JALECO RALLY: BIG RUN (ARCADE)

A couple of months ago I wrote about Tuff E Nuff, a SNES fighting game that (awful title aside) helped creators Jaleco strengthen their claim as the most consistent developer of average videogames. Sometimes Jaleco’s games are slightly above average, sometimes they’re slightly below average, but they’re never titles that make you jump for joy or jump around in pain because you hurt your foot when booting the game out of an open window. For this reason I have developed a tremendous amount of affection for Jaleco over the years, and it’s time I put that affection to the test by playing their 1989 off-road-race-em-up Jaleco Rally: Big Run!

“The Supreme 4WD Challenge,” claims the title screen. I’m pretty sure that refers to the concept of the race in question and not the game itself. Jaleco would never have the confidence to describe one of their products as “supreme.”

The Big Run in question is the Paris-Dakar Rally, a real-life off-road rally that sees competitors race from Paris, through southern Europe, across the Mediterranean Sea and down through Africa until they arrive at the finish line in the Senegalese capital Dakar. Or at least it used to, because concerns about terrorism saw the event move to South America in recent years. Supposedly the rally was started when its founder got lost in the Sahara during a different rally and though “hey, this would be a great place to hold a rally of my own!” I think that’s what they mean by making the best of a bad situation.
I feel that I should also mention that the screenshot above means I’ll be humming a-ha’s “Take On Me” throughout this entirety of Big Run. Not to be worry, I’ll be finished writing this article in a day or twooooo…

The attract mode also reveals our racer’s entry form. Apparently our team is called “Big bois.” The Akihabara Big Bois, that’s us.

With coins inserted and start button pressed, the race gets underway. Immediately the Paris part of the Paris-Dakar thing goes right out the window, because you actually start in Tunis. No European section at all, then, and I suspect this is because if there was a Parisian component then Jaleco would have had to create lot of very different backgrounds instead of being able to reuse the same sand dunes and palm trees for the majority of the game.

Big Run is a racing game, of course. A very arcade-y racing game at that, with a sense of depth generated by sprite-scaling techniques a la Sega’s OutRun and some very tight time-limits to beat. The game also measures what position you’re in amongst the other racers, but you can ignore that. The only thing you need to worry about is beating the checkpoint time. In fact, you can be in first place and still be disqualified for running out of time. Presumably this means all the other racers are disqualified too, and this year’s Paris-Dakar Rally comes to an abrupt stop somewhere near the Tunisia-Libya border.
The controls are exactly what you’d expect for this kind of arcade racer. A steering wheel for turning, accelerate and brake buttons, and a gear shift for switching between low and high gear - again, much like OutRun. Man, I wish I was playing OutRun. Oh, and Big Run also has a button for honking your horn. It does nothing besides making a noise but it makes you feel a bit better to honk at the other racers, just like a real car horn.

I was making decent progress in the early going, until there was a sudden ninety-degree turn on the course and I slammed right into this huge billboard of a bikini-clad Marilyn Monroe type. I say billboard, but Monroe’s expression changes from serenity to surprise when you crash into her so maybe she’s actually the 50 Foot Woman on a relaxing desert holiday. Jaleco seem to be very proud of this particular billboard, because it crops up throughout the rest of the game – and I’m convinced they placed the first one on the outside of this tight corner because they knew most first-time players would hit it and thus see it in action.

Aside from the huge sentient advertisements, the rest of the first stage plays out just as you’d expect from an arcade racer of this vintage. You barrel through the sandy locales, trying your best not to get caught in the pack of CPU cars while also avoiding the more interesting hazards. Here, for example, you have to race along a raised section of the track and it’s fully possible to fall off the side, costing you vital seconds. In fact, if you fall off the side you might as well give up there and then because Big Run’s time limits are very strict. Any time I play an arcade racing game of this type I always turn the difficulty down because I have enough confidence on my own self-worth that I don’t need to seek validation by beating a coin-guzzling arcade game on its default settings, but even on easy one major crash can spell the end of a Big Run, erm, run.

