Let’s Play Excitebike

Let’s Play Excitebike

Let’s Play Excitebike! Let’s Play ExcitebikeIt’s debateable my decision to include this in Retrotober when many of the NES games I play the rest of the year are just as old, but I don’t know how official any of this is, so I’m not too worried about anyone calling foul on me. The truth was I just wanted to play a fun game and it happened to work out that this was one of the oldies.

Let’s Play Excitebike:

This is one of the few games for the NES which everyone unequivically seems to love. One of those games where even the kids who didn’t have an NES would feign excitement if it came up in conversation.

You play as a competitive motorcycle who… what the hell, am I trying to come up with a backstory for the Excitebike guy? It’s a fun game, more fun if you know how to play, and even more fun if your engine overheating sound works (as mine did not). When I say know how to play, I mean hugging the ramps with the correct angle on your bike during the landing, hitting cooling strips, pulling back on the ridges, etc.

You can play by yourself (lame) or with other racers who haev been randomly distributed along the course and are all randomly programmed to jam you up.

There’s even a fun “design your own track” mode where you can guess at what obstacles the different letters of the alphabet correspond to before you save your track and race on it.

The only thing which would have made this game better would be the inclusion of a two player mode. Split screen would have done just fine, but it may have been too much for the NES to handle in 1986 or whatever retro year it came out.

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