Excitebike 64 - Hill Climb Mode (Actual N64 Capture)
88This is a capture of me playing the Hill Climb mode in Excitebike 64 for the Nintendo 64. This is not an emulator and was not played on the Wii U Virtual Console. This footage was recorded directly from my Nintendo 64 using a real Excitebike 64 cartridge. I'm using my favorite character: Nigel "The Duke" York.
My prior videos of this game suffered from some quality loss due to me deinterlacing the footage in Sony Vegas (it blurs the footage) and uploading at a 480 resolution. Youtube processes different resolutions at different bit rates, so even you if you render a 480p video at a high bit rate, Youtube will reduce it anyway through its terrible processing. I don't have the raw footage of my prior Excitebike 64 recordings, so I decided to record all new footage and upload the videos in a higher quality.
I played the original Excitebike on the NES at my uncle's house when I was kid back around the early '90s. I thought the game was really cool, but more than anything I liked to fool around with the track editor.
Around 2000 I noticed Nintendo Power previewing the upcoming Excitebike 64, but I didn't pay too much attention to it. Shortly after it was released I even managed to play the game at a friend's house and I still didn't give it much thought.
Around early 2001 I played ATV Off Road Fury on a neighbor's PlayStation 2, and I thought the game was fun (I've always liked off-road racing). I immediately decided that I needed a game like that to give me my off-road racing fix, and I remembered Excitebike 64. I called my local Wal-Mart and found that they had the game in stock, so I raced down there and instantly picked up my own copy.
When I got home and started playing Excitebike 64, I found that it was even better than I remembered. In fact, it was so good that it soon took the top spot as my favorite Nintendo 64 racer of all time - even beating out Wave Race 64. The courses were excellent and there was a nice variety of indoor and outdoor tracks, not to mention really fun special modes. There was just so much content that the game never got old. Left Field hit the ball out of the park with this title.
The Hill Climb mode is one of the "Special Tracks" in the game. It's a three-stage climb where you have to race to the top of the mountainside as quickly as possible. This is one of the most difficult modes in the game because of the wild physics. It's incredibly easy to fall off your bike or to simply go shooting sideways clean off the mountain since the game loves forcing your character off the cliff.
Luckily, Hill Climb has two checkpoints that add additional time to your total amount, and you can keep restarting from a checkpoint until you've completely run out of time. I've found that the fastest way to beat this mode is to repeatedly mash the turbo button (Z) for turbo boost jumps while generally holding back on the control stick to keep the bike level with the inclined terrain. However, whenever I need to slowly climb a difficult area (such as section three), I ignore the turbo button and just keep on the standard throttle while holding forward on the control stick to keep the nose down.
In this video I completed all three sections without crashing but only achieved my third-fastest time. I was approximately one second slower compared to my prior upload, but considering how difficult this mode is, I don't really mind.
Recorded with the Hauppauge HD PVR and the official N64 S-video cable. I used a Toshiba model D-R550 DVD Recorder to upconvert the N64's native 240p signal to 480i so that the Hauppauge could capture the console's audio/video signal.
I'm using a standard N64 controller.
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