Excite Truck

Excite Truck was among the first games to appear alongside the console, and remains to this day the purest demonstration of what it means to steer just by tilting the controller. The Wiimote is held horizontally with both hands, and turning it left and right steers, while tilting it forward or backward adjusts the angle of landing while airborne. You race with over-powered off-road pickup trucks across wide tracks spanning America, Asia, and icy plains, and the goal isn't just to finish first. Points are earned for jumps, drifts, close calls with trees, and flashy landings, and only the total number of stars decides whether a race advances further.

The game's biggest idea is the changeable terrain. Collecting blue symbols raises new hills and ramps beneath your wheels right during the race, so a track you just drove through looks different on the second lap. The result is racing that resembles jump acrobatics more than a fight for the ideal line, and the game supports this with generous forgiveness for mistakes: hitting a tree doesn't mean the end, just a loss of momentum. The controls take a little getting used to because the tilt sensitivity is high, but once the player adjusts, it gives a sense of direct connection to the vehicle that a classic gamepad can't offer.

Technically it's a smoothly running game with open views of the landscape, though it bets more on speed and readability than detail; the textures and surroundings were already fairly simple at the time of release. The soundtrack consists of rock tracks that could be replaced with your own music loaded from an SD card, which was a fairly unusual option on the console at the time. Reviews praised the freshness of the controls while also pointing out the sparse content and the missing full online mode. Today Excite Truck is a pleasantly straightforward title for short sessions and at the same time a historical document of how the developers played with the console's main trump card right from the start. For a newcomer, it's also one of the few games where it's enough to just take the controller in both hands and drive right away.