Back in 2020, the PC-Engine Mini finally got me some way towards owning the console I’d dreamt of getting since I first came across its exotic but seemingly unreachable delights in the pages of Computer & Video Games magazine back in the late eighties. Several decades on though, I was pretty familiar with the wider platform, as well as with a lot of what was included on the Mini, so I also knew that for all it’s superb shoot ‘em ups and platformers, it’s not a console that’s exactly renowned for the quality of its racing games! And as I slowly made my way through the through the fifty-plus (once you’ve accounted for repeats and Japanese language) games on there, this was once again confirmed when I got to the particularly dreadful top-down racer, Moto Roader, which, being a huge fan of that sub-genre, I’ve tried really hard to like ever since but its awful car handling and jarring automatic catch-up systems stinks worse every time! And I don’t care about how upgrading the car fixes this – you have to want to play long enough to do that first!
Anyway, I continued on through the games carousel in alphabetical order and eventually came to a game called Victory Run, which, for all my new-found familiarity, I’d never heard of, so didn’t even know it was another racing game when I fired it up for the first time, but what a racing game it turned out to be! Absolute love at first sight, and currently sitting just inside of my top one hundred favourite games of all time, and a little way just outside of top ten favourite racing games… Which, without being even more of a saddo and actually counting them, probably make up about fifteen percent of the hundred. Praise indeed regardless but before we get into that, I wanted to have a really quick look at a few other PC-Engine (or TurboGrafx) racing games, both it its original form and with its later CD add-on, to see if that reputation it has is at all justified… But after some very quick reflection, I concluded it really is, so instead, let me try and pick out a few racing racing games on there that buck the trend instead!
Relatively speaking, I don’t think there’s that many racing games on the platform, which includes all that top-down guff with “F1” in the title, but I think apart from Victory Run, its conversion of Out Run (one of my top ten games of all time period!) is probably my pick of the bunch. It moves smoothly, controls well and has a lovely, laid-back rendition of the game’s legendary soundtrack, and I’m struggling to think of a better way to play apart from the arcade original. By the way, I think Chase H.Q. is similarly decent on here but I’ve never been into any version so I don’t have much of an opinion! I do like my Power Drift though, and while this does make a few concessions to the system in terms of content, it’s got all the brash, wildly undulating, cartoon racing you could want from a home version, with big, bold visuals and all the excitement of the arcade game. Away from ports, I guess Final Lap Twin is alright, offering Pole Position-style, split-screen arcade racing that obviously comes alive with two players but does bizarrely also offer an RPG mode, and I’m talking full, top-down JRPG, not just some crappy engine upgrades! Then there’s Bari Bari Densetsu if you fancy racing a motorbike instead but honestly I’m already struggling at this point!
Let’s head straight over to Victory Run instead. Now, when I said just now I’d never heard of it, that can’t be strictly true because looking back through my collection of Computer & Video Games magazines just now, there it is, even heralded as “best racing game” in the very feature that left me totally smitten with the machine back in what turns out was the May 1988 issue… Can’t believe I didn’t remember a single screenshot I must have seen thirty-six years ago! Anyway, it was originally released by Hudson Soft at the very end of December 1987, exclusively on the PC-Engine or TurboGrafx-16, although there were later Wii and PSP releases on their respective shop thingies. I believe its full Japanese title translates to something like Victory Run: 13,000 Kilometers of Glory, which relates to the Paris-Dakar Rally the game is set across, making it an early one based on that race but I don’t think the first – arguably both marginally better known, Paris-Dakar on the ZX Spectrum and Paris-Dakar Rally Special! on the NES came out the following year but there was an old Commodore 64 game known as Honda or Paris Dakar or The Race of Paris-Dakar from 1984 that pre-dates all of them… Speaking of machines that can’t do racing games!
“Drivers Start Your Engines! Victory Run recreates the thrill of the rugged Paris to Dakar road rally. Negotiate the unpredictable French countryside. Conquer the Sahara. Change gears. Increase engine speed. Replace damaged parts. The perfect union of man and machine, Victory Run matches physical strength with intelligence for the most challenging road race ever.” Your objective is to make it to the end of the 13,000km (or about 8,0000 miles) course in the fastest time possible. Which seems like a very long way – that’s a good ten to fifteen days per game! Thankfully though, it’s been truncated into eight stages of two to three minutes each, representing the different regions the real race traverses, starting in Paris, down to the south of France, then over to Algiers for various more stops along the northwest of Africa before reaching your final destination in Senegal. Each stage is against the clock but you can carry over any left in reserve at the end of each one, so maybe a good idea to go for it on some of the more forgiving stages because it won’t be long before you’ll start to rely on it! Which all sounds a bit Out Run before that port made it to the system, and to an extent it is, but there’s also a bit more on top… Before you even begin the race, you can select twenty replacement parts you can take with you and use as required at the end of each stage, with a choice from tyres, gears, suspension, engine and brakes. The state of each is shown at the top of the screen during races using a traffic light indicator, and they’re easily switched (assuming you have the right spare) on the stage summary screen, thankfully with zero nerdy car knowledge needed but you are going to have to keep all of these things in mind as you drive!