After a couple of attempts I made it over the finish line, mostly thanks to a potentially disastrous spin-out being averted when a CPU car rammed me from behind and immediately accelerated me to top speed. Big Run has discrete stages rather than one long course dotted with checkpoints, and here you can see the finish line of stage one. The Colossal Marilyn returns to survey the scene, but I’m more interested in the woman on the right. That’s the girlfriend from OutRun! She’s wearing the same outfit and everything. I guess she just really loves racing. C’mon Sega, give her a spin-of game of her own! Or at least get her in Smash Brothers.

That’s the general flow of Big Run, then. Racing through the desert, crashing into things, admiring the scenery. Look, there’s some camels! And sand! Lots of sand in this one, folks. I dare say there won’t be another videogame with this level of sand content until I get around to creating Professional Sandcastle Builder 2019 and releasing it on Steam. Hey, if all these farming sims can sell thousands of copies I think I can make it work.
In the screenshot above you can just about see that there’s a choice of routes to take through the stage. It’s not like OutRun where each path leads to a completely different stage and most of the time which route you take is determined solely by which direction the computer-controlled cars are shoving you towards, but it’s nice to have a bit of choice.

Ah yes, the CPU cars. Here we come to one of Big Run’s deepest flaws, and that’s too much traffic. There are almost always cars nearby and frequently, as in the screenshot above, they’re positioned in such a way that they cover the entire road ahead of you despite having the whole goddamn desert to drive in. It makes it very difficult to build up any sense of speed – and consequently fun – when you’re constantly having to nose your way through a congealed blob of your fellow racers. In other racing games of this type, the issue of traffic is alleviated by having wider roads and a nimble, precisely-controlled vehicle, but neither of those things apply to Big Run. As a result, the other cars aren’t a challenging obstacle to avoid, they’re just a pain in the arse.

Honestly, just look at this bullshit. Guys, the Sahara Desert is over three and a half million square miles in size, so why are you all right up my arsehole?!

Sadly, even when the traffic is flowing a bit more freely Big Run still isn’t all that much fun to play. It never feels fast, for one thing, and I’m sad to report it doesn’t handle very well, either. A lot of the time it’s merely okay, but your car does feel sluggish and tight corners can be a proper nightmare because your car has a tendency to turn slowly for a while and then suddenly “snap” to a point past the angle you’re aiming for, making it difficult to perform anything but the shallowest turns smoothly. It reminds me a lot of Jaleco’s other arcade racer Cisco Heat; I assume both games run on the same engine. Sadly Big Run lacks Cisco Heat’s engaging visual madness. As we’ve established, it’s mostly sand.

It’s nicely drawn sand, at least, and the visuals are a strong point in Big Run’s favour. It looks better in motion than it does in still pictures – especially now that recent versions of MAME can run the game more accurately than ever – and I particularly like the way the sand dunes are drawn and shaded. They look really solid. Or perhaps I get that feeling of solidity because I couldn’t stop crashing into the bloody things.

As Big Run moves into its latter stages and you race through Niger and past Timbuktu, the scenery gains a bit more greenery and even the occasional water hazard - and the hint of a good game glitters below the dusty surface. That might just be down to me wanting Big Run to be fun, though. I really like this style of arcade racer, and I can usually trust Jaleco to come up with something that’s a solid six-out-of-ten at least… but Big Run doesn’t quite make the cut. I’ve certainly played worse racing games from the time, and Big Run does offer something different from the usual street or circuit races of its competitors, but the punishing time limits, the twitchy, unsatisfying controls and the vast swarms of roaming cars completely unconcerned by the safety of themselves and others make Big Run something of a chore to play. By the time I’d reached Mali, every minor collision or contact with the undergrowth was making my grind my teeth in a way that would horrifying my dentist.

I did find myself negotiating some of the most convoluted sections of track while leaving my car in low gear, something that’d you’d never really do in any of Big Run’s peers – but it worked well enough that I wonder whether it was the intended way to traverse the trickier roadways. There’s almost an interesting idea in there, the concept of selecting the right gear for the situation, and because it’s an interesting idea that means it almost certainly wasn’t intentional.

Eventually I reached the final stage. The game calls it the “victory run” in the bottom corner, which strikes me as rather presumptuous. They must not have seen me barely scraping through all the other stages in fourth place. The only victory here is the victory over common sense that playing all the way through a game I'm not enjoying represents.

