How Excite Truck plays

While the Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess has been stealing the spotlight Nintendo has another North American launch title for the Wii, Excite Truck. Excite Truck uses the Wii Remote like a virtual steering wheel where you tilt left and right like you were actually driving. While driving on a course there are exclamation point icons to run over. Hitting one of these morphs the terrain and creates ramps for the trucks to get some air. In mid air the Wii Remote can be tilted to control the angle of the truck’s decent. The goal of this segment is to get all four truck wheels to touch the ground simultaneously. If a player can achieve this the truck will get a speed boost. In many ways Excite Truck sounds like a spiritual successor to Excitebike from the NES days. While Excitebike was about stunts and jumps, the course creation mode gave Excitebike its legendary status. Courses were simple all players could do was place hills and obstacles on a track, but at the time that was pretty amazing to do. While no design mode has been announced in Excite Truck, terrain morphing is sort of an active form of course redesign.

See Excite Truck’s box art past the break.