Excite Truck shares nothing with the classic NES racer of old, Excitebike, other than the fact that both games feature vehicles with tires. While the ancient 8-bit game is remembered fondly, the Wii's brand new 3D truck/SUV racing title most likely won't be remembered past the end of the year. It's not a terrible game by any means, but it simply doesn't have enough in terms of innovation, gameplay or plain old excitement to make it anything special. As it's technically the only other first-party Nintendo game for the Wii at launch, I'm more than a little disappointed with its performance. Still, fans of racing might well get a kick out of the novel controls and blistering speeds that the game has to offer.

The hook here is the new control system. You hold the Wii Remote in two hands, with the D-pad on the left and the 1 and 2 buttons on the right. The 2 button is used to accelerate and the 1 button hits the brakes. The D-pad can be pushed in any direction to trigger the turbo boost meter, but this needs to be monitored carefully for overheating -- heat can be reduced by driving through bodies of water or catching big air from jumps. Your truck can be steered left and right by tilting the Wii Remote appropriately, and the pitch of the vehicle can also be altered by tipping the controller forwards or backwards.

Excite Truck doesn't let you participate in any real racing until you've completed the first of four training modes. This takes less than five minutes but it's a little annoying not to be given a choice. It won't take you long to finish up all four training sections, by which time you'll be (hopefully) well-versed on the basic and more advanced controls. There's a "stunt" system in place, but it only really consists of learning how to pull off some rather underwhelming spin rotations in the air. Other more interesting moves teach you how to turbo-jump off of ramps and land perfectly on all four wheels, which gets you a nice turbo boost on the flats.


Once you've nailed the training stuff, you'll be able to hit either the frankly tedious two-player split-screen racing mode, or the much better single-player Excite Race and Challenge modes. The latter modes are where the core content of the game forms up. Excite Race is your standard four-cup, multiple-stage affair where the idea is to score big and come in first place to progress. The Challenge mode sees you trying to beat specific goals by smashing into other racers, jumping through rings in the air, or nailing a series of gates on the ground. It's fairly standard stuff, but on the whole, it's pretty enjoyable.