In the end I did achieve victory, and the ending sequence begins with your car driving slowly past all the people who have made this trans-African rally possible: your pit crew, the girlfriend from OutRun and her many identical sisters, the living billboards of iconic actresses, the scores of locals who have every right to be pissed off that I showed up in their countries, drove like a like an absolute lunatic through their cities and repeatedly crashed my car into their houses before receiving a prize and pissing off home. Frankly, I should be in prison.

Then our driver ascends the podium, accompanied by a woman who is at least eighty percent leg. No wonder she’s wearing a leotard. Imagine how hard it’d be to find trousers with a twenty-inch waist and thirty-four inch legs.

Jaleco Rally: Big Run is a mediocre game and therefore fits nicely into Jaleco’s catalogue, but sadly there are degrees of mediocrity and this one falls on the low end of that scale. It’s not totally awful or anything; the graphics are nice, the soundtrack’s okay and on the simpler, less busy sections of the course it’s a perfectly acceptable racing game. However, it commits the sin of being a racing game that never lets you really get going. There’s very little sense of speed or flow when you’re constantly being boxed in by other drivers and struggling to take corners without suddenly lurching off in a new and unexpected direction, and with that in mind it’s not a game I can recommend. Perhaps the SNES port is better, but I haven't played that one and the arcade original isn't exactly encouraging me to check it out. I’ll be sticking to OutRun, but then of course I will. Hell, I might even mix it up a bit by playing some Super Hang-On. I’m a man of simple tastes, after all.

Oh, and while I’ve got you, here’s my roughly annual reminder that if for some reason you enjoy VGJunk you can always donate a couple of quid to the cause, if you like. I’ve got a new job coming up but it doesn’t start for a while, so hopefully this’ll be the last time I ever bring it up. Thanks for reading, as always.

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EXTREME DOWNHILL (ARCADE)

I’m learning a lot of things during the current heatwave. I’ve learned that the fear of global warming adds a piquant quality to my usual anxieties. I’ve learned that my neck apparently contains twice the amount of sweat glands as the rest of my body combined. I also learned that playing videogames set in cold, snowy, Arctic locations does nothing to trick my brain into thinking I’m cold but what the hell, I’ve played them now so I might as well try to get an article out of it. So, here’s Sammy’s 1995 arcade slip-n-slide-em-up Extreme Downhill!

It’s difficult to see but there’s a skier behind that desert chrome logo and, yes, the extreme downhill of the title refers to downhill skiing. Which feels a bit like a tautology to me, surely all skiing is downhill? I know there’s cross-country skiing and biathlon, but I would contend that when you’re not going downhill you aren’t skiing, you’re walking with planks of wood tied to your feet, like that time I tried to run across the local fishing lake.

Semantics aside, skiing is what we’ve got. The crisp mountain air, the sibilant whisper of skis carving through powder, the figure-hugging lycra that will be forever entwined with memories of Ned Flanders’ arse; Extreme Downhill is one-hundred percent a game about skiing and very little else. Its two gameplay modes are Time Attack and “Story Mode,” which tells a story in the same way the instructions on the back of a box of washing powder form an epic poem chronicling the eternal victory of Freshness and Bounce over the dread forces of Blackcurrant Juice Stains.

There are four nameless skiers to choose from, each with their own strengths. Having not actually started the game yet it’s impossible to know whether I’ll be tackling a speed course or a winding course, so I suppose I’ll begin with the “For Beginners” guy on the left. He’s holding a giant french fry, he clearly knows what’s up.

Story Mode features eight courses of increasing difficulty, spread across the globe in locations famous for hosting skiing events, like Manhattan. The “story” part of Story Mode consists of little more than being told “hey, congrats, you won an event, now do another one!” until you’re the Monarch of Skiing and the frostbitten corpses of your enemies litter the trail behind you, so let’s get to making that dream a reality.

And we’re off. As you can see, Extreme Downhill is a top-down race against the clock. Ski well enough to keep your speed up and avoid crashing and you’ll reach a checkpoint, which will give you more time to reach the next checkpoint, and so on until you finish the course. You can also crash into these snowmen for a small amount of bonus time, which I’m fairly sure isn’t a real part of competitive skiing. I’d probably watch televised skiing if the participants received extra points for making young snowman-building children cry.

