Excitebike: World Rally is fun but essentially non-existent

destructoid.com:

Looking back, Excitebike would have benefited from being released a couple years later. Originally on Famicom in 1984, it was still stuck in the arcade mindset. It was very strictly round-based, there was no real progression, and the best you could do was compete for best time, which wasn’t actually recorded on the game itself.

The most console-specific feature that it had was a track builder, which was definitely cool. However, on NES, you couldn’t actually save your track, which was far less cool. If you were on Famicom, you could actually save tracks using the Famicom Data Recorder, which would save your data to a cassette tape. That’s extremely cool to a retro geek like me. I mean, the Famicom was marketed as being a family-friendly microcomputer (Famicom being shorthand for Family Computer), but because the NES tried to get away from that, we never saw it over here. It’s neat to be reminded that, through their own game design, they basically made a bunch of their own products obsolete.

What were we talking about? Right. Excitebike really needed some form of progression. It would take until 2009 until someone went back and actually did that with Excitebike: World Rally.

Excitebike: World Rally is like a really belated sequel to the first game. It essentially is just Excitebike, featuring all the same mechanics and features as the NES title, but turned 3D. More importantly, however, there’s actually progression.

Yes, there is a series of four “cups” that progress in difficulty. In order to progress, you have to hit a B rank in each of the individual courses. This is done by finishing the course in a specific time threshold. Of course, you can also push yourself to get S rank by getting even better times. Doing so on