Bigfoot

As a child of the American ’80s, I was aware of Bigfoot, Grave Digger, and the commercials when they came through town. Pay for the whole seat, but you’ll only need the eddddddge! But I can’t say I was any more interested in monster trucks than any other 8 year old, except for one highly-specific area.

“Bigfoot is HUGE!” – meh.
“Its tires alone are 66 inches tall!” – ok.
“It crushes cars!”

I don’t know why I cared about a bunch of hoopties getting squashed by construction-grade tires, but I did, brother, I did. Not enough to ever see a monster truck rally in person, but enough to own the Bigfoot playset with the foil cars you could mold back into service. Sure the real truck could do wheelies, go over obstacles, and some drag race/funny car shit, but gimme more of those smooshed cars! Crunch ’em again!

And so, I remember renting the NES game and being mighty disappointed that it wasn’t just 8 Megs of crunching ’70s Cadillacs, from title screen to credits. Crunching Caddies is featured (sorta) but this is mostly a racing game. You’re on a cross-country trek from Los Angeles to New York City, with nine stops along the way. Each stop is a monster truck event, with entrance fees, cash bonuses, and repair costs. It’s also always a two-player game. If you don’t have someone standing by on the couch, the CPU controls a palette-swapped clone across all modes.

In between each event is an off-road race. Bigfoot (you) and the opposing truck drive vertically as the screen scrolls. Both trucks share the screen, so one player can never completely outrun the other. Hazards like dirt mounds, fences, and oil slicks the size of an ecological disaster all stand in the way. Controls are very simple, with the D-pad to steer and A to fire off collectable nitrous charges for brief speed bursts. Up on the pad moves you closer to the top of the screen, at the cost of not seeing what’s coming.

There are checkpoint flags and an eventual finish line that both give cash bonuses, but you’re mostly trying to beat your opponent to power-ups. These scattered icons include money, brief invincibility, and a huge jump that can clear some obstacles (just don’t land in the trees). Like Mario Kart, the last icon you picked up gets stored until you either use it with the B button or replace it by running over a new one. The crowd-pleaser is the buzzsaw. Activating this floats a spinning saw in front of your truck and strongly encourages you to ram it into your opponent.

Trucks have an overall health bar that drops when you’re forced into hazards, get bumped by your opponent, or start having a buzzsaw carved into you. If you ever get pinched by the scrolling screen, or nitro directly into something solid (fence, trees, etc), it zeroes your health immediately. If either truck runs out of health, they explode, then quickly reform after taking $500 from the driver’s bank. Considering I bumped a curb once and it cost about three grand, I’m a little jealous.

That bank account dictates the entire game. You’ve got to pay a $1000 fee to enter each event. The race section gives you the chance to earn enough if you’re behind, but also the chance to lose it all to crashes along the way. There are no lives or continues – only your bank account – and the game ends if you can’t buy into the next event. Blow up enough times during the race and you’ve ended your cross-country run.

Beating up on your opponent doesn’t help as much as you’d think. The one exception is if they’re almost out of money. If you can destroy them during the race and they can’t afford the $500 to reassemble, you’re left alone for the rest of the course. In this highly-specific situation, absolutely chase them down with the buzzsaw and then enjoy your leisurely Sunday drive over all the remaining power-ups. Unfortunately, your victory won’t last. Your opponent is replaced by a different-color clone with a fresh $5000 before the next event starts.

After the finish line and before the event, you get a garage screen. Here’s where the money you’ve grabbed comes into play. Your truck’s parts are rated in four areas: Engine, Tires, Transmission, and Suspension. These parts only affect your performance in the coming event and each has a maximum of four bars. You’re going to want four bars in everything if you can afford it, but if you can’t, you’ll want to boost specific ones based on the upcoming challenge – e.g. tires and suspension for hills, or transmission and engine for the tractor pull.

There are four events: Mud Race, Tractor Pull, Hill Climb, and Car Crunch. There’s variety in how you approach these – Tractor Pull is more of a timing challenge, while even Car Crunch has dirt mounds and a bit of mud. You’ll play through all four events in the first half of the country, then longer versions in the second. NYC features a final Drag Race, which combines sections of mud, hills, and cars into one long gauntlet. Events always come in a predetermined order, so you’re always doing a Mud Race in Reno and a Tractor Pull when you hit Tulsa. This means you can never skip any events if there’s a particular one you despise.

Events are shown from a split-screen side perspective with Bigfoot on top and Player 2 on the bottom. Between you both are dashboards with working indicators – blue for Bigfoot, red for the other guy. If the overhead race sections are supposed to be loose, arcade fun, then these events are more like a Bigfoot simulator.

Now, I’m sure actually driving a monster truck is more complicated than flooring the gas and yelling “yeehaw!”, but this game decides to really drive that point home. Let’s break down the key elements:

Bare minimum, you must alternate left and right on the D-Pad to move. Cycling faster makes you go faster. You won’t move forward at all unless you’re consistently jamming on the D-Pad. This moves a dashboard speedometer that is ultimately useless. Always go fast.

At the same time, your tachometer flails wildly. Press A to shift gears, with no differentiation between shifting up or down. It’s all the same button. The manual says to shift (up) when the tach is high and shift (down) again when it’s low. This roughly gives you the power for hill climbs or the speed for flatter sections.

At the same time, you’ve got a supercharger on the B button. Holding this down boosts performance at the cost of fuel and engine temperature. High temperature damages the engine, while running out of fuel ends your current attempt. Fuel becomes an issue as the events get longer, with 1-2 refuel checkpoints in the game’s later half.