There are no other physical skiiers on the track at the same time as you – this is a pure time-trial affair – but you do get to see the “ghost” of the current high-score holder so you can gauge how well you’re doing. Given that this game involves skiing at 130 kilometres an hour along exposed mountaintops and over wooden bridges with no guard rails, it may well be an actual ghost.

The controls are easy to learn, because there hardly are any. You turn using left and right on the joystick and there’s a button to slow down, although if you use the brake button at all in the latter half of the game you’ll end up running out of time. You’re limited to “steering,” essentially, and while that would be more engaging if Extreme Downhill was a gimmick cabinet where you controlled the action by moving two fake ski poles or something, it wasn’t. It was just a joystick, and as a result it already feels like a very limited game and I haven’t even finished the first stage yet.

Can we not use the phrase “last spurt,” please? Not when using table sauces, not during lovemaking, and not in this skiing videogame. Thanks in advance.

Having successfully negotiated the course and flattened a bunch of snowmen, our skier ruins this moment of triumph by acting like such a smug prick it’s a wonder the crowd don’t leap over the advertising hoardings and insert his skis into his body, sideways.

It took me quite a while to realise that “carrier” is supposed to be “career.” In my defence, I was still thinking about my skier’s victory pose in the first race and whether his extreme smugness made it more likely that his name would be Chad or Chet. I’m leaning towards Chad, but it’s definitely one of those two names. On top of that, I spent a few minutes trying to figure out what the “GLAND” billboard is advertising. Probably best not to think about it, honestly.

I switched to the female “all-rounder” character for stage two, which takes place in Canada. She’s about to land on a snowman in a manner that will be a) very uncomfortable and b) might mean she and the snowman are technically married.

Beyond the character I’m playing as, nothing much has changed. The stage still looks the same and plays the same, although there are a few sections where you can fall off the mountain now and also a couple of eagles flew past, which was the most interesting thing about skiing in Canada. There’s just not that much you can say about a game where all you do is turn around corners. This is especially true on the tighter bends, and it often feels like Extreme Downhill is happy to accept moving the stick left or right slightly to mean “well done, you perfectly navigated this treacherous hairpin turn.” There’s a feeling of distance between the player and the action on the screen that makes Extreme Downhill kinda unsatisfying to play. Put it this way – I managed to get surprisingly far into the Canada stage when I didn’t press the controls at all, with my character accelerating automatically and pinging around the corners like some especially gaudy pinball.

After Canada comes the Challenging Stage. It has no bearing on whether you progress through the, ahem, story, so don’t worry about scenarios like the one pictured above where I failed to line myself up correctly with the extremely dangerous rope bridge and launched myself off Big Idiot Mountain with the approximate velocity of a Tomahawk missile. At least the danger of these stages makes them more interesting than the regular levels, and it’s going to be real interesting for Jacques the fur trapper when a skier lands in the chimney of his cabin.

I cleared the Challenging Stage, but my victory was quickly forgotten when I noticed that sign at the back that says “Little Bastard” on it. That’s a bold advertising strategy, huh? I can see the commercials now. “Hey, you. Yeah, you, the dumb-looking guy with the bad haircut. Smoke Little Bastard cigarettes, you piece of shit!”
That’s not the only interesting bit of decoration around Extreme Downhill’s courses, either.

How about a big advertisement that says “GOD SAVE ME!,” that’s definitely interesting. I say advertisement, but it was clearly created by the spectators and erected as a plea to be rescued from this hell of standing atop a frozen peak and being forced to watch rich people slide down a mountain. Give it a few hours and they’ll be lashing a discarded ice skate to that sign to create a makeshift guillotine.

Oh, cool, we’re changing to football now? The 2018 World Cup was great, I can’t wait to play some tournament football on the biggest stage of them all!

