Seeing as it looks to be the only decent game for the wii next month, that'd be easy to expect, but I think that with the amount of info we've been given now, it will REALLY be a good game.

IGN Wii's Mark Bozon had a hands-on with the game last night, and it according to him, it "blows the original away."

http://wii.ign.com/articles/964/964992p1.html

Highlights (important pieces are in bold):

"In our first two hours behind the wheel with Excitebots we've had office members stop and stare, and we've had comments about it being a 3D reincarnation of Uniracers, Wario Ware mixed with racing, an F-Zero style game, and others."

"That's only the beginning though. There's also a rubber band bar that hovers in mid-air, allowing you to trampoline off it and do front flips for more stars. Question mark boxes on the track now either morph terrain, open up shortcuts, or bring on micro-challenges such as the random bowling and soccer events shown off in the trailer. These are available only to the person that hits the question mark, and are quick star-earning trials."

"There are also new items as well, all activated with similar boxes and executed with the A button. Pick up a set of wind-up teeth, and you can slow down a nearby racer as it latches on and requires them to shake it off. A bottle rocket can be used to boost you into the air from anywhere, hovering and flying with momentary boost. A hammer is also available, used to smash the ground around you and create earthquakes. As one of my favorite – purely because it's so strange – a tambourine is available as well, which will start the classic "Shave and a haircut" jingle, with you needing to hit the A button twice for "two bits!" in time. Do it, and you'll get stars and a boost. Roger Rabbit would be proud."

"Hitting ramps will send your sprinting bot into the air, morphing it yet again into a glider mode that would make any triple-changing Transformer from the 80's blush bright red. You take to the air, go into glide mode, and then have controls comparable to wing cap Mario, tilting backwards to gain height, and forward to dive-bomb and speed up. Oh, and the flight controls rock. This could be its own game. Collect butterflies while in the air, and then land on a gigantic sunflower to gain even more bonus stars. Seriously, we couldn't make this stuff up."

"Nintendo has asked that we keep a lid on a few things within the game (mostly unlockables you'll be spending your stars on), but online is confirmed, and it's six players. We also had a chance to try out the odd – but again, awesome – Poker Race mode, which combines classic five card draw with in-level cards and a "hand" for each player. In these three specific tracks, players have a hand of five cards, and the ability to highlight those cards one at a time with left and right d-pad taps. When colliding with other cards in the world, your on-screen hand is updated, swapping out the new card for the highlighted one. Basic poker rules apply, with the A button used to "cash in" a hand and score points, getting a new stack of random cards immediately after. It's still a conventional race in the sense that you want to be in first to have your pick of the available cards on the track, but more importantly the different hands yield huge amounts of stars, and the racer with the most stars at the end of the track takes the gold. It's a lot to take in, since you'll be racing and trying to think strategically as well, but the game keeps your hand (as well as on-screen prompts for upcoming lines of cards) on-screen to streamline the experience. It's a fun mode, and hopefully – we'd assume – it's online as well."*

*It was later confirmed by other sources that Poker Race is indeed online

Now for some screens

Also, Game Informer got to chat with Monster Games about Excitebots, and some online details were given. I don't have the magazine though, so I have to thank the people on the net for posting it, otherwise I wouldn't have known.

-There will be 6 player online [we know that]
-poker race is online
-stats and some type of achievment' system will be viewable online
-you will need friend codes, but you can invite people from your message board, like mario kart wii
-Wii-speak will be included for waiting lobbies amongst friends, and worldwide
-there will be a system that follows a 'world-globe'- showing where people are, and then you can play world-wide, regional, ranked, unranked, and friend matches
-there will be split-screen online
-you can unlock new skins and stats/attributes through a 'star' based system ONLINE, where you can get points from winning matches, and unlocking things.

It looks like this could be on par with, or even be better than Mario Kart Wii's online. Yeah yeah, friend codes are a pain, but poker races and wii speak. It should still be good.

I'm calling it: April Game of the Month for the Wii