And now, for reference, the NES controller:

This is a whole lot to manage with not enough hands. If you hold it like the manual’s suggestion above, you’ve got no way to shift or turbo. If you never shift at all, you’re going to break parts. A warning message flashes on your dash and that part drops one bar in real-time. You immediately feel these effects – my favorite is watching the tires literally shrink as they take damage. Level 1 tires just ain’t gonna get you up that hill, no matter how hard you work the D-Pad. For its part, supercharge really helps boost you on straightaways and keep you competitive in the longer courses.

I tried focusing entirely on working the D-Pad as fast as possible and found I was losing even the first race. I already don’t like these stamina-based button smashing challenges – and especially never liked the D-Pad system when I’ve seen it before. Throwing in shifting and turbo made it the “pat your head and rub your stomach” challenge from hell. The best I was able to do was place the controller on a table, rock the D-Pad with two fingers, and use my right hand for buttons. Even then, I couldn’t press Left and Right very fast. I was getting thwomped handily by the CPU, while I’m cramping up and stalling the truck.

You can do a little better with an emulator and keyboard keys, but my saving grace was an arcade stick. I’m basically mimicking the NES Advantage, and waggling the stick back and forth is mechanically much easier than trying to press the D-Pad. You can crank your stick hard with one hand (STOPPIT!) and still shift and turbo with the other. It also helps that Up and Down don’t do anything in events, so go wild. This took the game from something that was “clearly impossible; the developers must have been high,” to a game I could actually beat.

The CPU doesn’t have to worry about hand cramps and charges forward at a relentlessly steady pace (unless he’s out of money and his parts completely fail). In a straight-out D-Pad battle, you’ll lose. Shifting gives you the advantage, because he never bothers. If you watch his dashboard, he will supercharge in bursts, but he’ll never shift. If you do, then you’ll blast past him on the hills, in the mud, and when pulling the tractor. He will stay mindlessly in the red and sacrifice parts.

This makes him predictably beatable, but only if you can manage a scheme that lets you keep smashing Left/Right while shifting with your other hand. I’m not convinced this is physically possible on a stock NES controller. It’s also exhausting. Granted, I’m in my 40s, it’s not Saturday morning, and I haven’t just chugged a couple sodas or housed a bowl of sugary cereal. But even with a stick, my resolve was slipping by Pueblo, and my hands were failing me by Jackson. If it weren’t for emulator save states and breaks, I wouldn’t have had the juice for NYC. I can’t imagine pushing through twelve heats in one marathon session.

Some of these issues will be helped by racing an actual second player. Both of you will have the same human disadvantages, and similar awkward, twisting poses as you try to will your truck up a hill. If I had to guess, this is probably how they designed it, and they would have preferred to not include a CPU opponent at all. Because if they really cared, it would have made sense to have easier computer drivers that you progressively knock out to get to a final, ultimate challenger. Instead, you’re getting the CPU’s best out of the gate.

However, if either player runs out of cash and fails to qualify, the CPU takes over. The losing player can’t come back until you reset the game. Also remember, it’s a static list of events. If one of you keeps failing, you’ll never compete against each other in the later events. Second place gets no money, nothing, good day, sir – so you may never be able to compete the Hill Climb against your little brother before he’s knocked out. This also means you can’t just plug in a second controller and win all events unopposed. In about two events, the CPU’s gonna show up and make you earn your victories.

There’s arguably some strategy. You don’t have to win every heat, so you might actually save money by doing nothing on the Tractor Pull or Hill Climb and watching the CPU blow out all his parts. But you do have to win most events – you can’t consistently perform second place and try to make up the money in the cross-country race. Losing events puts you in an inevitable death spiral. Even if you can still buy in to the next event, if you can’t afford equal parts to your opponent, you’ll lose. They’ll dig through mud or climb that hill faster, no matter how engaged your fingers are.

And even if you somehow earn enough money to squeak by, the points system gets you in the end. The same activities that earn cash (winning races and events, hitting checkpoints, etc) also give you points. Points are shown in interstitial updates between events, but only matter in deciding the winner at the end. The truck with the most points – not money – wins the game. If you haven’t been winning events, you won’t have enough. Oh, and if you do destroy a CPU opponent? His replacement keeps all the points, because of course he does.

Graphics are surprisingly good, with nice detail and shading. Hazards are easy to understand in the overhead races. Colors trend brown and yellow, but each event gets a slightly different palette, up to the blues of the arena in NYC. My only real disappointment is that cars just go from an intact sprite to a smooshed version when wheels touch them. There’s no multiple stages of deformation. They go by too fast to appreciate anyway, but 8-year-old me was real disappointed.

There’s only one song that gets reused, and it’s a sort of 50’s carhop style. I guess the math works out for a late-30s composer in the ’80s to lean into the music he grew up with, while the NES sure isn’t up to mimicking Skynyrd.  Growls and revvs of motors sound 8-bit, but fine. The buzzsaw is especially grating, but I imagine that’s the point. There’s some limited recorded speech with “prepare to race,” that would have impressed back in the day.

I don’t love the idea of a game that’s so situational. Playing on the stock NES controller? Awful; impossibly complicated, no fun at all. Playing with an arcade stick? Not bad; events feel different, some challenge. Playing with a second player? Great time, until one of you can’t keep up and the computer takes over. The controls and the computer opponent could be improved, but there’s a decent foundation here. You’ll need to care about pushing a giant truck to its limits, because you’re going to get worked over yourself in the process. If you’re up for it, you might enjoy Bigfoot’s event challenges.

 

The Good

If Bigfoot was a purely lazy title, it would have been satisfied with just the cross-country overhead race. We can disagree on the execution of the events, but they definitely add value. Good variety of monster truck mayhem.

 

The Bad

Event controls seem totally broken on a standard pad. Computer opponent needed some tweaking. The inter-event racing sections are kind dumb, but mostly harmless.