Arcade Motorcycle Racing Game: VS. Excitebike

VS. Excitebike was the second game in Nintendo's Excite series, releasing to arcades on the VS. System on December 5, 1984, one day short of a week after the release of the original Excitebike on the Family Computer, the Japanese version of the Nintendo Entertainment System.

The game is graphically identical to Excitebike, taking place on a two-dimensional plane with obstacles such as jumps, hills, and mud. It contained the two-button control set up with a regular accelerator button and a turbo button. The turbo button causes the bike to overheat, but switching to regular acceleration or running over an arrow on the track will cause the bike to cool down.

It contains the same motor running sound effects, jumping sounds, and overheating sounds as the original, as well as the catchy music played at the beginning of the tracks and when a race is won, as well as the downbeat music played when a race is lost.

As it was released for the VS. System, the biggest addition this game added was the ability to play a game for two players, connected through the arcade hardware on two separate screens. Because it is an arcade game, the design function of the original game has been removed. To make up for the lack of the ability to create custom tracks, the total amount of tracks has been increased from five to seven. The game also alternates between playing on tracks with one player or many opponents, playing trough all seven tracks twice rather than having a selection between modes at the beginning of the game.

VS. Excitebike is an interesting follow-up to the original Excitebike that adds two tracks not seen before. The Family Computer Disk System port of VS. Excitebike, which is substantially different enough to the arcade game to deserve its own review, is the best way to play the original 8-bit trilogy of sorts. However, now that VS. Excitebike is available to officially purchase for home use, it might be worth checking out if you enjoyed the original game.

Final Verdict:

3 out of 5

Arcade Passenger Delivery Racing Game Review: Crazy Taxi

Crazy Taxi was the first title in Sega's long-lived franchise of the same name. It brought a fast-paced rush against the timer style-game that is less of a taxi simulation and more of a racing game with marked stops to pick up and drop off passengers. That style of game worked wonders in the arcade.

The game starts with an attract mode featuring the very 1990s skate punk music of The Offspring and Bad Religion, assuming the venue has attract mode music on. My local Walmart always had the attract mode off, which is understandable, as it would drive the cashiers crazy after a while. After a quarter is inserted, the deep-throated voice of DJ Bryan Burton-Lewis, a tokyo-based disc jockey, tells you to pick a car and driver. 

There are four drivers to choose from, each with their own convertible-modified taxi. The charaters included the green haired maniac Axel, the funky cool B.D. Joe, the calm and cool Gina, and the slick open-shirted Gus. My friends, family, and I always went with the same characters. My friend would choose Axel, with his New York-city style taxi, my sister would choose B.D. Joe with his taxi with an elongated hood, and I would choose Gina, with her taxi with white paint down the front and back. No one I ever knew chose Gus. He did have a pretty cool car though, with its classic 1950s-style curved hood. 

The characters would pick up passengers, who lines based on your skill at picking them up including "watch it, you nearly killed me", your performance such as "I'm gonna be late", or indicating their destination, such as "take me to the KFC". In regards to the latter, the original arcade version of the game included several real-life American brands including the aforementioned KFC, Levi's, and Pizza Hut.

Each person requesting pick up has a circle at their feet which indicate how far their fare will take them. Red indicates short fares, yellow indicates medium-distance fares, and green indicates the longest fares. The farther the fare, the better the pay, but it will also run out your timer if you aren't careful. If you make it to the destination quickly, you can earn bonus time, so it's smart to pick up a bunch of red fares if time is running short. You can also make more money from your passengers by doing stunts such as drifting.

As this is an arcade game, your money is added up when the timer runs out. Your score indicates your license rank. If you get $0 at the end, you get no license, and the licenses go up from there by every thousand. The ranks range from E to A, then to S, with E being the worst and S being the best. If you do better than that, you will get an "Awesome" rank at fares above $10,000, and a "Crazy" rank at scores above $20,000. Ranks S and above will get you to the rolling credits. After the game is over, or the credits are over in the cases of high ranks, the player will be able to add their three letter name to the leaderboard.

Crazy Taxi has always been a fun game to play in the arcades, as it is another feeling altogether playing with a physical steering wheel, brakes, gas pedal, and a drive to reverse shifter. However, more than a quarter century later, it is a bonefide arcade classic. From the 90s skate punk music, to the deep tones of the announcer, and especially to the smooth and addicting gameplay, Crazy Taxi is a game anyone can enjoy.

