Mad as a box of frogs
Nintendo spoiled its fans when the Wii launched in 2006. Not only was there a massive single-player Zelda adventure, Twilight Princess, but there was an all-ages sports game with an emphasis on action. One that relied on motion control to extend the play experience into your living room — forming a full-bodied connection between you and the game. And everyone forgot about it!
“But Abram, Wii Sports is one of the best-selling games ever,” you exclaim from the toilet, on which you’re reading this article. And that’s true. In honor of anti-AI season, though, I’m being circuitous, engaging in typed theatrics simply because there’s joy in playing with words — even though Skybox’s style sheet tells me to be concise. (And I’m using copious amounts of em dashes — ChatGPT can pry that punctuation from my cold, dead hands.)
The forgotten game I’m talking about is the third that Nintendo published for the launch, Monster Games’ Excite Truck. (Which, incidentally, you control by holding the Wii Remote on its side, this configuration looking a lot like — you guessed it — an em dash.) Excite Truck is the quintessentially American racing game, fitting, given Monster Games was the rare Nintendo partner based in the States and previously worked on NASCAR games.
It exemplified the Wii’s all-ages appeal, insofar as it involved chaotically zipping around offroad racetracks at ludicrous speeds all the while gaining points for ramming full-tilt into other trucks. To an 8-year-old American child, it was sick because monster trucks are awesome. To a 58-year-old American man, it was sick because monster trucks are awesome and you could drink a beer while smashing through shit at high speed.
Better yet, Excite Truck is always launching you into the air with enough hangtime off a massive, dynamically emerging jump over the Finnish Icecaps to check your email, brew some coffee, and return to your Wii Remote to vigorously crank 360s before landing. Smashing into dudes gets the adrenaline pumping, but soaring over them is euphoric. Even though you’re racing through real-world landscapes and driving lifelike trucks, there’s a strong element of fantasy.
But Excite Truck looks generic. It hails from the tradition of classics like Excitebike 64 and Wave Race: Blue Storm — Nintendo racers concerned with realistic aesthetics meant to make their motorsports action seem all the more real. Excite Truck is larger-than-life, though, and thrilling because of it. Without a more interesting wrapper, it’s little wonder that Excite Truck sold a paltry amount and faded from memory, lost among the many third-party middling racers on the system.
Three years later, Monster Games returned, having tuned up the Excite formula while repurposing its engine. Excitebots: Trick Racing not only plays very similarly to its predecessor, but shares assets and track themes too. But the two couldn’t feel more distinct. Gone are the realistic jeeps — in their place robotic animals to race like grasshoppers, frogs, and mice. And you don’t simply control various critters on wheels: pick up the wrench item on the track and you’ll become a biped!
Suddenly, you’re playing as a robo-frog who can get up on two feet and boogie. But sometimes you aren’t merely a robo-frog on two feet obliterating the trees that outline the track. Sometimes, you end up on a grind rail that you shred until you’re thrown in the air where you collect music notes to sing a song that earns points.
The only thing that makes sense about Excitebots is that nothing makes any goddamn sense at all. Return to wheel mode after your rail grinding, and before long, you’ll find an item that conjures a set of bowling pins for you to crash into. Later on, you’ll find a pie to throw at a clown’s face. There’s sometimes a mid-race dart competition for good measure. Oh, and Mario Kart style items… like a tambourine or wind-up joke teeth.
All this excess is flying at you while you race. That dart competition isn’t an intermission, it’s a multi-tasking skill check. As this mania unfolds, you’re still contending with everything tremendous about Excite Truck: spectacular collisions and mid-air 720-degree spins make up the moment-to-moment amid all the carnival zaniness.
If you need a slower paced attraction that’ll let you catch your breath, go check out the poker races, where you earn score by collecting cards laid out around the track to make the best poker hands. You know — that mode that’s in every racing game?
For me, it was love at first sight (in an issue of Nintendo Power). I anxiously awaited the GameFly shipment with my rental copy, since 8-year-old Abram — in one of the prime Excite ages — didn’t have $40 for a copy. Its memory never left me during the intervening years wherein I didn’t have Excitebots spinning in my disc drive. Upon finally getting another copy, I was immediately cycling through tricks. You never forget how to handle a wheeled-biped-robo-frog. Of course, that handling isn’t great, and you spend half the races on unintentional Tree Runs without aptly tight turning ability. Excite Bots is certainly no Mario Kart Wii.
But I don’t care. Excite Bots: Trick Racing isn’t the Wii game to play with grandpa. It revels in the joy of illogic. It’s the good kind of non-fungible. No other development team, let alone a machine, could brew one similar. You catch butterflies suspended in bubbles one moment and kick a soccer ball the next, all while vying for pole position. Too much for you? Stick to Baby Mario puttering around Yoshi Falls in the Tiny Titan. Go back to 50cc. Leave the insects, the grind rails, the bowling pins, the pies, the poker hands, the robo-froglegs — everything in Monster Games’ off-kilter, alchemical potion — to me.
