Excitebike 64

On this day many years ago, my dad bought the wrong game. I'd asked for Excitebike, meaning the one on the NES. The good one. The only one 10 year old me knew existed at the time. He got this one, and some days later when it came in the mail, I was understandably disappointed. I didn't shout. I didn't scream. I just told him he'd gotten the wrong one. I played the game for a few minutes and shelved it, and I wouldn't come by the real deal until years later. I'd learn to not trust my parents with buying the right games almost immediately after this, and my disappointment was only beginning. It only grew after I foolishly thought it would be a good idea to revisit a footnote of childhood misery.

Welcome to the world of Excitebike 64, where computer riders seem to have the uncanny ability to knock you off your bike by tapping your shoulder while you slamming into them at full force will merely tickle them. Handling is a weird subject in this game too, as it tends to stay with the overall theme of this game having a bizarre lack of consistency. There IS a definite feel of speed-based understeer, as there should be, but at seemingly random your handling is also liable to sharpen up to a razor's edge and throw you off, making you severely undercut corners where you don't need to, which often ends very poorly indeed. The stunt system seems to operate based on logic from another planet, where inputs SOMETIMES work and also SOMETIMES don't, possibly due to the alignment or misalignment of the stars. Jerk that stick all you like, but the odds of you doing a Saran Wrap change every .3 femtoseconds. The ultimate result of trying to blend a then classic with then modern technology is what feels like a tacky, unresponsive, and cheap imitation that pales in comparison to the '84 original that has happily replaced this heap on my shelf, and one kind of has to wonder what the impetus was to make this game anyway. The racing genre, MX or not, was more than just a little densely populated on the 64 by the time 2000 rolled around, most of which are older, and also deliver a far better experience. As opposed to maybe sometimes perhaps occasionally knocking someone off their bike one time during a whole race, I feel much more at home and happier when I ram someone to death in F-Zero X, because the Blood Falcon has gone without due credit for too long... To date, Excitebike 64 is the only game I have ever gotten angry enough at to smash, and just might be the reigning champion of that from hereon out, although this game does teach a powerful and enduring lesson: Newer doesn't ever inherently equal better. Sometimes, the classics really CAN'T be beat.

I have tried this game Excitebike 64 out on my Nintendo Wii U virtual console and it was the most agonizing racing experience I've ever played.

Seriously the acceleration is slow, the turbo is unresponsive, your character is always overtaken by rival bikers and worst of all there's so many hills that slows your bike down and sometimes you crash and one hill so steep you can't even climb up, also there's a race where you have to jump off a dead end cliff, you also can't slow down or steer very well. Excitebike on the NES was more fun to play, how could Nintendo screw this 3D game up?

What the heck were the Nintendo developers thinking? I really hate this game, it's too darn hard to get first place. The controls are sloppy, it makes Bubsy 3D not look so bad. I'm very disappointed I've spent my Wii U points on this time waster, this game needs to be redone so you can actually race rivals and get first place more easily.

It's more fun to build your own tracks without the awful hill jumps in custom mode. Also you're better off racing with other 2 players instead of CPU players.

I would suggest you skip Excitebike 64 and play a more fun racing game like F-zero X, 1080 Snowboarding, or Wave race 64, or Mario Kart 64, Diddy Kong Racing 64, Zelda Majoras Mask, those are more user friendly racing games.

Excitebike should've been called Crashbike 64. I'm very disappointed in this game. Don't believe the gaming critics who praise this awful game. This game is bad. Meantime I'll replay 1080 Snowboarding, Wave Race 64, Mario Kart 64.