A new retro-styled Excitebike title is coming to WiiWare soon, though it was announced through a strange venue.
If you’ve never seen a Nintendo Week video on the Nintendo Wii channel, it’s probably because you don’t enjoy watching absolute crap. But, the Nintendo Week video for October 26 contained an interesting WiiWare game announcement that almost made me not want to annihilate everyone involved with the series’ production: Excitebike: World Rally.
Excitebike: World Rally is a 3D-ish version of the Nintendo Entertainment System’s Excitebike and will be released on November 9. The gameplay looks very similar to the original, though multiple camera angles are shown and it appears that you get bonuses for good landings and tricks such as wheelie jumps while trying to beat the best time on each course. Excitebike was very simple fun on the NES; bringing that back on the Wii could end up being bigger successes than ExciteTruck or ExciteBots, both of which were good games that just didn’t seem to click with an audience.
The seemingly nice enough actors in the Nintendo Week video that I sort of want to punch anyway also revealed that we will be able to play with either motion controls or classic controls, that a track editor will return in World Rally, and that there will even be online multiplayer. The rest of the video is available on YouTube here and here, though you have been warned. There is also little bit of info on WiiWare’s upcoming Castlevania: Rebirth and a Nintendo DS title called COP: The Recruit that might have something to it, but I wouldn’t put the video at the top of my list of ways to find about about those two games. I know it has to be kid friendly, but that doesn’t mean it has to be awful.
