Excite Truck, if you haven't figured it out yet, is a spin-off of Nintendo's classic Excitebike series, with trucks instead of bikes. The game is basically an arcade rally-style racer, with a heavy emphasis on boosting, crashing, and insane jumps. In all, the game feels quite a bit like another popular arcade racing series, Burnout, in the way that players increase their scores by driving like a complete maniac. You get points by taking out other cars, making massive jumps, and crashing, which you'll be doing a lot of (more on that later). Players will be doing a lot of jumping, as it functions as the main way to get ahead of opponents and accumulate points. Another cool feature are various "?" blocks strewn about the race course. However, unlike certain other Nintendo-published racing games, these blocks don't give you items, but instead change the actual playing field, raising parts of the track. This helps in two ways, giving you an new jump to boost off of, as well as catapulting any opponents unlucky enough to be on that part of the track when it rises into the stratosphere.

Of course, this would all be standard fare in any other racing game, except for the fact that this game is played on the Wii. To play the game, the controller is held in what is referred to as "classic style", on its side like an NES controller. To turn right, simply tilt the controller to the right, and left for left. The 2 button is the accelerator, and the 1 button is for brake, while boosting is done by pressing up on the D-pad. Although the controls are very simple, they felt really intuitive, and it was never uncomfortable to hold the controller in this way. The only problem with this is one that is inherent to the Wii controller - the tilt technology, with it's lack of force feedback, makes it easy to over-steer, and thus spin out and crash. While it wasn't completely broken, it certainly needed a bit of work, although the game was still early.

While the game was one of the less impressive graphically of the Wii games shown at E3, that doesn't mean it didn't have potential. The dust and lighting effects were rather nice, and the game looks to be heading to many various exotic locales like Fiji and Mexico, and while there wasn't much to see in both areas except for trees, water, and cacti, it all looked reasonably good, and better than most stuff seen previously on GameCube. The music seemed to be basic hard-rocking fare, good enough for a driving game of any sort.

The game seemed quite early in development at E3, as things like the amount of players (which I have a hunch will be more than one), and online capabilities were still being ironed out. Still, while Excite Truck certainly didn't race at full throttle at E3 2006, there's certainly enough potential here to move this game into the winner's circle when it launches with the Wii this fall.