Tyres will obviously deteriorate as you go, although how fast that happens is down to how you drive and what surface you’re on, ranging from regular roads to grass, sand and dirt tracks, and the worse they get, the more you slip and slide around the bends. Rough gearshifts will result in wear and tear to the gearbox, which will make it sticky to the point of not changing up and down when you need it to, while knackering the suspension by jumping over too many hill crests is going to slow you down on rough terrains. Being heavy on the brakes is going to cause them to fail, and finally, if you’re driving at high speeds for too long then the engine will go too. Despite all this though, the feel of the car never strays too far from arcade territory and into simulation but there is a definite element of strategy required to see the end of the race, from simply braking a little bit as you hit the top of an incline rather than going all Dukes of Hazzard over it to managing your gear changes differently on different surfaces to avoid wheel spins. Actually, more than anything else, learning to change gears effectively is probably the one factor that will dictate your overall success once you’re done playing Out Run-style – you can really get yourself in a pickle and lose loads of time on some of these surfaces if you don’t! Oh yeah, should you find yourself unable to repair something because you didn’t stock up on a bit of everything at the start, you’ll be forced to retire. And just to close on the car before we get in it and race, the wonderful PC Engine: The Box Art Collection from Bitmap Books tells us that during development, it was originally going to be modelled on a Mitsubishi Pajero, but ended up resembling a Porsche 959 in the final product instead, although if you look carefully at the box art (pictured in the book back up the page), it’s still the Mitsubishi illustrated on there. None of which means anything to me but nice trivia all the same!
We begin the race against the backdrop of a distant Parisian skyline, complete with Arc de Triomphe and Eiffel Tower, while a little guy with a flag counts us down and waves us off. In some respects it’s then the kind of gentle introduction you might expect, with an initial stretch of long straight road and no other traffic, giving you plenty of opportunity to work your way through all four gears and stay there as other vehicles start appearing but are relatively straightforward to weave around and in-between, with responsive and just the right side of twitchy but still a bit weighty car handling (at least until any damage or crap on the road kicks-in), and then the road starts going up and down, and it won’t take many times before you start noticing your suspension damage indicator starting to change colour and you’ll remember to take your foot off the gas the next time you start to ascend! Alongside the five damage indicators, you’ve also got speed, current gear, the position of your car relative to the stage distance, stage number, stage time and how much time you have in reserve in case you hit the time limit but once that’s gone it’s gone, and it won’t be easy to get back by the time it is! It’s also not going to be easy to make this first stage in that time limit either – while the driving is as forgiving as it will get on this one, you’ll need to very decent run to have much time to carry over!
The next one isn’t so bad though, taking a bit more of a toll on your tyres with a bunch of increasingly tight turns and gravel on less well-maintained road surfaces that can slow you down or cause a skid, but traffic density isn’t any worse, although the appearance of police cars on this stage never stops being daunting! It’s not Road Rash though, and I don’t think they’re particularly out to get you, or at least not anymore than anything else is! You’ll typically get up to three other vehicles in close proximity to you and each other on the road at any given time, meaning you’ll need to anticipate their different speeds and what direction they’re going in as best you can, even if it often seems like they’re watching your every move in their rearview mirrors, ready to suddenly drive in your way! Collision detection is a bit suspect here too but it works both ways, and you’ll probably make it through more impossible gaps unscathed than you will run into the back of something where there’s still clear space between you and it! As well as police cars, you’ve also got lorries, which seem scarily big and wide when you get up close, a few types of regular cars (with a bit of variety in their colours too) and motorbikes. They’ve all got plenty of movement and detail too, which is visible from various angles as they change direction, with working lights, mudflaps, spoilers and some very fancy paint jobs, and the same goes for your car too, even if it is a bit on the small side, particularly when the sprite scaling effect goes a bit wild as other vehicles approach and can weirdly seem massive for a second or two!
We’re well into the North African wilds in stage three, racing on dirt for the first time, and this is where you’re going to have to start thinking about replacement parts, assuming you’ve not had any major mishaps so far. Actually, just on that subject while we’re talking about how the cars look, if you hit anything hard enough to do more damage than cause you to slow you down a bit and panic about your gears, you’ll be spectacularly launched into a series of almost binary somersaults – top of car, bottom of car, top of car and so on, all on a strange diagonal plane until you eventually land on your roof! Anyway, back on the dirt, I mentioned the importance of the gear shift here, and it really takes some getting used to, specifically at the start where changing from first to second can easily cause a wheelspin if you’re lucky or if not, just bring you do an abrupt halt, meaning an even bigger panic about getting back into first and trying harder next time! Once you’re moving though, in any decent driving game you’re always looking for that balance of friction and drift, and you really feel that balance moving here, especially when you’ve gone a bit wide on a bend and are trying to fight the car and the road all at once to get back on track! You’ve also got rocks on the road to deal with, which can briefly cause you to totally lose control, and this is also where the continuous day-night cycle becomes more than a bit of a visual treat, that since Paris has simply been dressing-up what are some very drab, very 8-bit mountainous backgrounds. Each stage will begin at a certain time of day, indicated by the sky, which, together with some large-scale cloud effects, can be very dramatic, particularly at sunrise or sunset, with these incredible solid burnt oranges! On this stage though, day quickly becomes night, making collisions with rogue rocks harder to avoid, while it also becomes just as hard to distinguish the side of the dirt road, and in turn avoid any of the admittedly sparse roadside decoration – more rocks, lampposts, signposts, the usual stuff.
