Product Description

A revolutionary horse racing experience that brings you closer to the real thing than ever before. Work your way up from novice status to become a renowned horse racing legend throughout a full, in-depth career.

• Use the Wii Balance Board for greater immersion to feel like a true jockey
• The Wii Remote is your whip and the Nunchuk your reins
• Download super-powered horses for free via Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection
• Challenger your friends in the multiplayer mode
• Train your own stable of thoroughbred champions
• Choose from a variety of race conditions in Free Mode

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3947 in Computer & Video Games
• Brand: Koei
• Released on: 2008-09-26
• Platform: Nintendo Wii
• Dimensions: .34 pounds

Manufacturer's Description
A revolutionary horse racing experience that brings you closer to the real thing than ever before. Work your way up from novice status to become a renowned horse racing legend throughout a full, in depth career.

Customer Reviews

This is the best game on the wii so far........
This is quite simply the best game on the wii so far; if you have an interest in horseracing it will help you get into it even more. The only down side is that the game is based on US racing so everything is based in metres and different colour grades but aside from that it is really good.

You can start a racing career beginning as an apprentice and then negotiate to race horses in different grades. The better you do the more likely the trainer is to offer you a regular ride on that horse. The controls are great but you really need to master them especially changing your horses lead leg after entering/exiting a turn otherwise you won't be able to steer your horse into the rail. What makes it really good is all the different tools the jockey uses to motivate the horse are there from showing the whip to a sharp reminder and driving the horse to the line. Also not all horses are the same and they have different characteristics just as in real life one might have a fast finish another fade out, one might excel on inclines another one have difficulty.

As you build up wins you get racing points which will enable you to negotiate rides if you visit the stables and request to ride in a particular race. If it is a group race you will need more points and if you don't ride well you may be pulled off other rides but ride well even in maiden races and the trainer might offer the horse as a regular ride.

As well as flat races you can also opt for jump races this is a little bit more difficult as you have to time the jump by raising the nunchuck and hit a green target that comes up. If you miss the green target then more than likely you will fall off the horse. If you are a shade out then the horse will lose speed.

You also have the option of training a horse and improving it's ability to try and take the horse of the year prize. The game is the most demanding wii game on your body as you pump your arms as you drive to the line. Fantastic game.

Excellent but a few jumps short of amazing!
Excellent but a few jumps short of amazing! I say both positive and negative things below but if I put you off don't be. I really think this game is a cut above many of the games I've played on the wii. My wife and I are only up to the end of November in our first year of racing so more playability may develop but this is how I see things so far:

Starting off
Getting to grips with the horse world will not be straight forward for some people. When my wife and I first got the game I suggested a 2 player as our first port of call to warm up. I expected something like the other fun but silly uninvolved games I had seen (such as wii sports and wii play) but this was something entirely different. We both made like jockeys and waved our arms like furry and our horses were out in front until the last bend when every AI horse passed us. This was highly amusing but importantly it placed the game firmly in the category of having to master the finer detail before wins could be achieved. With this in mind the manual is seriously lacking in its detail and I couldn't find anything on the internet to help much either.

Playing the game - ups and downs (main game which is flat racing)
Whether you're into horses or horse racing in real life or not there is no avoiding the fact that this is an interesting and involving game. The only down side I can see at the moment is a lack of general challenge in the game after you've got a hang of actually racing your horse well and you understand the various gauges on screen. I've started asking myself what's next?
My wife's riding experience has allowed her to understand some of the terminology and concepts quicker than I would have on my own but even so after one season she has nearly 200 wins (which would be a lot for any jockey in an entire lifetime I imagine). Now I'm not saying that a game has to be realistic to point of turning people off but the fact that the best AI jockey on the game has just 38 wins in his entire career (which is several years longer than your character as you play an apprentice) and that your win average is 88% and the next highest is about 12% just lets the side down a bit. One good example is that the game has mini challenges in storey mode which set rivalries between you and the other jockeys. The other jockeys will say things like, `let's see who can win the most races in 2 months' after a month an update announces the progress of the challenge. In this particular scenario my wife had won 32 races and the other jockey had won one... Ok she is good at the game but that margin is just not challening. Unless the challenge improves in the second year itI don't think it wopuld be enough for most gamers.

