Features

• Body English: 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.
• Controller as a Steering Wheel: Players 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... but that's just the beginning. 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.
• Dynamic Terrain: Pick up items on the courses to make the terrain deform in real time, turning innocent bumps into massive launch pads that affect not only the player's route, but that of his or her rivals. Players jump and bump their way to the highest score and highest finish.

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.

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.

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.

Bottom Line
Simulated driving interaction and an off-road free-for-all make Excite Truck a fun, involving game.