Aww, we’re still skiing. Boo.
We’re in Italy now, and despite being on a completely different continent the stages still look the same. I know there’s only so much you can do with snow, but baffling billboard aside once I’d played a couple of stages I felt like I’d seen everything Extreme Downhill had to offer.
It was around this point that I realised Extreme Downhill isn’t a skiing game at all. It’s a rally driving game with the cars replaced by people who thought falling down the stairs wasn’t an interesting enough way to break their spine. Seriously, you could replace ChadChet with a Subaru Impreza and the game would be identical. It’s got the same arrows that tell you when a corner is coming up as most rally games, it’s all about sliding around corners and beating the clock… it’s difficult to find a full list of the games made by Sammy but I would not be surprised if they released a rally game a year or two before Extreme Downhill that plays very similarly.

The German course features billboards of buff, shirtless men. God, what I wouldn’t give to be shirtless in a snowstorm right now. I’m being serious, this heatwave is literally killing me. I don't do well in hot weather, I look like a plastic bag laying in an oily puddle.
The billboard is advertising something called Troosers, which is, of course, Scottish for trousers. You know, like the famous Scottish song about troosers. That’s why it says “loose fit,” you see.

Onward to America, which is where the different characters came into play. After several failed attempts at clearing the stage with the all-rounder character, I switched to Mr. Winding Course and immediately set a new course record. The thing is, I don’t think I played much better. I did everything I did before except it worked, and the only reason I can come up with is that Mr. Winding Course loses much less speed when turning. I’m not sure it’s even possible to complete the later stages with the slower characters, which makes the fact you can only switch characters once you’ve spent a continue bit of a kick in the balls.

The mountains of Japan are home to cowboy billboards advertising, I dunno, cowboys themselves? Hey, someone’s got to look after all those cows you have, am I right? This cowboy might have a hat and an eyepatch, but that’s not fooling me: I’m ninety-five percent sure that this is actually a picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger, specifically when he’s pointing a gun at someone in a Terminator movie.

I’d class falling off a mountain as “extreme downhill”, yes.

The final course is in Norway, the birthplace of skiing (I assume). The course is tough, but perhaps not quite as brutal as I was expecting it to be. Extreme Downhill is a strange one, difficulty-wise. The character you choose seems to make a massive difference, and stages often have one or two vicious obstacles or turns in the middle of the stage that can make or break your run.

For example, had I slightly misaligned my skier and fallen off this bridge, that would probably have been game over, and learning the course so you know when these hazards are coming up is definitely the key to good times. I mean good times on the leaderboard, not “good times” as in fun, which Extreme Downhill is rather lacking. A major problem is that you can’t see where you’re going. Seriously, look at the screenshots and remember that your skier is travelling pretty bloody quickly and you’ll seen realise that there’s no way to see what’s coming up in the next half-second. The “camera” really could have done with been pulled back a bit, because as it stands all the player is doing is responding to the arrows as they appear. Am I saying that Extreme Downhill was originally designed as a test for intelligence in laboratory goldfish, where they were rewarded with food pellets if they could correctly nudge a lever when the appropriate arrow was shown to them? And then one of the researchers came back from a skiing trip and said “hey guys, this might sound crazy but hear me out...”? I might be. I just might be.

It’s not all bad, though. The snowmen are cute, the weirdo billboards are entertaining enough to stop me regretting that I played the game. Oh right, good things about the gameplay. Well, it’s definitely fast, and straightforward enough to pick up and play for five minutes of high-intensity eyeball stimulation. It works, for the most part, even if it does feel like the game’s guiding you around corners. It’s probably the best skiing videogame I’ve ever played, and I trust you’re all clever enough to work out the reasoning behind that statement.

“King of Hills” was also the title inkjet-printed onto the King of the Hill DVD box set I ordered from AliExpress.

And then the game crashed during the ending sequence, which seemed pretty appropriate.
At the beginning of this article I said Extreme Downhill is a game about skiing, but it isn’t, not really. It’s a game about going fast and occasionally slamming face-first into a billboard with a shirtless man on it. It’s definitely an arcade game, I’ll say that much. I can’t imagine a home console port of Extreme Downhill: this is a game all about big graphics, big speed and gameplay so shallow you’d struggle to drown a chinchilla in it. I didn’t much enjoy playing it, but I did enjoy experiencing it, even if it did call me a Little Bastard.

