Excitebike was pioneering in the '80s for being one of the first racing games to ever let you build your own track from scratch. But those enhancements do add a lot of value, and the biggest of them all comes in the game's Design mode. As it is, this is basic Excitebike - albeit with a lot of nifty enhancements to the presentation surrounding that core game.
Had Arika endeavored to implement more gameplay features like multiplayer (which WiiWare's World Rally first brought us) then a case could be made that the core, underlying game has been enhanced.
Even a fully-featured version of it like this one won't challenge the best modern racers and can't reasonably be awarded the highest of review scores. Excitebike's never been Nintendo's deepest game design. If you do crash - and you will, at some point - madly pressing A and B as fast as possible gets you back astride your ride just a bit quicker. So you have to press Left on the Pad to pop wheelies and avoid tripping over low obstacles, and also weave back and forth across the course to keep from running into enemy racers. It likes to drop its speed severely after a jump off a ramp or over a hill, so you have to use the D-Pad to reposition its wheels in mid-air to match the angle of the surface you're about to land on and preserve your momentum. Its engine is prone to overheating, so you must judiciously balance between its normal A Button acceleration and heat-building B Button turbo settings to keep it from shutting down on you mid-race. You control a nameless, helmeted motorcycle racer trying to set speed records across an array of courses and must manage your temperamental bike to do it. On the gameplay front, Excitebike plays the same as it always has. New storm clouds make mud-covered Track 4 more ominous. But sliding it up starts easing in the stereoscopic "wow" factor, while giving you a glimpse at what's been in the background of all these many Excitebike races over the past 25 years - you see more of the crowd gathered in the seats at the edge of the racetrack, and then, beyond them, an all-new cloud-filled backdrop of sky. Leaving the slider pushed all the way down to the off position gives you a flat, traditional 2D Excitebike view (in new widescreen) that already looks great. Excitebike accomplishes that same goal, but does more at the same time. No other 3DS game has taken that approach so far, as most every other game uses that simple slider to just adjust the "intensity" of the 3D effect. The game has been given an expanded, widescreen ratio to fill the 3DS' upper display and the system's 3D slider inventively bends the camera angle of the action to your desired degree of depth. The development team at Arika rebuilt every aspect of the graphics from scratch, rather than just take the NES pixel art as-is. The 3D visuals are the main selling point, and they work wonderfully well.
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Every part of its package has been given extra polish, making it impressive to the point that Nintendo could have launched it without the month of free access and still seen it post great download numbers. But 3D Classics: Excitebike edges out even that closest competitor because this new edition has clearly been crafted with quality in mind. The GBA re-release squished the display area, the eReader cards were a pain to scan through that gimmicky peripheral one at a time and the WiiWare remake - well, OK, the WiiWare remake was alright. The Excitebike 64 and Animal Crossing unlockables were OK, but you had to buy $50 console games and put in the work meeting their access conditions before you could even get to them. The NES version wouldn't let you save your created tracks, because it lost that functionality when being ported to America's NES from the Japansese original. Looking back across them all, none of Excitebike's earlier editions has really been that great.
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