There are a few tweaks to the gameplay – like the ability to wheelie over opponents – that feel like a natural evolution for the NES original. And Monster Games did a great job in retaining what made the original an addictive Nintendo design. Simple as its sounds, Excitebike is still a fun game even if it's a little limited and simplistic to today's standards. If you turbo accelerate too much your bike will overheat and stall, cooled only by letting off the gas, running over strips on the road, or knocking other racers over by swiping them with your rear wheels. You can also tilt your bike back and forth with either the D-pad or motion on the Wii Remote depending on what control option you choose.
![8 bit excitebike 8 bit excitebike](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/DvU5xWhXBqI/maxresdefault.jpg)
The game controls as simply as possible: you've got acceleration, you've got turbo acceleration, and you've got the ability to shift your bike between the four lanes. And extra bikes are unlocked if you manage to cross the line with an S-ranked time, so you'll need to get a grasp of what keeps your speed up in Excitebike. Every goof up is precious seconds off the clock, and with this design every millisecond counts: if you don't score the minimum time possible you can't move onto the next race. You're not trying to beat these opponents – you're trying to cross the finish line in the shortest time possible. Excitebike was more of an action game than it was a racer, and the single player is still the same way: navigate through the side-scrolling tracks and its hazards all while weaving through slower-paced computer racers. The game looks pretty spot-on in its rebuilding of the classic, but it also looks pretty sharp in the Wii's widescreen progressive mode.
![8 bit excitebike 8 bit excitebike](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-PPnmlrwnNTk/Tm1E-iN7JJI/AAAAAAAAAP4/_5IHRdYRNx8/s1600/Excite-Bike-3.jpg)
Excitebike: World Rally is a direct conversion of Excitebike from the NES, but instead of 8-bit sprites and backgrounds, the team built out 3D characters and environments and kept the style as minimalist as possible.
![8 bit excitebike 8 bit excitebike](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/t09eQV9cB1g/maxresdefault.jpg)
The developer of Excitetruck and Excitebots, Monster Games, has recreated the game that inspired those designs.