quote IGN

Just a few days prior to the Electronics Entertainment Expo 2006, Nintendo of America offered IGN an exclusive first look at some of its biggest Wii games. The brief preview of upcoming software was over almost before it began, and it both proved the console's potential and left many questions unanswered. IGN Wii's editor-in-chief Matt Casamassina has written a series of articles describing the approximate 10 minutes of play time he had with each of some of Nintendo's most important E3 Wii games. His impressions below:

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Ironically enough, ExciteTruck, the first Nintendo-published racer to hit Wii, comes out of left field and not from Left Field, the former second party responsible for Excitebike 64. This is a game that nobody saw coming and for good reason. It's called ExciteTruck, after all. Not exactly the cleverest name, I know, but it's a title that at least does accurately encapsulate the gameplay experience within. ExciteTruck is, in fact, a lot like Excitebike - except you race monster trucks and not dirt bikes.

The project comes from Nintendo newcomer Monster Games, which has in the past worked almost exclusively on NASCAR and Test Drive titles so apparently it has some experience with the genre, if not the franchise.

Once you get past the name, you'll find that ExciteTruck is a fun little racer with a lot of compelling play mechanics. The title utilizes the Wii-mote and not the nunchuck attachment. You simply turn the pointer on its side and use its tilt functionality for four degrees of movement. The B button functions as gas and the A as brake. As you race your monster truck over mountainous tracks, you can turn left or right simply by tilting the controller in the respective directions. There are a lot of jumps in the game and you'll often find yourself hovering, if not soaring through the air for seconds at a time. When you're way up high, you can push forward or pull backward on the controller in order to center your truck so that it lands correctly on all four wheels, which is an integral objective to succeed in races as it grants you boost power.

The game moves at a really fast pace - much quicker than Excitebike 64 by comparison and nearly at the speed of arcade racers like, for instance, Hydro Thunder. Actually, the two have a similar feel because in both you're gunning for speed boosts and air hang time.

Boosts in ExciteTruck are intuitively handled when you're in the air by tapping any direction on the Wii-mote's D-Pad. Bear in mind again that the controller is turned on its side so it's even easier to access the pad. Once you press a direction, the boost kicks in with a flaming effect, the screen goes a bit fish-eye and your monster truck shoots forward with noticeable force. Speed boosts in the game can make huge differences. For instance, there might be a huge chasm separating two mountains and you could easily clear the gap with a boost when you'd have no chance otherwise.

There are question marks strewn about the courses and when you run them over with your truck, the terrain around you dynamically shifts up and down to create new jumps and barriers. It's a very dramatic effect, actually, because in an instant a flatland can change into a fairly sizeable mountain - and right before your eyes. As a general rule, you'll want to run over the question marks whenever possible because they provide massive air potential for you, which is fun and useful. When you land big jumps, you gain more turbo bursts, after all. The section advantage, though, is that the changing landscapes can seriously malfunction your AI-controlled competitors and you can take advantage of their missteps. As a result, ExciteTruck presents racing environments complete with a fair amount of strategy.

The trucks themselves don't take damage and you can't stray too far off of the course, but the levels are still large and varied. Nintendo demoed two different levels to me. One was set in Mexico and featured big mountains, shrubbery and trees, while the other was set on Fiji and was surrounded by shimmering ocean water. (Every so often I would soar off a mountain and crash directly into the ocean below, and I'd need to tap the gas button repeatedly to reset my truck.) The trucks move about the levels with a solid sense of weight and physics and although you won't find extra graphical bells and whistles like detailed particle mud, many of the backgrounds look like something befitting of an Xbox racer, which isn't a criticism.

I found ExciteTruck to be immediately accessible and surprisingly entertaining, even if its premise is straightforward and its control method relatively simple. Using the Wii-mote to move tilt and turn about levels is easily performed and feels downright natural, in my opinion. When writing this hands-on, I went back and listened to some of the audio notes I took as I played the game. I'll end this hands-on preview by quoting my notes: "I had some concerns about whether or not driving games would work with the Wii remote. Not anymore. ExciteTruck feels great and I'm having a lot of fun."

The title runs in progressive-scan mode and 16x9 widescreen on Wii.