Final Verdict:

4½ out of 5

Motorcycle Racing Game Review: Excitebike

Excitebike was an influential early motocross racing game for the Nintendo Entertainment System. There have been many more realistic games released after this, including Nintendo's own Excitebike 64, but the original game still has retro charm.

The game takes place on a two-dimensional stage with various obstacles in the way such as jumps and hills. If there is a small obstacle on the ground, pressing up at the right time lets the motorbike go over it without crashing, and pressing up at the right level to the ground on a jump will prevent a crash as well. 

Pressing the B button will activate a turbo boost, but if it is held for too long, the bike will overheat. A loud warning sound will play when the overheat meter gets too high. There are arrows on the ground that will immediately reset the turbo meter when you hit it. 

This was an early NES game, predating the NES itself when it was released on the Japanese version of the NES, the Family Computer, in 1984. As such, it is very arcade-like with a simple selection of two modes when the game starts. Game A is the time trial or practice mode and Game B lets you play against the patterns that make up the enemy movements in versus CPU mode.  There are ten stages, which increase in difficulty as they go on. The racers become faster and the obstacles become tougher. If you fail to qualify by finishing in third place or better, you will be returned back to the select stage screen.

As it is such an early game, there wasn't much in the way of music here. For most of the game, you will just here the engine running sound or the engine overheat warning sound. There are musical jingles at the start of the game and between stages. The title screen and winning screen have a happy tune, the start of each race is also pleasant, leading into three beeps signaling the start of a race. Failing to qualify will lead to a fail screen with suitably melancholy music.

The thing that really elevates this game past average status and into the hearts of people who played it in the 1980s or 1990s is the track creation system. This is actually surprisingly quite robust, allowing you to choose from any of the obstacles from any of the stages to be used in your creations. The biggest drawback of this was that early carts didn't come with battery saving so the tracks could only be played on the console where they were created, which at release led to hoping that the game didn't become corrupt while waiting for your friends to come to your house to show off your creations.

The expanded version on the Famicom Disk System fixed this issue when it was released in Japan. International players got the ability to save with the emulation-based services like Virtual Console on Wii, Wii U, Nintendo 3DS, and New Nintendo 3DS as well as Nintendo Entertainment System – Nintendo Classics for Nintendo Switch.

Excitebike is an interesting little game. It isn't much by today's standards, but there's no doubting its impact on the video game industry. It comes from the age when video games were brutally hard, so there's a lot of challenge in there for people who want to complete all ten courses. Today's emulation-based re-releases of the game definitely help with that. Emulation also helps with those who want to play around with the track maker, but it's a shame that the modern re-releases never came with the option to share your creations with friends over the internet.

Addendum October 8, 2025: There is also an arcade version for the PlayChoice-10. This version is identical to the NES version, except there is a time limit in place where the game will quit when time runs out.

Final Verdict:

3 out of 5

Arcade Maze Test Game Review: Dottori-Kun

In 1990, Japanese law required that all arcade cabinets had to be shipped with a working game so that purchasers could plug it in and immediately test whether the cabinet was functional. Thus, companies created simple games with cheap hardware that could be included and then disposed of by the purchaser. Taito created Mini Vaders, based on Space Invaders, for their EGRET candy cabinets. Sega created Dottori-kun as the game that was included with its Astro City arcade candy cabinets.

Like Taito, Sega also reached back into the 1970s for their test game. Dottori-kun was based on Head-On, a maze game released by Sega in 1979. Like Mini Vaders, Dottori-kun was a monochrome game with no sound and no score tracking. The buttons only change the color of the background and game graphics, although they still remain as tinted monochrome. Dottori-kun was never meant to be released commercially, but presumably, for the sake of completion, Sega Toys included it in its Astro City Mini video game console.

Despite the lack of sound and a score, Dottori-kun remains fun. As it is based on Sega's Head On, it is a game that combines maze games with automotive chicken. The goal is to collect all of the dots on the four rectangular-shaped roads. The hitch is that each road is only large enough for one vehicle and there is a computer-controlled racer zooming around the tracks in the opposite direction. There are splits in the roads at the center, so the trick is to grab the dots when the opponent car is on another road so that you can collect the dots and then turn onto another road so that the two cars aren't coming at each other head on.

Dottori-kun is an arcade game from 1990 that is a simplified version of the already simple 1979 arcade game Head On. Despite it just being a test game with monochrome graphics, no sound, and no score tracking, it still is remarkably fun. I'm glad Sega Toys included it in the Astro City Mini since this game doesn't deserve to be junked.

Final Verdict:

3 out of 5