Product Description

Excite Truck brings back grand racing tradition of Excitebike. Get ready for a big-air experience like no other! Players rocket their trucks across dynamically changing terrain in this nitrous-injected, high-flying racer for speed junkies. Showing the Wii Remote controller's versatility, players tilt the controller on its side to turn it into a wireless steering wheel. Jump and bump your way to the highest score and highest finish

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2567 in Video Games
• Brand: Nintendo
• Released on: 2006-11-19
• ESRB Rating: Everyone
• Platform: Nintendo Wii
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: .75" h x 5.50" w x 7.75" l, .30 pounds

Features

• Remember tilting your arms while playing Excitebike to try to make your character land a huge jump? That experience is finally a reality with Excite Truck
• Your controller is a steering wheel - Hold the Wii Remote like an NES controller to control the truck; the 2 button is the accelerator, the 1 button is the brake, the Control Pad is the turbo
• Tilt the Wii Remote controller right and left like a steering wheel to steer
• Once the truck goes airborne, tilt the Wii Remote controller every which way to line up the wheels for landing boosts
• Pick up items on the courses to make the terrain deform in real time, turning innocent bumps into massive launch pads

Amazon.com

In the grand and classic racing tradition of Excitebike, get ready for a big-air experience like no other! Players rocket their trucks across dynamically changing terrain in this nitrous-injected, high-flying racer for speed junkies. Showing the Wii Remote controller's versatility, players tilt the controller on its side to turn it into a wireless steering wheel!

The Wii's 4x4 title goes off-road and flies high!

Use the Wii remote to control your rig in mid-air. View larger.

Multiple racing modes allow for different types of challenges. View larger.

Rigs of all shapes and designs are featured. View larger.

Steer by using the Wii remote like a wheel! View larger.

Arcade excitement, arcade feel
Excite Truck doesn't hide the fact that it's an arcade racer. You won't be modifying your rig with aftermarket parts or racing to win the heart of some flag-waving girl. You will, however, go fast- very fast. It would be easy to stay on the dirt path that defines the race track, but if you plan on truly winning in Excite Truck, you have to go off road and in the air. Your true success in each race is based on a star system. The more stars you get by performing stunts, drifts and more, the better your rank.

Netting lots of stars is not for the feint of heart. You'll need to cruise through fields of trees, launch yourself high in the air, hang on around curves for dear life and smash the daylights out of other trucks. All this and you still want to finish the race in first place.

Turbo originality
As with the game's spiritual predecessor, the NES classic Excitebike, you can turbo to your heart's content, but if you push the envelope too far, your rig will overheat, causing you to stall until it cools down. If you smash into a tree, go to far into the water or come face-to-face with a rock known as a mountain, you'll need to mash the 2 Button to right your truck and get back on the road.

The Wii-unique aspect of Excite Truck is the way you hold the Remote. Instead of its traditional vertical configuration, you hold it in a horizontal fashion, like the center bar of a steering wheel. You move the remote in the same fashion that you would a car steering wheel, tilting your right hand up if you want to turn left and your left hand up if you want to go right. When your truck goes airborne, its front end will lean toward the ground if you tilt the Remote away from you, and if you tilt the Remote toward to, your truck's front end will point up, allowing you to catch a little more air. If you catch enough air, you can try to pull off a 720 and, if you're daring enough, a 1080. The more midair spins you can perform, the more stars you earn. Plus, remember tilting your arms while playing Excitebike to try to make your character land a huge jump? Now that move will actually affect the game in Excite Truck.

"Raze" the track
The game features a Dynamic Terrain power-up. When you drive over this symbol, the road ahead changes, sometimes it plows upward to give you an extra hill to jump off. Other times, the terrain can sink, sometimes exposing water that can cool off an overheating engine. If you time the Dynamic Terrain activation just right, you can earn stars by sending racers out in front of you for an unexpected flight. Excite Truck's tracks also contain POW power-ups. This gives you clutch invincibility as you dare to go off the road and into the woods for a star-flooded tree run.

Excite Truck lets you customize the in-game music you race to. Download an MP3 to an SD card and explore Excite Truck's sound options to hear the tunes you want. The speed of the game is one thing, going fast to tunes that get you pumped up makes the game a pulse-pounding experience.

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Customer Reviews

Excite Truck: a must have game for the Wii
Excite Truck, in adding a vertical component to a standard racing game, has created one of the more enjoyable games that I've played in recent memory.

Controlling the trucks in Excite Truck is both unique and simple. Holding the standard Wii remote sideways (keep the d-pad under your left thumb and the 1 and 2 buttons under your right), you steer the truck by turning the controller. The courses feature many ramps from which you can launch your truck into the air and control how long it stays aloft by rotating the controller back toward you. And if you stick the landing, so to speak, by aligning all four of the truck's tires with the ground (again, by rotating the controller), you can get a speed boost.

The game play in Excite Truck is very compelling. The game offers a head-to-head mode that pits two racers against each other, but my friends and I preferred collaborating on clearing the levels. In a twist that is, in my experience, unique to Excite Truck, you do not clear a track based just on score. Instead, you must collect stars as you run through the course. Stars are granted for, among other things, jumps with long hang-times, daring runs through trees, hard slides through curves, and smashing other trucks. You can also get points for how you place in the race, but it is much more important to collect stars during the race as you cannot get an 'A' or 'B' for a course simply by coming in first. In fact, no matter how fast you race, your competitors will likely be able to match your pace, especially in the 'Gold' and 'Platinum' level tracks. It takes deft maneuvering at the end of the race to secure a first place finish in some of these later levels. All things considered, the focus on tricks and jumps makes for a very enjoyable game, especially for a group of players.