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LED STORM: RALLY 2011 (ARCADE)

It feels like it’s been a while since I covered a really arcade-y arcade game. I’m still not sure exactly what I mean by arcade-y, but I know it when I see it and I’ve seen it in Capcom’s 1988 top-down racer LED Storm: Rally 2011. So, let’s take a look at it, then, and enjoy the predictions that Capcom made about road conditions in the distant future / recent past of 2011.

I am at a loss to explain what “LED” means in this context. I thought maybe it was a corruption of “lead,” intended to conjure up images of heavy metal and, erm, leaded petrol, but that doesn’t feel right. Some of the artwork and advertisements for the game’s home computer versions claim it stands for “Lazer Enhanced Destruction,” but that explanation wilts in light of the game’s complete lack of lazers (or even lasers.) I suspect it was chosen simply to sound cool, much like how “vanishing” apparently became associated with fast cars in Japanese media.

As for the plot, two chaps challenge one another to a cross country race. The winner presumably receives the large pile of cash, although no prize is ever explicitly mentioned so maybe they’re a couple who just won the lottery and decided to embark on a futuristic cyber-race as a means of spending their new-found wealth. Hopefully this attempt to keep the ennui of the ultra-rich at bay will also keep their relationship alive and healthy.

Here’s the world map, showing the nine stages we’ll be racing through as we head from Capital to SkyCity.009. Oh, and your car talks to you because it’s the future. Looks like Capcom predicted SatNav with this game, although rather than a soothing female voice asking you to turn left in three hundred yards, you get a squawking robot constantly pestering you about energy. The voice identifies itself as “Mac.” Possibly. The voice sample’s a little muddy, so it could be Zack, but given that it says “MC” at the bottom of the screen I’m sticking with Mac.

And then you’re racing, blasting across the elevated highways of Capital City, bumping the other road users out of the way and – I hope – collecting every petrol can and energy pick-up along the way. You’re going to need them. You can see the rival blue car towards the bottom of the screen, although (perhaps surprisingly) you don’t actually need to beat your rival to the finish line. They’re mostly there to get in your way, often re-appearing towards the end of the stage to nudge you off the course. Probably not your romantic partner, then, what with you racing a couple of miles above the distant city below and all.

Being a highly advanced robo-car, you’ve got a couple of tricks up your wheel arches. The main one is jumping, which you can perform either with a button press or by hitting one of the ramps that litter the track for a much higher leap. The game’s attract mode calls them “jumping slopes,” but that’s an unnecessarily grandiose title to be applied to something that’s barely more technologically advanced that the bike ramps you’d build as a kid from the planks you nicked from a building site.
Jumping is an important skill to master in LED Storm. You can squash other cars by jumping on them, and there are frequent gaps in the tracks or patches of speed-reducing mud or gravel that must be hopped over. However, the most vital use of the jump is in collecting extra fuel, because most of the time energy pick-ups gently drift across the course while suspended from balloons. With all the complaints that increased regulations have made Formula 1 less interesting to watch, hopefulyl the pit lanes will be replaced by helium balloon in the near future. That ought to liven things up.

The jumping is so important that when a small squad of skinny golden mechanoids – distant relatives of Crow T. Robot, perhaps – jumps onto your car and hangs on for dear life, it is in your best interests to shake them off as quickly as possible by veering from side-to-side because you can’t jump while they’re on there. It’s a really nice touch, and right from the off LED Storm has a lot of charm in its futuristic cityscapes, sci-fi vehicles and cavorting, capering, spoiler-grabbing robots.

Oh, and you can transform your car into a motorcycle at the press of a button, complete with a really nice transformation animation situation. My personal high watermark for vehicular transformations is Inspector Gadget’s car, and LED Storm’s car-to-bike switch is approaching that level so I spent a lot of time switching back and forth when I might have been better served by trying not to crash.
However, there doesn’t seem to be much point to the transformation. Having played all the way through this game a couple of times with a roughly fifty/fifty split between car and bike, I could see almost zero differences between them. The car mode might be slightly more robust when it comes to collisions, but it’s a very subtle difference if a difference even exists at all. I had thought that the narrower sprite of the bike might make it better for squeezing through small gaps, but the hitbox of the car and bike seems to be the same size. The transformation aspect is kinda redundant, then, but that doesn’t stop it looking cool.

