It's new to me: Big Run — The Supreme 4WD Challenge

This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Paris, France to Dakar, Senegal is a bit of a hike. That’s the point, though, in what has been known as the Paris-Dakar Rally, or even just the Dakar Rally: a marathon rally race in which different classes of vehicles start their engines in Paris, and drive all the way to Dakar. It’s an off-road rally often featuring off-road vehicles, so we’re not talking about a Sega Rally Championship-style of race or racer here, but instead, the kind where you have to watch out for plants growing in the middle of the road, if there’s a road at all.

In the late-80s, the kinds of racing games that were being made started to branch out further, owing to the faux-3D technology of the era and the success of companies like Namco and Sega in establishing what was possible. Jaleco got in on the action in 1989 with an arcade game known as Big Run — The Supreme 4WD Challenge, which cut out the Paris portion of the Paris-Dakar rally and instead focused on the Africa-exclusive portions of the race, from Tripoli to Dakar. Rather than a traditional off-road vehicle, you’re behind the wheel of a Porsche 959, but to be fair a driver racing one of those did win the ‘86 event.

It was a highly successful arcade game for multiple reasons: for one, it ranked between second and fifth in arcade revenue for upright cabinets per Game Machine from November of ‘89 through April 15 of 1990, and then it stuck in the top 10 through the rest of the spring before a brief drop to 11th in the second half of June. However, Big Run then rebounded for the rest of the year — and into 1991 — sticking in the back half of the top 10 until mid-April. It then popped in and out of the top 10 until the fall of ‘91, and finished 1990 as the fourth highest-grossing arcade game in Japan that year, due to it sticking within the top 10 for almost the entirety of it.

The second reason you could call it highly successful is that Big Run ended up with multiple home ports. One to the Amiga, another to Atari ST, and also the Super Famicom — there was no SNES version to be found, despite the game being in English in its Japanese release, and the arcade edition finding success in North America, as well. Luckily, the SFC version of Big Run did eventually make its way to North America, through Nintendo Switch Online, so it’s available to play if you want to experience a port of a game that took Japan’s arcades by storm over three decades ago.

Big Run is a short game, in the sense that it’s an arcade game without much in the way of extras in its home port — the Dakar Rally is the length of the Dakar Rally, and all — but it will take you plenty of racing to master it. You’re going to need some reps for this one, both in terms of your driving and for figuring out the strategy that will see you reach the finish line.

The Dakar Rally is more than just a standard race. It’s one that takes days and spans countries and continents, through a variety of terrain. On roads, off roads, in a space that sits in between those two concepts. Through desert, through flood, past trees and dunes and stone, around bends and other vehicles, in the dark, by cities and through swamps. Anything can happen in those environments, and anything will: your car’s various parts degrade with use just as a natural consequence of racing, and you can hasten all of that along by doing a poor job of it. Crash into the wrong things, drive over the wrong things, and your tires, engine, brakes, and suspension will all suffer for it. And if they break down, so will you.

You need to strategize in order to carry additional parts with you, in case something breaks down either in or between segments of the Dakar Rally. The thing is that carrying more parts directly with you can save time should there be an emergency breakdown — and time is everything in the Dakar Rally, as we’ll get to — but but they also slow down your vehicle by making it heavier. The base weight of your Porsche all geared up for the Rally is 2,000 kilograms, or, over 4,400 pounds, but if you decide to directly pack up additional tires, suspension, brakes, or an engine, then that weight is going to dramatically increase. Inversely, your max speed will decrease, and not by a little bit. At 2,000 Kg, you top out at around 265-270 km/h depending on the terrain, but you’ll struggle to crack 200 if you’re loaded up at 3,000 or so Kg.

Time is of the essence in Big Run, as failure to reach the goal before you run out of it is a game over. In Victory Run, the Turbografx-16 Dakar-Rally racer that predates Big Run by two years, you get a small pool of overage time that is deducted from whenever you take too long to complete a segment, and when that’s out, so are you. Big Run has no such mercy: you can finish a race segment and be told how much you were over by when you complete it, but once you’ve finished the race, you’re also finished with the Rally itself and have to try again. While other editions of the game featured the ability to continue, the SFC one sends you back to the start to try all over again.

Big Run is forgiving in some ways that Victory Run was not, however. For one, the parts system isn’t the only thing you need to spend money on. You choose a sponsor with a Legally Distinct From But Similar To real-life companies name, and they give you a basic loadout of spare parts — some have more brakes, some have more engines, that sort of thing. The one with more engines gives you the fewest sponsor dollars, but engines are also way more expensive than new tires or a suspension, so, that all checks out. There’s also the Jaleco sponsor, which is just straight cash freeing you up to buy what parts you want, but that’s for people who already know the ebb and flow of the Rally.

