master" mantra, and does so superbly. And that's before we get to the track designer.

Now Western gamers never really got to see this in its full glory. Japanese gamers were provided with a cassette tape on which they could save their favoured track creations to play another day. Us Westerners, on the other hand, were simply given the option to build a track that could be played until the game was turned off. It was still enough to add hours of life to the game.

Nintendo let you customise everything for your track, allowing you to place obstacles and hills wherever you wanted. You could alter the height of the hills to whatever you though was necessary, and could even judge the length of a lap and how many laps constituted a full race on the circuit. Once you were done you could then play the design in game, meaning there were endless hours of fun to be had with the too, even if the Japanese got the better end of the bargain.

Unfortunately, this fun couldn't be shared with other players. In what can only be considered a missed opportunity Nintendo failed to add a two player option to Excitebike. This is a title that was ripe for competitive play, and the best we could do was to try and beat each others time. It is the only real blemish on the title as it seems like the obvious thing to add. My best guess is that the design mode took up so much cart space that Nintendo simply couldn't fit it in. If that's the case then I'm not really sure which I would take given the choice. Still it would have been nice to have multiplayer.

Graphically the game does what it needs to do. Your bike looks like a bike. The track looks like a track. And the hills are alive with the sound of music. Basically everything is as it should be and that's all you really need. This is gameplay at its purest, so as long as the graphics are serviceable, you don't need them to do much else.

The same can be said of the sound. You get engine noises, or as good a reproduction as the NES allows, and some little bloops and bleeps for a soundtrack. Again its not really needed and you won't really notice, making the soundtrack of the title a bit of an irrelevance.

Elegance in simplicity. That term describes Excitebike to a tee. It doesn't try to do anything to big or fancy in terms of gameplay, yet it offers a distilled gaming experience that can be appreciated by everyone, from the most casual through to those who plunge into the game's hidden depths. In doing so it manages something that few games could at the time, near universal appeal. This is why Excitebike, while never attaining the glitz and glamour of its big named cousins, will always have its place in the hearts of many a gamer of a certain age.



The Aftermath

Excitebike was a surprise success on the NES. Its combination of supremely simplistic yet incredibly enjoyable gameplay had somehow managed to capture the excitement of motocross about as well as you could imagine an 8 Bit console doing. It experienced a good amount of commercial success, selling in the region of 1.5 million copies. While this wasn't a patch on the record breaking numbers of some of Nintendo's AAA titles, you still can't argue against a game that has passed the million sales mark.

There was definitely a niche for the unique take on the racing genre that Excitebike offered. There were a bunch of spin-offs and the like, most of which were released in Japan, however the game didn't see a sequel proper until the advent of the N64. The imaginatively titled Excitebike 64 was a worthy successor in many ways. It brought the fun of Excitebike into the 3D arena, without losing the essence of what made the title so great in the first place, in other words its simplicity.

The Excite-train hasn't stopped there though. Outside of the motocross aspect of the serious, Excitebike expanded to include entries from a host of different racing genres. We have had a bunch of things, from Excitetrucks to Excitebots, however none have quite managed to reach the heights of the original Excitebike. Just recently Monster Games, the overseer of the Excite series, released a new WiiWare title called Excitebike: World Rally. The game is billed as a return to roots, however many will feel that adding too many bells and whistles is a plan destined to failure with a game that was the definition of elegance in simplicity, and mixed reviews thus far seem to confirm that.

The Price is Right

There aren't too many different console versions of Excitebike floating around out there, and your best bet is to go for the Virtual Console release that lets you save tracks.

UK

NES - £10 – 15.
Gameboy Advance (US Import) - Approx £20.
Virtual Console - 500 Points.

US

NES - $5 - 10
Gameboy Advance - Approx $10.
Virtual Console - 500 Points

The Guy Who Can do it Better Than You

Before we get to the video make sure to visit the 411 Games Twitter.

Here's a little vid on how best to best stage 5. The trick is in the little ramps apparently.



Enjoy and see you next week.