As you’d expect, the first stage is relatively straightforward, and after slaloming through a convoy of trucks, our plucky little car-bike rockets across the finish line of the first stage without running out of fuel. I managed to collect plenty of energy capsules along the way, which meant I never got low on fuel but it did have the drawback of Mac shouting “energy!” every time I fuelled up, his voice sample carrying the unmistakeable cadence of someone who’s starting to get frustrated about having to explain energy to someone who just doesn’t get it.

Mac likes to complain. He’s a whiner, a whinger, and his wheedling voice piping up with “you’re running out of energy!” will become an annoyingly common occurrence as the game continues.

The second stage is the Netwood Forest, presumably named for these large net-like trees that conveniently allow any passing cars on a cross-country race to be seen through their sparse foliage. This time, the creatures hanging from the car are hopping, rabbit-like creatures, so I felt a little bad about shaking them off my car at 250 kilometres an hour. In my defence, without being able to jump I would have run out of energy and thus had to hear more of Mac’s complaining, so I’m sure the rabbits will understand and accept my actions.

This stage is far more open than the first, lacking clear roads a lot of the time, and so you’re free to move around horizontally much more than before while enjoying the robotic wildlife and trying not to plough face-first into a tree. It’s fast-paced, constantly driving the player forward into a stream of colourful opponents and hazards that zip by with impressive smoothness. That said, the main thing that caught my attention in this stage was the music. Here, give stage two’s theme a listen and see if it reminds you of anything.

There’s a riff in there that sure sounds a lot like the Dr. Wily Castle theme from Mega Man 2, huh? As it turns out, LED Storm’s composer is none other than Takashi “Ogeretsukun” Tateishi, who also created the music for Mega Man 2 – and given the 1988 date on both games it seems likely he was working on both soundtracks at around the same time and a bit of cross-pollination set in. On the whole the soundtrack is quite good, with plenty of high-energy tracks, although some of them do feel like they belong in a different game – one that’s a traditional platformer or something rather than a futuristic racing game.

Heading back to actual (if dangerously under-maintained) roads for the Coral Sea stage, where the tranquil blue waters provide a stark contrast to the huge robot woodlice that sit right in the middle of the bloody road, requiring a lot of nimble manoeuvring to get past. Sadly, your vehicle doesn’t do nimble manoeuvring. Not well, at least. Often times, I found the vehicle’s hitbox would clip things behind you, obstacles I felt I’d completely avoided, which made for the occasional frustrating moment in what is otherwise a game that plays perfectly adequately.

I think there’s an explanation for some of the rough edges to be found in LED Storm: Rally 2011. You see, I’ve actually covered this game before, sort of. Many years ago I wrote about another top-down arcade racer from Capcom, a game that was called Mad Gear (yes, like the Final Fight villains) or, in some markets, LED Storm. As it turns out, LED Storm: Rally 2011 is actually an earlier version of that game. Capcom weren’t happy with the way the Rally 2011 version was turning out, so according to former Capcom designer (and co-creator of Street Fighter II and Final Fight) Akira Nishitani, he was tasked with changing things around to ultimately produce the Mad Gear version of the game.

The changes that were made are a little strange. Most of the gameplay is identical, as is the soundtrack, and while the stages were reworked and shuffled around a bit they’re mostly the same. One of the biggest changes is that the transforming car of the Rally 2011 version was replaced by a selection of three vehicles – a Porsche, a Formula 1 car and a lorry – that the player could pick from. Another is that the futuristic, sci-fi designs of the cars, helicopters and other vehicles were replaced with more realistic vehicles and frankly this seems like a major downgrade. The original version of LED Storm has some really appealing vehicle designs – long-legged bug-shaped cars that look like moon rovers from a sixties comic book, bulbous TNT-carrying trucks, galloping cyber-ostriches – and the idea that replacing them with regular cars would somehow be more appealing to arcade players is baffling to me.

