{"id":1149,"date":"2012-09-26T11:31:34","date_gmt":"2012-09-26T11:31:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.controlpadblues.com\/?p=1149"},"modified":"2012-09-26T11:31:34","modified_gmt":"2012-09-26T11:31:34","slug":"my-top-100-80-excitebike-64","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.controlpadblues.com\/?p=1149","title":{"rendered":"My Top 100: #80 &#8211; Excitebike 64"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_1154\" style=\"width: 510px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.controlpadblues.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/600full-excitebike-64-screenshot.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1154\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1154\" title=\"600full-excitebike-64-screenshot\" src=\"http:\/\/www.controlpadblues.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/600full-excitebike-64-screenshot.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"342\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.controlpadblues.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/600full-excitebike-64-screenshot.jpg 500w, http:\/\/www.controlpadblues.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/600full-excitebike-64-screenshot-300x205.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-1154\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">2000 &#8211; Nintendo (N64)<\/p><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>The original <em>Excitebike <\/em>will always hold a dear place in my heart, if only because it was the second NES game I ever played.\u00a0 We had family friends in Shediac (New Brunswick), and their much-older-than-me son introduced me to the Nintendo system with <em>Super Mario Bros.<\/em>\\<em>Duck Hunt<\/em>, <em>Excitebike, <\/em>and a beat &#8217;em up he didn&#8217;t really want me playing called <em>Renegade<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Looking back, <em>Renegade <\/em>was somewhat awful, so it&#8217;s all good.<\/p>\n<p>In any case, I always loved the whacky colours on display in <em>Excitebike.\u00a0 <\/em>How\u00a0can\u00a0a track be lime green?\u00a0 What on Earth makes dirt show up that colour??\u00a0 It still doesn&#8217;t make sense, but I still play it from time to time.\u00a0 It&#8217;s not exactly an in-depth experience, but it&#8217;s fun for\u00a0a few minutes, anyway.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/8Vs-B-QfwGQ\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>There were a few motorcross games out during the late 90&#8217;s, most of them with a Jeremy McGrath or Ricky Carmichael-caliber name attached to them.\u00a0 The X-Games were starting to soar in popularity, so it was up to Nintendo to revive a long-dormant franchise, and do it properly.<\/p>\n<p>What I loved about <em>Excitebike 64 <\/em>was that it didn&#8217;t rely on\u00a0widely-known tracks or names to be awesome.\u00a0 There were your typical stadium dirt tracks with varying degrees of difficulty, the &#8220;out in nature&#8221; tracks in the desert and snowy areas, and then there were the just plain weird and unrealistic ones.\u00a0 Every track was challenging, and though they weren&#8217;t really re-inventing the wheel, the tight controls made it a\u00a0blast to navigate.<\/p>\n<p>The classic game was included as an unlockable bonus, as were a few other modes, such as Soccer, Excite 3D (a 3D version of the original), a Track Editor and a free-for-all through randomly generated\u00a0checkpoints on a Desert course.\u00a0 Taking out opponents was as simple as it was before &#8211; clip the front tire of the guy behind you, and down they go!\u00a0 You could do stunts going over ramps and stuff, too.\u00a0 I didn&#8217;t much care for that part of it, though.<\/p>\n<p>I loved the heck out of <em>Wave Race 64 <\/em>when it came out, and this just felt like a much more complete version of that game&#8230;\u00a0\u00a0except\u00a0on land, this time.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_1155\" style=\"width: 510px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.controlpadblues.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/nes-excite-bike-on-real-background.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1155\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1155\" title=\"nes-excite-bike-on-real-background\" src=\"http:\/\/www.controlpadblues.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/nes-excite-bike-on-real-background.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"375\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.controlpadblues.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/nes-excite-bike-on-real-background.jpg 500w, http:\/\/www.controlpadblues.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/nes-excite-bike-on-real-background-300x225.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-1155\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Don&#8217;t overheat!<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; The original Excitebike will always hold a dear place in my heart, if only because it was the second NES game I ever played.\u00a0 We had family friends in Shediac (New Brunswick), and their much-older-than-me son introduced&#8230; <a class=\"read-more\" href=\"http:\/\/www.controlpadblues.com\/?p=1149\">Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,23,32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1149","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-excitebike","category-nintendo-64","category-top-100"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.controlpadblues.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1149","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.controlpadblues.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.controlpadblues.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.controlpadblues.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.controlpadblues.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1149"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.controlpadblues.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1149\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1160,"href":"http:\/\/www.controlpadblues.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1149\/revisions\/1160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.controlpadblues.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.controlpadblues.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.controlpadblues.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}