If opponents get in your way, sideswipe them with your back wheel to make them spin out. Hit the turbo just before a jump to send your bike soaring, but make sure you adjust your landing angle or you’ll end up eating dirt. Roar across the dirt and take down rival riders to claim victory in the main event, or design your own monster motocross track to race on!Ĭhoose to either play alone and practise your techniques, or race against computer-controlled rivals in a thrilling Challenge race to qualify for the prestigious Excitebike Championship. Long before Excite Truck for Wii, there was Excitebike for NES a wheelie-poppin’, mud-flingin’, side-scrollin’ motocross masterpiece. Some might be dubious and question if a game this old is worth purchasing for the Virtual Console, but worry not - this classic game has somehow managed to retain its appeal. After all, it was one of the original launch titles for the NES way back in 1985. I really have to thank my parents for spoiling me like that.Excitebike will no doubt be remembered fondly by older gamers. In that respect, being in a place where I could play all the NES games I wanted wound up being my connection to game development. The combat in Yakuza really retains some of that, I think. I think one of the really core ways of having fun with games is pushing buttons and seeing what kind of cool stuff happens. One of the core concepts I carry around is that I make games you can play with just one or two buttons. "It still makes me think to this day," he explained, "because I often wonder if I can make a game that really feels bottomless like that. It's a philosophy that, believe it or not, still drives a lot of Yokoyama's design decisions in Yakuza. You keep on trying new things, and you really just never touch the bottom of it." I mean, that course looks really simple on the surface, so you'd think you'd master the best route pretty much immediately, right? But that's just not how it works.
The really crazy thing was that I was still breaking this record on regular occasions by my senior year of high school. "I'd tape a piece of paper with my best record next to the TV, and I'd write a new one every time I broke it. "The only thing I ever did was race against the clock on track 1," he said. But Yokoyama saw a far greater depth to it. Push A for the gas, push B for the turbo, don't crash. One of the original Nintendo Entertainment System releases, Excitebike is a pretty simple race game on the surface. I pretty much always took it out before going to bed at night and I kept that up until my senior year in high school, so I probably played it for something like 2000 days in a row." "I mean, I played it to the point that I've still got calluses on my fingers from it. "I got completely addicted to Excitebike," Yokoyama told Famitsu. With a library like that at his fingertips, you'd probably expect Yokoyama to be some kind of hardcore RPG addict. I had a lot of opportunity to get involved with games back then."
#PLAY ORIGINAL EXCITEBIKE PLUS#
That, plus I was really sick for a year or two in elementary school so I could engage in any strenuous physical activity. I probably sound pretty spoiled, but I was pretty much able to pick and choose whatever game I wanted to. How did this happen? "My dad was the manager of the toy section of a department store," Yokoyama explained, "so it was pretty easy for us to get our hands on games. Some of your readers would consider this a dream environment, but when I was a kid, we had something like 500 games in the house." "Now that I look back," he told Famitsu magazine in an interview published this week, "I think the groundwork for games was laid pretty early in my life. How he got in this position probably has a lot to do with the incredibly spoiled video-game life he led as a kid. Sega's Masayoshi Yokoyama is the producer of the upcoming Yakuza 5 and has contributed scriptwriting and production work to every other game in the sandbox mobster series.