Excitebike

Engaging and advanced, you race a bike on a straight line across obstacles while keeping mindful of the way you land on ramps. You can play five courses solo or competing with AI opponents, which can often be unfair as the foes have a tendency to throw themselves right in front of you. Also has a spanking level editor but can become passe immediately after beating all five courses. Great to challenge your buddies with custom levels.

If you want to play this in 2P mode, please refer to Vs. Excitebike for the Famicom Disk System.

"For the time," is certainly something we don't use in reviews too often. Music can be appreciated directly in the moment, for the most part. Books are certainly an exception, usually with a very directed point-of-view that may be seen as trivial or outdated or simple by our standards today. I feel videogames may fall into this camp too. They can certainly still be fun and entertaining, but it seems almost necessary to take a look at a game from the time it was made. Not to give excuses, certainly a fun game 'then' must still be a fun game now, or else it still had flaws to begin with. Fun is fun, but maybe our ideas of what games offer and how they offer 'fun' changes with each new generation. With that said, Excitebike for the NES offers up some great arcade-style racing and some mechanics that were quite intuitive for the time.

Begin at the start, end at the finish, do jumps and don't crash in the middle: These are the basics. The core stands really well. Graphically it has charm, the sound is decent, and it certainly is a great game of the pick-up-and-play variety. Where it gets a little better is not with the AI options (though it is a little fun), but with the track-builder. Pretty neat for the time, and even today, the ability to create your own custom tracks and race them is awesome. It puts all the tools at your fingertips and doesn't hold up.

Overall, Excitebike seems simple by today's standards, but remains a fun classic to visit and offers a few twists here and there that seem to keep it fresher than a lot of newer downloadable titles today.

In excitebike you must compete against your opponents by driving your bike as fast as you can, but making sure you land after ramps on your feet. It was extremely popular at the time, and it does manage to provide a sense of action few others games did. But it is also extremely shallow and very depending on you to have more players to compete with (there is no 2 player mode, i mean competing for high score). It is a relic by today's standards, with the Trials series being the closest thing out there.