Fortunately most of the interesting scenery was kept intact, with things like the lava-dwelling dinosaurs and giant stone heads that must have crept in from a Konami game helping to keep things interesting. I mean, whatever vehicle you’re driving, you can’t argue with a section spent escaping from the collapsing skeleton of a colossal dinosaur. That could even make a unicycle look cool.

Halfway through the game, and Mac pops up with some encouraging words. I think they’re encouraging, anyway. Reading them again I’d accept that they could also sound like Mac is simply resigned to his fate.

Here in Million Valley, where the vast stone walls loom around the player and someone forgot to close the back of this truck and oh no now there are highly advanced future-containers all over the road, I came to the conclusion that LED Storm has a problem with difficulty. It’s not just that it’s hard, although it is a difficult game, but it's that the difficulty level fluctuates wildly from stage to stage. Maybe less time spent redrawing all the vehicle sprites and more effort putting the stages into a more sensible order would have helped the game.

This is definitely one of those arcade games I’d recommend playing on the easiest difficulty setting, though. This is entirely down to the rigmarole of having to collect fuel. The fuel acts as a timer, because it depletes even when you’re not moving, and it drains so quickly that missing a few energy capsules in a row means that there’s little you can do to stop yourself from grinding to a halt. I know the fuel limitations are there to increase the amount of money people were pumping into the arcade cabinet, but that was back in 1988. That was then and this is now, and at this moment in time I don’t feel the need to prove myself to a thirty-year-old racing game. Having to concentrate on collecting fuel detracts from the enjoyment of the high-speed action and the vibrant, character-packed scenery, so anything that helps to keep the fuel gauge at bay comes with my highest recommendation.

So LED Storm: Rally 2011 is a prototype of sorts, but the question is was it ever released? Perhaps. I suspect that it was put out for location testing at the very least because (a) that’d explain why Capcom though it required a rework and b) there are home computer ports of LED Storm and they’re all based on this version, futuristic cars and all. The home ports are quite good, by most accounts, although even in the Amiga version the graphics suffered a significant downgrade and the colour and vibrancy of the action is probably LED Storm’s strongest suit.

Going back to the start of the article, and I’d have to say that yes, LED Storm is a very arcade-y game. You might well disagree, but for me the top-down racer has always been a genre I associate with the arcades in particular for reasons I can’t adequately explain. Maybe I played a lot of them on my rare childhood visits to the arcades, although my arcade memories are mostly of Capcom fighting games and Side Pocket.
But LED Storm feels arcade-y in other ways, too, even if it lacks the sense of overblown, screaming bigness that makes games like Konami’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Operation Wolf feel like quintessential arcade games. LED Storm does have those bold colours, graphics that handily surpass the home consoles of the time, it’s got voice samples that impress even as Mac’s constant greedy clamouring for fuel grates on the nerves like a screaming baby on the bus. Yep, feels like an arcade game to me.

None of that matters if the game isn’t any fun to play, but I’m happy to report that LED Storm is an enjoyable little title. In fact, I think I enjoyed it more this time around than I did when I played Mad Gear. The extra interested generated by all the cars looking like vehicles from a non-existent eighties toyline about hot-rod gangs from Neptune helps, but I think it’s more that I happened to be in a state of mind where a simple, uncomplicated arcade racer was just what I fancied. The relentless pace of the gameplay keeps you invested and makes a short run-time feel packed with incident rather than disappointingly brief, and the fact you don’t lose lives (just fuel) for falling of the track or crashing into a huge truck helps prevent the obstacle-strewn courses from becoming too frustrating.

As the red car and the blue car scream over the finishing line, I’m left with the knowledge that I’m going to have this old Milky Way advert stuck in my head for the next few weeks. Oh, and also LED Storm: Rally 2011 is pretty good! It’s got flaws, especially with the fuel system and the refills that often float off the side of the course where you can see them but can’t reach them, and the sometimes hard-to-predict hitboxes. On the whole, though, a fun time was had by all.

The game ends in the same way as the Mad Gear version: with a heartfelt message from Mac about his treasured memories of falling off elevated highways and running out of fuel in the middle of the desert. Capcom changed a lot of the graphics and even the font for the Mad Gear version, but not the spelling – Mac is still “vary giad” to have been with the player. I wish I could say the feeling was mutual, Mac.

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