Welcome to VC Weekly, N-Europe’s guide to the wonderful world of Nintendo’s download service. Written by Sam C Gittins

If you're easily excited about bikes and adore Nintendo 64 games then this edition will surely have been worth the wait as VC Weekly now hopefully returns to its more regular schedule following the onslaught of titles from the Switch launch, still no VC in sight for the new machine though so it's time to catch up with the Wii U's digital service which is still keeping afloat. Anyway enough from me and on with the game! 
  
Available for download this week we have...  

Price: GB £8.99, EU €9.99
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Left Field Productions
Released: 2000
System: N64 

Out of all the franchises Nintendo has created over the years, probably the one which I've had the least experience of would be Excitebike as I've quite honestly only ever played the original NES title and only properly after experiencing snippets of it within Wario Ware as a minigame. But from any time when I have been exposed to this underrated series, I've always had the best time with it because while the original title tends to be easy to start playing, it is tricky to master as you need to balance your speed with carefully combined turbo blasts which you'll need to get ahead but you don't want to overuse for fear of overheating; then there's the other racers who can knock you off your bike just as you can relieve them of their rides with the right timing, all the while you're trying to keep track of which lane your rider is occupying to avoid any oncoming hazards and as all this is happening you will constantly be going over ramps which make you focus on the angle of your bike in relation to the ground when you land so that you don't wipe out.

Ultimately that's how Excitebike works, imagine this same concept but then applied to a three-dimensional racing title with a few extra elements thrown in, this is essentially what Excitebike 64 is as it acts as a continuation of all which is great about it but reimagined in a brand new perspective; it's even the first officially released worldwide sequel if you don't count Excitebike: Bun Bun Mario Battle Stadium released for the Japanese only Satellaview which was more of a remake anyway - though we wouldn't say no to a digital re-release Nintendo - so this is a very significant entry which many will be glad to see as a VC title being that we didn't get it on the Wii at all.

Created by Left Field Productions this is more of an extreme sports stylised reimagining of Excitebike which is fine as it lends itself to polygonal 3D very well, after working through the tutorial - which is worth sticking with to the very end as performing all the tricks will unlock the original NES Excitebike as a bonus - you can pick your different colour bike along with its rider who each have different stats despite being rather unremarkable in appearance, they usually have suitably outlandish names so I went with 'Jumpin' Jim Rivers before hitting the dirt track. 

Going through the Season races is where most of the on-track action is, you have twenty tracks in total to try your hand at over time, not all of them are that varied in their setting though you do get a bit of variation from the outdoor tracks which break up the predictability of the indoor circuits; there are even shortcuts to find if you're brave enough and some cool trackside detail in places such as the 3D N64 logo which seems to be a staple feature of every Nintendo racing game on the console in one form or another. You'll need to be at your best if you want to win races as well which you need to do in order to unlock further tracks, so every bump will need to be carefully calculated, your oponents should be either avoided or taken down to your advantage depending on how you want to play it, that Turbo boost must be used sparingly as well because the cooldown seems to be much longer than in the original game.

Go on, take down that faceless racer in front of you... whatever their name is.

Timing a double tap of the turbo button at the top of a jump seems to give you an extra lift so this is a neat trick to learn if you want to have every advantage for those later races, turns can be ever so tight too which will likely have you using the right shoulder button in conjunction with the brakes at just the right moment for a power-slide which can either win or cost you the race. The controls do take a little bit of getting used to but if you're the type of player who really likes the reward of triumphing over a method of control which is effective once you've tamed it, then you will likely relish in this though I wouldn't be surprised if anyone ended up using restore points to their advantage in order to learn certan parts of the track as it really is a lot to take in so it can be handy to have these modern save states to help you along, though be careful when you choose to use them as you might just find yourself wishing you'd never bothered if you save in an unrecoverable position like in the middle of a water hazard.

You can even perform tricks while in mid-air if you feel so inclined, personally I found the system to be a little bit fiddly so I didn't really attempt to master any tricks but it's nice to have the extra depth even if it does seem a little bit on the superfluous side which panders to a certain audience, while detracting a little bit from the pure concept of its origins. For all of its flawed ambition in one area there are a few interesting additions elsewhere such as a Desert bike scramble mode where you race towards checkpoints, Stunt Mode lets you pull of those "sick tricks" if that's your thing, Soccer is basically Football with bikes, The Hill Climb is a death-defying challenge to make it up a steep mountain alive and lastly there is the unlockable Excite 3D which is a 3D version of a course from the NES game; some of these are welcome distractions whereas others won't hold your attention for long but at least the developers tried.

And if you eventually tire of all that then you can always make your own tracks via the fully functional Course Editor which is actually another cute nod to the games origins, it gives you more than enough pieces to play with so you can come up with some really entertaining environments if you put your mind to it. I don't see any reason why you wouldn't be able to "share" your creations via Miiverse in a way as well if you were to take a picture of your finished track in zoomed out form, I didn't test this but this might add a bit more appeal for any budding creators within the community; oh and you can save your tracks despite the game giving you messages about a missing Controller Pak as this is just something which harks back to the days of the original console where you'd save extra things to a memory card in the slot of the controller itself, crazy times indeed.

Don't mind me, I'm just getting some "crazy, mad, sick air" or whatever it's called these days.  

Even though it utilises the full power of the N64 Expansion Pak which you'll need to turn on in the options to utilise the "better" visuals, there still isn't a lot here worth noting aside from it's all pretty well modelled but the realistic style just merges much of the track with surrounding area, while the riders themselves have some detail but are hard to tell apart; all of the bikes look pretty solid though and all of the menus along with the HUD have an inoffensive enough design to them, there's just not that much charm to it, hence I went with replay footage with less of it for the screenshots as there just isn't much to look at but you can appreciate it on a basic level as it's far from rough, merely unremarkable.

The soundtrack is mostly Rock coupled with some modern Hip-Hop just to balance things out a bit, it's a shame because I think there could have been a lot more to this game if Nintendo had managed to splash out on some licensed tracks akin to something like Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 which would have likely gone down pretty well or even if a little bit more effort had been put into the existing tracks as they just aren't anywhere near as memorable as the original Excitebike theme. All of the bikes makes some rather lovely sounds though which are as authentic as possible considering this is an N64 title so this all adds to the experience, as does the announcer although you may well tire of him picking on your character when you're at the back of the race at any time, though he has some pretty amusing commentary on any take-downs which may happen during the race so it balances out.

If there ever was a Nintendo owned franchise which deserves another chance at success then it's definitely Excitebike as this 64-bit version proves, at this point many of us would have even played the US exclusive Excitebots from the Wii era if it was given a fair digital re-release so there's clearly a market for a game bearing the "Excite" moniker. As for this entry, if you've played the original game and have always been curious about what the series is like in full 3D then I would definitely advise picking this up as it's very rewarding if you have the time to put into it or even if you're looking for an occasional alternative multiplayer title for some bike-based battles, this is still a valiant and underrated attempt at keeping the series semi-relevant through the ages.    

That's it for another installment of VC Weekly which will return again soon. So until then, enjoy the rest of the week and Game On!