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Today’s “NES-talgic” Retro Game: ExciteBike

Excitebik is not your typical NES racing game, rather it’s a ‘side-scrolling’ motocross game. To start, you have several different tracks to choose from each with a variety of jumps and hazards and you can choose to race against a clock or CPU controlled opponents. The object is to finish the track as quickly as possible, the tracks consisting of four lanes that you move across vertically. You can also use the left & right controls to tilt your bike after a jump so that you land flat on the ground or angled onto another jump, thus maintaining your speed. If you want an even greater boost, you can use the B button to hyper-accelerate but if you boost too much your bike will overheat and stall. Running over a speed arrow on the ground is a safer, although less reliable, way to gain a speed boost.

The Japanese version of the game included a custom track creator that used the Famicom Data Recorder add-on that was unavailable in US and EU markets. The feature has since been added back in the Virtual Console editions of the game.

Excitebike has only a few music tracks (and they’re played during title and menu sequences) but they’re quite memorable and catchy. The graphics are pretty impressive, if extremely simple in color, with a neat vibrating animation for the bike while you drive.

Excitebike is a true NES classic that’s perfect for some quick retro fun. It’s even available on the Wii Virtual Console and the 3DS e-Shop.

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