You then use the remaining money not just for additional parts — either before the Rally starts or in between legs of it — but to hire support staff. A better mechanic will take less time to fix you up in an emergency, for instance, but of nearly similar importance is a navigator. These navigators can alert you to upcoming turns sooner the better (read: more expensive) they are at their job, which is not something that Victory Run did for you. You just had to guess there, often completely ruining your life and chances at a win because you didn’t react quickly enough to a sharp turn on the faux-3D course. Here, you have flashing left and right arrows on your HUD, and plenty of time to adjust to upcoming turns in advance.

The art of a successful Big Run race involves avoiding the many obstacles in your path, whether they be overgrowth or trees or stones or large mounds of sand or other vehicles. Crashing into any of that kind of stuff will damage your vehicle’s parts, more quickly degrading them and costing you not just your spares, but also additional money to buy new replacements. If you run out of money and replacement engines and yours goes out mid-race, you can still get it repaired, but the process is going to burn through a significant chunk of your remaining time since you have to wait for a truck to get there and do the work for you.

So what you need to do is build up a massive reserve of bonus time, which is accomplished by finishing earlier segments with plenty of time to spare. Whatever remaining time you have from your initial allotment in a segment is banked for your next one, and so on, meaning you can have multiple minutes to complete the final leg of the Dakar Rally, which is a less-than-90-second sprint in terms of what Big Run gives you to complete it, if you thrive early on. It’s insurance for whatever you do to cause all of your tires to explode at a time when whoops, you don’t have any tires on you. Skill on the course and strategy off of it, that’s what you need to finish before you run out of time.

And the skill part is no joke. You’re going to encounter sand storms that limit visibility, or have entire stretches of road just not exist at all, with you truly off-roading while trying to avoid other vehicles — some of which you find crashed and turned over — or giant stones or trees and so on. You’ll drive at night, and visibility isn’t great there, either. Sure, you’ve got headlights that’ll eventually come on, but you’re also trying to drive 250 km/h in the dark, they’re only going to give you so much time to react compared to being able to see everything well off into the horizon.

You can switch between a low gear and a high gear, but will spend most of the races in high so long as you aren’t constantly crashing: acceleration is fast, and when you hit 130 km/h you’ll want to switch to high gear to attain max speed. You will have to actually use your brakes if you want to slow down on a turn: letting off the gas leaves you with far too much momentum for the kinds of turns you’re going to be taking. This isn’t Ridge Racer, where letting off the accelerator can give you the kind of speed reduction you need to pull off a sick drift — if you want to actually slow down enough to handle a sharp turn, you’ll have to tap the brake, which works almost too well sometimes. Learning a very gentle tap is in your future if you plan to succeed at Big Run.

There are eight segments, and they’re measured in minutes, so Big Run isn’t going to take you long to get through in terms of going from start to finish. However, given you need to learn the courses, learn the feel of the vehicle — which can change depending on how much you’ve loaded into it or not — and figure out the appropriate timing and planning for both carrying parts and replacing the ones you already have without running out, it’s you’ll get more out of Big Run than “just” those limited segments. And I should know, since I felt like I was cruising along… until I hit something too hard in the penultimate segment before what is admittedly a very easy, breezy final one, and nearly blew out my engine. Which had real consequences for me, because I did not have a spare at that point — I’d end up finishing the race about 30 seconds over time instead of well ahead of the pace, which is where I was sitting heading into it in terms of pure time allotment.

Another go at the Dakar Rally was necessary at that point, since Big Run doesn’t allow for second chances, but I’d learned something. Maybe the sponsor with less money who gives you that additional engine is the way to go, after all. And maybe I didn’t need quite so many spare brakes, now that I knew the course better and could better prepare for tapping the pedal instead of slamming on it. The next time I challenged The Dakar, I was in a better position than I had been, and successfully completed the whole thing even as I didn’t avoid similar late-game engine trouble — this time around, I still had a spare that I’d properly rationed out. The system works!

The Dakar Rally no longer actually ends in Dakar — its location has changed multiple times in its many decades of existence, and now takes place in Saudi Arabia — but thanks to a few video games out there like Big Run, you can still experience the rally raid in its early form, or close to it. Jaleco’s racer is worth experiencing, since the whole idea of needing to figure out parts for a long-haul race makes it so different from the kinds of racers that dominated the space both before and after, and it’s more welcoming in its approach than Hudson Soft’s Victory Run was. Both are worth playing, but given the prevalence of the Switch and its online subscription service compared to both the Turbografx-16 and its mini console variant, most people are going to have an easier time firing up Big Run these days. And they should!

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