Excitebots: Trick Racing

This one was a surprise. I thought that Excite Trucks was not only the Wii’s best original launch game (I count Twilight Princess as a Gamecube port), but one of the only titles that showed any promise for the system’s motion controls. When Excitebots was announced, it looked way too silly and a little stupid. Upon trying it, however, it proved to be an incredible amount of fun and, obviously, very addictive.

One of the clinchers for this win is the game’s steady difficulty ramp. The racer has a pleasantly challenging difficulty curve for a Nintendo game and once you’re into the insane style, you’re hooked. A few people panned the game for its small selection of maps, and while that is an ultimate detriment, it made it easier to get intensely familiar with the course layout to repeatedly try for that S ranking. And man, some of those S rankings are tough to get. But that’s what made the game fun and addictive.

Ironically, the game’s insane mechanics that initially made me hesitant about the title became the other clincher. Since the racer is unique in that the rankings are actually based on a points system and not necessarily the placement in the race – although that helps – the race becomes a tactical frenzy to find the best way to get a lot of points which are, in this case, stars.

The point is that I played this game nonstop for a very long time this year, and that’s more than I can say for most games in a year packed full of some great ones. That’s it! ‘Till tomorrow!

Runner up: Peggle (XBox Live)