Having said all that it has been the most fantastic start to any game I've played for a while. It's drawn me in and allowed me to get better and better and now I've got a hang of the controls and know how to handle my horse and know how to handle what the horse is good or bad at to best affect I need more to challenge me. Learning how to ride was the first challenge - surely the game has more to offer? I'm hoping that when I get to the next year in the game the game storey will have something exciting for my character to shoot for, otherwise I can see it turining into a mindless series of races with no real connection - other than winning the best jockey prize at the end of the season for most wins (so technically I could have retired after 1 month with my win ratio).

So far there doesn't seem to be any knock out cups or anything progressive to get you hooked on. It would be fantastic if you could choose a horse (perhaps one that no-one expects to win) and try to get it through qualification races to take part in bigger races, with the potential of being asked to race it in a huge race looming at the end of the season. Lots of media based storey plot could have been easily and cheaply developed from that. Sadly that dynamic is not include instead the difficulty and challenge is based on winning the different classes of race: maiden, class D, Class C, Class B, Class A, G3, G2, G1 (at least that's all I've seen in the storey mode so far).
When G1 races do come up they seem to have no entry criteria for the horses - your entry criteria is having won lots of races so that you are offered a horse to ride in the race, but once you are offered a horse the races themselves are not much harder to win than other classes. The only time the computer seems to win is when the horse it has significantly out classes the horse you have been given to ride. For example, teh trait 'ability' governs the speed of a horse (according to the manual) and if you ride an ability 55 horse and race against an ability 80 horse you will probably find it hard to win... I say probably because there is a lot more to each horse than its overall speed. Each horse has a range of attributes and each is better or worse at certain aspects. You do not get told exactly what the rating of an attribute is but you do visually get an indicator of if its particularly good or bad at something. Attributes include but are not limited to 'spirit' for when racing alongside other horses for the line, obedience showing its temprament for being a willing racer, if it has a good spurt of acceleration for the finishing line. Negative traits can include excitability, aversion to being boxed in, left or right drfit and a whole lot more.

Jump Horses
You can fall and injure yourself and be out of the running for several weeks whilst your character recovers (happened on the first jumping race we played). Jump races quite good fun but seemingly impossible to loose provided you A. don't fall of and B. are at the front going onto the last bend. (Please also note that one jump race has an idiotic sound track which sounds like a trapped pig glued to Hammond organ (in fact much of the sound track appears to be Hammond lift music) I quite like Hammond organ if I'm in a silly mood, but usually for a maximum of 5 minutes before the cheese saturates my brain and makes me turn it off - so beware on G1 Jockey there is no escape from it!!

Training Horses
I like the idea of training horses and in this game you get to train your own horse and select its parents from the list of breeding horses! That's quite cool and the only down side appears to be that you can only train one a year so you can't try different training regimes with a few at the same time to see what works best. Once the horse is mature enough to ride you lose the ability to train it further or at least that's what happened to my first horse during the first year. Since horse mature at different rates and I chose parentage that gave it the 'early but long' maturation period it may be that horses which mature morse slowly can be developed for longer. I will see nest year and report back if this is the case.

Before you head to the paddock to start the races you can do some training work on the horses you are due to ride and at first this seems a great thing. After a while, however, you realize that this training increases your riding level on the horse - not the horse itself. When your rearing the horse its attributes improve and you see them increase as statistics but it appears that after the horse has matured it cannot be improved any further. All those lovely horse attributes (of which there are quite a few as mentioned previously) appear to be locked (unless they unlock as you get better as a jockey). Training a horse before a race can therefore only improve its 'form' or its start' ability - on occasion, when a horse has a negative trait, you can correct this but not always and otherwise training consists of five pages of work outs that can only improve `form' and one option which improves `start'. To me that is a serious waste of opportunity given that that horses have abilities which could be improved. Rider level seems to max out at 30 too so after you have ridden and won on a horse a few times that cannot be improved either. I'm hoping there is more to training after I finish my first year in the saddle or I may be tempted to skip training altogether.
I'll update this if it develops further.

One Jump Ahead
My 5 year old son and I love horseracing, and this is by far the best horseracing game we have seen of any type.
The controls, though detailed, are as intuitive as you would expect on the wii and the story mode is really engaging.
As you progress through your apprenticeship, you get to create a horse, which is as near as most of us will ever get to breeding horses!
We've played it a LOT and still have many intricacies to master.
Excellent!