The Game:
Of all the Wii launch titles, Excite Truck certainly wasn't considered one of the "must haves." Considering the unending love-fest for Twilight Princess and the overwhelmingly negative attention paid to Red Steel, any non-party game got lost in the shuffle. It took me almost five months to even give Excite Truck a try, but what I found pleasantly surprised me.

The game is simple. Off-road racing. Nothing more, nothing less. No crazy plot involving racing your way to the top of some list of street racers, no Big Mutha Truckers style redneck non-humor. Just straight up racing with the Wii remote.

To play, you hold the Wii remote horizontally, with the D-pad and face buttons facing upwards. You tilt the ends of the remote up and down to move the truck left and right. The 2 button supplies gas. The 1 button puts on the brake. Pressing any button on the D-pad gives you a turbo boost. When you're in the air, you can lean the remote towards yourself to get air or away from you to land sooner.

And that's about all there is to it. Sounds simple, but the simplicity is the key. The game really gives the impression of speed, so as you go careening across the landscape, the last thing you want to worry about are complicated button combinations. In many ways, Excite Truck is the essence of Wii game play. How often have people described the allure of the system as "Remember when you'd play games as a kid and wave the controller around to get the character to move?" That's exactly what you're doing here.

However, there is a significant break from other racing games with Excite Truck. In 99.99% of other racers, the only concern is to finish first. In Excite Truck, your goal is to collect stars. The way you would go about doing this is by successfully completing several daredevil actions. Some are as simple as drifting, others are as thrilling as racing through a bank of trees while in a turbo boost. Collecting stars is as easy as racing hard and throwing in a little style. Finishing the race garners you stars, and the higher you rank, the more stars you get. Gathering the requisite number of stars unlocks new cars.

There are a few other tweaks. As you go through the level, you will come across exclamation marks floating on the track. Driving through them alters the terrain in front of you, creating peaks and valleys that provide more opportunities than the landscape would be otherwise. Additionally, you can find "POW!" signs which make you temporarily invulnerable and provide a power boost at the same time. The last little quirk involves your normal turbo, the one you active by pressing the D-pad. The longer you run it, the more your car heats up. If it heats up too much, your car stalls for a period. However, you can cool the car down by driving through water or flying through the air. So knowing when to use your boost and when to ease up is also important.

Aside from the main racing mode, there are several challenge modes. On the whole, the challenge modes feel tacked-on (with the exception of a smash challenge, which is basically Excite Bumper Cars), as does the half-baked tutorial mode. If you like, you can also grab a friend and do some two-player split-screen action (why they limited it to two players is beyond me). If you think wagging your Wii remote around in front of you is fun by yourself, wait until you try it with a buddy by your side. Truly exciting.

The Graphics:
The main criticism leveled at the Wii launch titles was that they were nothing but Gamecube games with a new control scheme. And graphically, it's hard to deny that Excite Truck is a ruddy, gruff experience. In some ways, since this is outdoor off-roading, this isn't exactly a bad thing. But it's certainly not going to win any awards. Luckily, the breakneck speeds that you'll be traveling at most of the time mean you won't be looking at any one texture for too long.

The Audio:
As far as car games go, Excite Truck does not have the most impressive audio. There are some rev up sounds, some speeding noises, and occasionally the Wii speaker is used. The soundtrack is nothing but generic guitar rock, certainly serviceable but utterly forgettable. Apparently Nintendo figured this out, too, because the game lets you load MP3s from the SD slot on the Wii so you can overlay your own soundtrack on top. Kudos for that, at least.

The Conclusion:
Excite Truck has a simple concept. Drive your heart out. Weaving the Wii control around while trying to prevent your truck from careening out of control is undeniable fun. While the graphics and audio are not impressive in the slightest, the game play is too much fun to avoid. Recommended.