Excite Truck

"Excite Truck is fun, but it's shallow fun. The soundtrack is stupendously bad, a horriffic 1986 tour-bus collision of Poison, White Snake, Def Leppard, and Van Halen&tribute bands. Thankfully, players with a SD card can plant their own custom tunes in the game, while those without are highly recommended to turn the music setting down to zero. And it doesn't look like much either, with a slightly inconsistent framerate (don't tease us by going up to 60 fps for a couple seconds before dropping back down) and various environmental fade-ins...and it looks really old in splitscreen multiplayer."

"I'll be honest - despite being heavily pushed during Nintendo's press conference, I wasn't holding high hopes for this to be particularly good. Competent, I supposed, but not necessarily good. I don't think anyone else was particularly enamored by the sound of the title either, with the lines, while still hefty, a walk in the park compared to some. The demo offered a choice of either the balmy, sandy beaches of Fiji or the red, sun scorched deserts of Mexico, but didn't offer any choice of vehicle, and was played entirely with the Wii controller, no nunchuck. You hold the controller sideways, in the NES style configuration, but you tilt the controller to turn the truck left and right. It's worth pointing out that you aren't ‘turning' the controller. As you wouldn't naturally be driving a car with a wheel that's at a 90 degree angle to yourself, this feels surprisingly natural supposing you imagine the controller held sideways as the crossbar of an imaginary wheel."

"Excite Truck is fun to play. It’s as simple as that. Trees blur as you race past lush forests. You press the button furiously to get back on the track after a nasty crash. The music dies just as you hit the apex of an incredible jump leaving you only with the sound of wind and a smile on your face. There’s no need to tweak or tune-up any of the generic cars you win by completing tracks. It’s the nice game you can play with friends or take home to your mom. While this may not be a racing game for the hardened fans of the genre, Excite Truck may just win over a new fan base through its simple controls, interactive environments, and a soul that remembers when people played games for fun."

"With the use of the Wiimote, Nintendo has made what would have been a generic racer into something worth owning. This isn't Burnout or Ridge Racer, it's just good arcade style fun. Even though you have a limited number of modes, a wretched soundtrack and a small number of tracks, Excite Truck more than anything gets me excited about the future of racing games on the Wii. As a third or fourth pick of Wii launch titles to own, Excite Truck fits quite comfortably."

"If you liked Excite Bike, then you’ll probably want to buy it on the Wii’s Virtual Console. If you like Excite Truck, then there might be something wrong with you. Thanks to some of the most unresponsive controls ever seen, you’ll be driving your jet engine truck into trees and off the course more often than not. If your goal in life is to buy tech demos for newfangled machines in order to impress colleagues then Excite Truck may be on your list of things to buy. But if you’re an actual consumer who buys games for fun and lasting gameplay then you should steer clear."