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Victory Run, TurboGrafx (1987)

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Victory Run (TG-16 Mini)

The fifth and final release in 1987 for the PC Engine was Victory Run. I just realized that 60% of the console's 1987 titles are on this mini-console, with the others involving potentially tricky licensing. Neat. I also just realized that unlike many companies launching new consoles, NEC and Hudson didn't have much in the way of sports games during the early months. Victory Run is the closest thing to it, so any parents who wanted to enjoy some golf or baseball would have to wait.

Victory Run is an interesting game. It's one of the earlier examples of the Japanese game industry's fascination with the Paris-Dakar Rally from the late 1980s to the early 1990s. Its colorful visuals, upbeat music, and horizon-chasing gameplay might make you think you're in for an arcade-style driving game in the vein of OutRun. This would be a grievous miscalculation on the part of the player. Victory Run is absolutely brutal, and makes an earnest effort at trying to capture the feeling of the incredible endurance run that awaited drivers in the Paris-Dakar.

The race as a whole is broken up into legs, each of which has a target time you're meant to hit. You have some bonus time to spare, but the pool carries over from leg to leg. Finish quicker than expected and you'll add to that pool. Come in slower and you'll reduce it. The target times are tight. If you crash, you're going to be eating into that bonus time with gusto. The race is long, and any mistakes you make early on are going to leave you in a very precarious position towards the end.

Your car also takes damage to its various parts based on how you drive. At the start of the game you can take twenty spare parts total with you. There are five different parts, and you'll want to distribute your selections based on how you drive. Between legs, you can choose to use one of these parts to replace your existing one. Your call how far you want to push things, but if a part blows out completely during a race you're going to be in a lot of trouble. Don't skimp on your tires.

The game controls well but the low-to-the-road perspective can make it hard to see what's coming. The road frequently twists and turns, and it's full of other vehicles. Victory Run is tough. If you get everything right and all goes to plan, it's not a ridiculously long game. But those are serious "ifs", and in practice you'll be lucky to pull out a win even with reasonably good driving. That lends this game a fair amount of replay value, and while I don't think this is a particularly great racer by 16-bit standards, I think it's a good meal for those 1987 PC Engine owners. Really, not even that bad by the standards of the game's North American launch in 1989.

As part of the TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine Mini line-up, I think it serves a few purposes. The console didn't have a ton of racers, so it's nice to have any decent ones Konami could scare up. It's also, I think, one of the better games from the console's first year. If you're using this mini-console to do a chronological journey, it's a pleasant albeit challenging stop.

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Victory Run is a rather simple and unassuming game, and one that I'm surprised ended up as TurboGrafx-16 title. Although certainly not bad, it doesn't really do much to show off the power of NEC's console. The graphics are only a notch above those of the NES. The soundtrack is nice (but only has a handful of songs), and the driving itself doesn't really offer a lot that we couldn't get out of Rad Racer or Al Unser Jr.'s Turbo Racing. This is probably all owing to being part of the TurboGrafx's first-year releases (it's the last of NEC's freshman lineup we're covering.)

The game does bring an interesting element to the table in the form of parts for your vehicle. At the outset of the race, you allocate up to 20 spare parts in five categories, such as tires, engine and brakes. These wear out as you make your way across the 6,000+ mile Paris-Dakar Rally course. If you have the spare parts of the appropriate type, you can replace them between stages when they wear out. If you don't, well, I don't know what happens--I never got through enough stages to actually run out of parts for any part of the car. (See: Previous posts affirming that I am not a great racing player.) Although Victory Run beat Epyx's 4x4 Off-Road Racing to the punch in terms of allocating materials to fix your vehicle on the fly, I still prefer Epyx's offering, which allows multiple trucks, multiple courses, significant customization of the vehicle as well as carrying a greater variety of goods (like beer) at a cost of weighing your truck down.

There are eight stages in all, and you have to complete each of them individually within a set time limit in order to advance. Most of the stages, sadly, are nearly identical apart from the arrangement of turns. The ground beneath you is usually bland, the distant scenery is tiny and nondescript (except for the Eiffel Tower), and the skies of each stage go through the same three color gradients as you come closer to completing them. It's all a bit repetitious, but with only eight stages and a two-minute time limit for each, you'll usually finish a game in under 20 minutes with almost no reason to re-play unless you just have to top your previous time. That makes it a great recommendation if you want to go out and download something for a slight change of racing pace, but I couldn't have recommended actually paying for this even when the TurboGrafx was at its height of popularity.

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