Excitebots: Trick Racing — A 7.8/10 Racing Game That Never Left North America

Excitebots: Trick Racing is a racing game about throwing pies at high speed. It came out on April 20, 2009, built by Monster Games and published by Nintendo for the Wii. It is the fourth entry in the Excite series and the direct sequel to Excite Truck, which arrived in 2006.

The pitch is simple and strange. You drive animal-themed robot vehicles across 25 courses modeled after real locations on Earth, and you score points by doing almost anything except driving cleanly. That is the part that matters, and it is also the part that got the game stranded.

Pie Throwing and Bowling Pins

Excitebots runs on the Wii Remote held horizontally, with the Wii Wheel as an optional shell. That is the same setup Nintendo used for Mario Kart Wii, and the game shipped both with and without the wheel, so buyers could pick their package.

The courses are large. That size is deliberate. Because each track sprawls and offers meandering paths, most races last only two laps. Two laps on a course this big means the racing is less about line and more about volume — how much altitude you can grab, how many maneuvers you can chain, how many items you can collect before the finish line.

Stars decide everything. Each trick, stunt, minigame and item yields stars, and the star count sets your final grade. The grading scale runs from D at the bottom to S at the top. Beating the other bots matters, but it is not the whole score. You can win and still grade badly if you drove a boring race.

The star sources are where the game stops being a racer:

• Gaining extreme altitude off inclined terrain
• Smashing into other bots at high speed
• Altering the terrain ahead to send leading bots skyward
• Ramming bowling pins
• Grabbing offensive items — bombs, hammers — and using them well
• Swinging on bars, including a mandatory red bar on every course

There are also short minigames during the racing itself: pie throwing, bowling, soccer. The mandatory red bar is the tell. Every single course requires it, which means Excitebots is not asking whether you want to do the weird thing. It is asking how well you do the weird thing.

A Sequel That Never Left North America

Here is the fact that defines Excitebots more than any mechanic. Despite positive reception from critics, the game was never sold in stores outside North America.

Nintendo Australia’s managing director, Rose Lappin, gave the reason directly. Excitebots would not release in Australia “due to lack of interest,” she said.

Japan eventually got it, but not in shops. The game arrived there in August 2011 under the name Excite Mou Machine, and only through Club Nintendo. A fifth game in the series, Excitebike: World Rally, came out in 2009 for WiiWare.

So the fourth Excite game is a Wii title with a full retail release, a Wii Wheel bundle option, and 25 courses — and most of the world never had a shelf to find it on.

What the Two-Lap Structure Actually Does

The two-lap decision is the smartest thing in Excitebots, and it is worth being precise about why.

Long courses plus short races means the game has to keep feeding you. There is no time to settle into a rhythm and grind out a clean lap. Every stretch of terrain is a chance to launch, and the terrain-altering mechanic pushes that further — you can reshape the ground ahead of you and fire the bots in front of you into the sky. That is a racing game where the lead is not safe and the road itself is a weapon.

The minigames are thinner. Pie throwing, bowling and soccer are short by design, and they sit inside the race rather than replacing it. They are star dispensers with a joke attached. Whether that joke lands depends on how much you want a racing game to keep interrupting itself.

The mandatory red bar is the honest version of this. It guarantees that no course lets you skip the swinging. Nintendo and Monster Games committed to the bit.

The Grade

Excitebots: Trick Racing scores 7.8 out of 10, matching the published critic aggregate across five outlets.

That number is right, and the reason is not the trick list. The trick list is genuinely good. Altitude, terrain manipulation, ramming, the red bar — this is a game with a clear idea of what it wants to be, and it executes that idea without hedging. The two-lap structure is a real design solution to a real problem, and the S-through-D grading gives the whole thing a spine. You are always being asked to do more than finish.

The problem is that Excitebots never got a fair test. A game this committed to its own strangeness needed a wide audience to argue with it, and it got North America and a Club Nintendo listing in Japan. Lappin’s “lack of interest” line is the whole story of its reach. You cannot build interest in a game you do not stock.

The minigames are the weaker half — short, funny, and gone before they develop. The animal-robot vehicles are a costume rather than a character set. None of that sinks it.

What limits everything is the scope. Excitebots is a sequel to Excite Truck that doubles down on stunts and stars, and it is better for it. It is also a game that asked players to choose the stranger option over the Mario Kart Wii already sitting on the same shelf. Some did. Most never got the chance.

Seventeen years on, the score holds at 7.8 of 10. The game deserved a wider release than it got, and that is a distribution failure, not a design one.

Excitebots · Excitebots Trick Racing · monster games · Nintendo Wii · racing games · Wii games