That reminds me, the Paris stage starts off at some time during the day and will then typically cycle through three or four visually distinct separate time periods over the course of its two or so minutes, but if you purposely take it easy, by the time you get near the end you’ll be treated to a fully illuminated Paris skyline, including those famous landmarks from earlier! Coming back to the stage at hand, and those replacement parts, if you didn’t need to fit any so far then you definitely will here because at the very least, your tyres and suspension have now taken a beating! Of the five different spare part types, these are probably where you’ll need the most stock, although with eight stages the most you can possibly get through is seven of anything, and in reality even having two sets of brakes or engines or gearboxes is going to be a luxury, so you could happily go seven sets of tyres to be safe, five suspensions and two or three of each of the others as you wish, and you still won’t get through all twenty. Assuming you make it through all the stages! Speaking of which, I think we’d got as far as stage four, which is thankfully back on the tarmac, and you can really feel it – such a relief after all that sliding about and not being able to get out of third gear! Lots of long turns, lots of traffic but once again, the timer is pretty forgiving, so a good opportunity to pick up a few seconds in reserve.
Back on the dirt for stage five, and as well as it being a bit more difficult to distinguish what’s road and what’s scenery (especially when you have red-green colourblindness like I do!), you do also start to notice some almost psychedelic patterns emerging from the traditional lines in the road that create the illusion of motion as the poor old hardware struggles to maintain what’s generally a consistently fast, and generally smooth experience. A lot of this craziness takes place on long bends, and the traffic hasn’t let up here either, and none of this helps you because this stage is a slog regardless, with what seems like an even slippier, even rougher surface this time out but once again, the timer seems to make more allowances for that here than it does elsewhere. I think stage six is my pick of the bunch, taking place across grass, so it’s all about the green psychedelics this time (not to mention trees instead of mountains in the background for a change!), as well as pushing your car (and in particular your engine) to the limits, so you’d better have kept some spares for emergencies! As much as I enjoy that one, it’s nice to be back on a normal road for the penultimate stage all the same, and also have the timer on your side again because no matter how much I’ve played this game, at best I’m deep into my time reserves by this point! It’s mostly more of the same though, with a load of traffic, a load of tight bends, and we’re back in the mountains again! Nice clouds though, and to the game’s credit, as alluded to before, it does continue to mix up the clouds and the colour gradients in the sky to keep things a bit fresh.
I’ve tried to avoid too many more Out Run comparisons over the course of actually playing the game but like that, the final stage (where you hopefully remembered to throw on any spare parts left beforehand!) is likely going to be more of a victory procession than a frantic race against what’s left of the clock. It all takes place along the coast too, with the waves lapping against on side of the road and occasional exotic islands dotting the background. Okay, it’s a poor man’s first stage of Out Run but most things are! Likewise, it was never going to compete in the sound department either, with a jaunty but not necessarily memorable set of well-composed chiptunes playing over the action and between races, but the sound effects offer more merit to both the presentation and the gameplay, not least when they’re reminding you it might be a good idea to change gear! Despite a few arcade-like flourishes, such as they are, it’s things like the wailing engine sounds, and the skidding, and the nasty crunch as you land an unplanned and unwanted jump that all add to what this does have over Out Run, and that’s a level of realism, and the subsequent sense of often being right on the edge of control while also being painfully aware of the needs of the car, where you’re driving it, and what’s then a risk too far at any given time.
And that’s mostly why it sits as an unlikely bedfellow alongside the likes of Out Run, Virtua Racing and Enduro Racer among my all-time favourites in the genre. You never quite know what you’re going to get from race to race in the way you do with any of the examples I’ve just given, and no matter how much you play it – which is admittedly far less than those in my case – I’m not sure you’ll ever get to the point where you’re simply trying to perfect a route or knock a hundredth of a second off a time with this; I think the best you could hope for is a level of consistency that allows you to just about get from one stage to the next with your bits intact, and then hopefully being able to compensate for any that aren’t by adapting your driving style in the next, or conversely just throwing strategy out of the window and going for it if the clock says so! It’s clearly got arcade roots but it veers towards simulation just enough to make it more unpredictable than that, and yes, it’s still arcade-tough but it’s got the handling, and it gives you the tools to back that up, and a few quirks and limitations aside, it’s also got just enough polish to make that a very enjoyable ride!