Quibbles:

• The initial setup of the game -- all of the game actually -- requires that you hold the remote sideways. However, no indication of this is given when you are asked to create save data at the beginning of the game, so you have to figure out on your own why pressing the up arrow moves the cursor to the left. Driving the menus with the standard Wii point-and-click interface would have been a useful improvement.
  
• The controls take some getting used to. Some of my friends had a tendency to try to steer with the directional pad. Others would over steer by turning the remote all the way past vertical when steering, which had unpredictable results. But a little more time with the game will probably get people used to the controls. (And, as a full disclaimer, none of the ones who had difficulty steering had completed the tutorials.)

All that aside, Excite Truck is a must-have game for the Nintendo Wii.

Excite Bike - Bike + Insanity + Truck = FUN GAME!
Excite Truck is a launch game for the Nintendo Wii and is FANTASTIC! The game is perfect in nearly every way, so here's how:

PLAYING IT: Excite Truck is a simple game, really. You turn the Wii remote sideways and then tilt it left and right to steer your truck! '2' is accelerate. '1' is brake. And the D-Pad is turbo. And the D-pad is turbo. And the D-pad is turbo. And the D-pad is turbo. Get it?

GAMEPLAY: Excite Truck's winning conditions are unlike any other racing game. While it does help enormously to get in first place, the game is not a race, but a competition of points. To get these points you must do insane stuff: Going extremly close to tons of trees in a row, staying up in the air for seemingly hours, pulling off air spins, morphing the terrain and sending other trucks into the air, ramming straight into anything possible, and MORE!

GRAPHICS: Graphics are usually things that fans of other consoles taunt when it comes to Nintendo. But Excite Truck's are absolutley astounding! Water is realtisically rendered, dirt on the ground goes into the air when your truck lands, paint is thrown off of the truck when you crash, and coconuts fall from trees making the sand sprinkle when you crash into a palm tree!

COURSES: Perhaps this is where Excite Truck does not exceed so much. Each course is insanely fun and perfectly made, but they seem to be...similar. Too similar. Oftentimes, a new course you unlock is an exact replica of an old course you already beat, just taking a diffrent route every 5 seconds and then veering back to the old level.

TRUCKS: Another place. Excite Truck's trucks are made great, but almost every truck seems to have a clone. Of course, trucks like the Boulder, Dynamo and Alpine and expert cars, there seem to be wannabees of these cars, some that are short and long, which reangle the camera during a race more towards the ground.

EXTRAS: Excite Truck doesn't have many extras to speak of. You beat, 4 or 5 courses, and you unlock another 4 or 5. And when you do certain stuff, you get new trucks. Although working for the Diamond Cup in the Super Excite difficulty is defiently worth your frustration and time. Not to say that it needs extras,anyway. And even though not much comes from winning trophies of pulling of those 250 Super Tree Runs, you still can't help but just think 'but maybe..'

DIFFICULTY: Excite Truck seems to have uneven difficulty at times. The bronze cup is insanely easy, and the silver cup is a bit mixed, but the Gold Cup is INSANELY difficult, yet the platinum cup doesn't present much challenge, although it does contain the best courses in the game (landing that jump means racing on the GREAT WALL OF CHINA!) yet the secret Diamond Cup is amazingly difficult..I reccommend the Sargon for beating it.

MULTIPLAYER: People seem to complain that Excite Truck's two-player mode is boring. While it does seem dull compared to single player, its still a rousing good time with your friends. And there are no framerate issues!

REPLAY VALUE: Excite Truck has infinite replay value, not because of graphics, difficulty or anything like that, just because its fun. It's a fun game for all ages.

FINAL SCORE:
Gameplay: 9.8
Graphics: 9.2
Courses: 8.7
Trucks: 7.0
Extras: 6.3
Difficulty: 9.1
Multiplayer: 7.9
Replay Value: 10.0
TOTAL (Not Averaged): 9.7

Casual Gaming Fun
Excite Truck might seem to be a straightforward truck dirt-racing game, but they include a number of interesting features like morphing terrain, super speed, and stunts.

The graphics are rather nice. You get a variety of terrain types - deserty mountains, snowy slopes, sandy dunes, tropical paradises, and much more. There are numerous models to choose from - four by fours, buggies, SUV styles, and other styles you can unlock as you go. You get all the colors of the rainbow to paint your vehicle.

The sound is reasonably good - what do you really care in a racing game? It's a collection of upbeat rock songs, along with the squeal-crash-wrrrrrr of the trucks racing.

The fantastic fun here is the actual racing. No, this isn't high end technical Indy car tuning. This is out and out fun, the kind where you have friends over for the afternoon and laugh yourselves silly with the moves you are making. You can play against friends, play with friends, or play on your own to get the longest jump, the most impressive crash, or any other of a number of stats.

That's because this game isn't just about who makes it to the finish line first. You have to gather up enough stars to win, too. Stars are earned by doing outrageous feats. Do a flip in the air, crash in an impressive manner, go for a long distance slide.

The courses make this fun to play and replay. There is lava rolling down at you, boulders crashing, landscapes changing before your eyes. These aren't courses you master in one pass. There's always something new to learn if you keep your eyes open.

The game is definitely family-friendly - grandparents can play with their grandkids and both would enjoy it.

Is there a downside? You could argue that the same is too "silly" - but that's its purpose. It isn't meant to be a serious racing game. Maybe the trucks are a little too shiny, but I find it hard to object. I think my biggest complaint is that you can only have two trucks in multi-player, and it's just head-to-head. It'd be cool if you had more than 2 players, or 2 players in a regular field with computer-controlled enemies, or co-op modes on the real courses.

Still, these are minor complaints. The game is quite fun.

Well recommended!