Excite Bike is a game for the original Nintendo/Famicom entertainment system. The game was released in Japan in 1984, American in 1985 and Europe in 1986 (almost exactly a year apart from each other). In the game you must ride a motocross bike across an entirely straight track, bypassing other racers and jumping over mounds to become the most Exciting Biking champion.

In theory, there are ten tracks to race on included in the game, each track is played through in order and your aim is to beat the best times displayed on the screen for the track you are playing. There are five unique tracks which you must play through, once you have beaten the best score for the track you are playing you will get a chance to play the Excite bike version of that track. Luckily, you can choose which track out of the five you want to play from the title screen. There are two ways to beat the tracks best times, you can either go at it Solo (Selection A) or with computer controlled bikers (Selection B) who will get in your way as you attempt to beat the best times.

The controls for the game are pretty basic, you’ve got your directional pad which lets you move up and down the horizontal raceways. When you are in the air after jumping from a mound you can also use the left and right buttons to alter your trajectory. Also you’re going to want to move your bike so you can use either of the A or B buttons to accelerate. Excite Bike was also rather ahead of its time with the acceleration system as you could effectively ‘boost’ by using the B button to go faster than normal, in doing so however you increase the temperature of your bike and could end up crashing out - something I can’t recall from many retro racers at the time.

Excite Bike is one of the great classic Nintendo games which will always be remembered for its fast speeds and custom track design. I admit, the game is good for its time but I personally think the completely straight track design is a little boring. I can imagine it was great fun at the time and I really like the track editor - Nintendo were way ahead of themselves in that respect (especially the added bonus of saving your tracks onto magnetic tape if you lived in Japan). However, the game simply doesn’t entertain me in comparison to other NES racing games with a more realistic view of the field. If it was up to me, I’d probably call this game ‘Mildly-interesting Bike’ instead.

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