Big Run

STORY / GAMEPLAY
There is very little to say about Big Run. It's a common joystick-controlled racer, where you push the stick in the appropriate direction to move your car. The fire button switches between the High and Low gears (remember Chase H.Q?). The race consists of six stages with various check-points and you need finish in the top 3 in every stage. The road starts out as a fairly standard twisting motorway lined with aesthetic sponsors' billboards, trees, barrels and other obstacles found there to either reduce your speed or even smash you in pieces, but soon degenerates into rock strewn mountains passes, scrubland and desert. You can also use your...horn in order to force other road hogs out of your way. What is really annoying is that the time limit between the stage's check points is extremely tight.
Big Run is playable, but not to an extend that's going to see you coming back time after time. Although most people will get bored with its grey and brown landscapes, the same red opponents and the same sound effects pretty quickly, it isn't actually a bad game, and it's one of the many racers to the average arcade conversion line and deserves to be in this review-list.

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The ST conversion offers smooth scrolling, probably because the background graphics are sparse and the detail level and animation is limited. Even the coin-op\arcades wasn’t that good with dodgy graphics and wobbly game play, so one could question why put in all the effort to make this conversion. Much like the Amiga conversion, the graphics here become extremely blocky when you get too close to them.
There is a nice bit of hefty music before each stage, while in-game it includes some cool, sound effects (car engine, spinning etc) but not sampled.