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In some ways, this game is clearly meant to prey on your nostalgia; most people into video games during the NES era played the original Excitebike and remember it fondly for its ’time trial’ racing along with its ability to make your own tracks. Excitebike World Rally sticks very close to the original’s formula, with only minor tweaks that are joined by some much-needed technological updates and the result is surprisingly good.
World Rally immediately lets you know it’s an Excitebike game, even starting it up triggers remixes of the original game’s music. Once you set up a profile, you can choose to go through a series of singleplayer races, online racing, or make your own tracks. The controls are very similar to the original Excitebike, with the Wii Remote held sideways. If you want, you can use the exact same NES style controls from that game, but you can also tilt the controller to lean your bike back and forth; I prefer the original controls, but the tilting works well enough. From there, you race across various stunt tracks, jumping from point to point and managing your throttle; gun it for too long and your motorcycle overheats. Or if you get too reckless, you might crash. Either of these are very bad, as you stop for a few seconds while waving your Wii Remote around to speed up your recovery.
While that may sound complex, it’s actually very easy to learn and the game’s training mode only lasts a few minutes. Once you do that and get some singleplayer races under your belt, you should quickly be ready to play online. Interestingly enough, the online racing is the main draw of World Rally. Each of the sixteen courses included is very short and can be finished within two minutes or less, so singleplayer racing will quickly lose its appeal. It’s only by adding a few other human players, up to four total, that things stay interesting. Thankfully the online play works very well; I was usually able to find a full set of players within just a few minutes no matter when I played, and if that level of activity stays consistent then World Rally will be a very healthy game over the long haul. It also has mostly good networking code and only has odd things occur if any of the involved players are going out of their way to generate lag, such as running peer-to-peer downloading or other high bandwidth activities.
Strangely, online play is the only multiplayer you have access to. There is no local split-screen play, which I find baffling since there should easily be enough screen space for at least two players. Combined with the fact that playing with friends requires using Nintendo’s ridiculous Friend Code system, and this could be a real problem if the game’s player population drops in the future.
Perhaps in an attempt to compensate for that, World Rally’s track editor is a little better than the original game’s. The major addition to track parts is a few ’Morph’ items where you hit a small beacon on the track and a ramp will briefly appear; miss it and the terrain won’t change. The most important change however is the ability to actually save your created tracks, which is an obvious upgrade for a Wii version of this game. Even better, you can send tracks to your friends though oddly enough this uses the Wii Menu level Friend Codes rather than the game specific ones. While the editor does have some modest limitations, it’s still an important part of the game and fairly well done.
Ultimately, World Rally is best enjoyed in multiple short bursts. The simple nature of the game combined with its short courses mean you’ll get your fill pretty quickly. On the other hand, these same traits make it an easy game to agree on when playing with friends over the internet. With this in mind, I think Excitebike World Rally is an excellent ’long term investment’, where you’ll gain several short but fun sessions over several months. And on that basis, this update to the old-school NES racer earns its 1000 Wii Points/$10.
