Honda ATV Fever (Wii and Nintendo DS): Release and Review Facts

Honda ATV Fever is an off-road racing game that reached North American shelves in October 2010 on two systems, the Nintendo Wii and the Nintendo DS, with Storm City Games listed as the Wii publisher. The Wii and DS editions share one title and one theme, but the credits and details differ enough between sources that they are laid out separately below.

Overview

The game puts the player on all-terrain vehicles and sends them around circuits against computer-controlled riders. Honda is the licensed name on the box, and the title makes it the follow-up in a short run of ATV racers from the same group of credits, which also includes ATV Quad Kings, a different game covered on its own page.

Wikipedia’s list of Wii games shows the title as Honda ATV Fever in North America and ATV Fever in PAL regions, where Enjoy Gaming is named as publisher. The same list gives Beyond Reality as developer. A Wii entry on the Dolphin emulator wiki repeats the Beyond Reality and Storm City Games credits and notes a two-player mode with the Wii Remote as the input.

How it plays

Most of what is documented about play comes from WorthPlaying, whose reviewer Brian Dumlao covered the DS version on 20 February 2011. He describes a Championship mode built from point-based circuits of four races across two vehicle classes, an Arcade mode that runs the same tracks against a countdown clock where finishing laps in time buys more seconds, and a Free Ride mode for practising with whatever has been unlocked.

Vehicles in that version carry statistics, which makes the choice of machine matter, and the handling is faster than in the earlier game, particularly under turbo. The trick system from Quad Kings was dropped, so turbo comes from jumps and slides alone. On the touch screen the game does little: it switches between the map and the speed and turbo gauge during a race.

The same review is blunt about the rough spots. The d-pad feels loose on straights and tight in corners, which makes it hard to read whether a bike is under- or oversteering. Opponents are aggressive and appear to be tuned to hang around the player, and hard hits can stop a vehicle abruptly. Tracks differ from the previous game, yet the scenery looks flat and jumps are hard to judge. Graphics and sound are largely carried over from Quad Kings, and the reviewer calls the engine noise and the air horn at the end of each lap grating.

Release and credits

For the Wii, Wikipedia and the Dolphin wiki give 1 October 2010 in North America. For the DS, Wikipedia, HonestGamers and WorthPlaying give 7 October 2010. PAL dates for the Wii version appear on Wikipedia only as the year 2010.

Credits split along the same lines as the dates. Beyond Reality is the developer on Wikipedia, HonestGamers and the Dolphin wiki. WorthPlaying names CokeM Interactive as developer instead. Publishing is just as mixed: Storm City Games on the Wii lines of Wikipedia and the Dolphin wiki, CokeM Interactive on the DS lines of Wikipedia and HonestGamers, and Storm City Entertainment at WorthPlaying. Elsewhere in the library Storm City Games and Storm City Entertainment turn up as two names for the same publishing outfit, which is why both appear here exactly as each source prints them.

Reception

WorthPlaying scored the DS version 5.5 out of 10. Dumlao called it a modest improvement on ATV Quad Kings that still shares too many of that game’s flaws, and he suggested not renting it unless the player badly wanted ATV racing on the DS. HonestGamers lists that review as the only one it references, so the 5.5 stands as its average too.

No review of the Wii edition turned up in the sources used for this page, so the score above describes the DS game only.

Can you still play it?

Yes, with a caveat about hardware. The Wii disc runs on a Wii and in Wii Mode on a Wii U, which needs a Sensor Bar for most software; discs are region-coded, so a North American copy suits a North American console. The DS card is the easier one to keep running, since it works in a DS, DS Lite or DSi and in the Nintendo 3DS family through its DS mode, and DS cards of this kind are not region-locked. Neither version was a digital-only release, so the closure of the Wii Shop Channel and the Nintendo eShop does not affect finding a physical copy.