Elf - Run Run Kyousoukyoku - ＲＵＮ・ＲＵＮ PC-98 Final (uncen-eng)

Translation: BabaJeanmel

Released: 1989-09-15
English Patch: 2022-03-10

Description:

The female inhabitants of a poor village in Japan want to improve the technological level of their homeland. A lazy but patriotic young man who grew up in the same village agrees to organize a world-wide running competition that will hopefully bring glory to the village.

Run Run Kyōsōkyoku is an arcade-style on-foot racing game. It uses a split-screen side-scrolling view and can be player against computer-controlled opponents or in a two-player mode. The latter allows players to choose any stage, while the former follows a linear set of levels, starting in Tokyo and advancing to the USA via China and Europe. The courses typically feature platforming sections alongside flat terrain; it is usually required to jump in a timed fashion to succeed, and jumps can vary in height and length depending on how long the player holds the correspondent key. Runners would also take falling damage in certain spots.

Players have ten female runners at their disposal. Each has her own attributes in four categories: jumping, speed, vitality, and stamina. The vitality parameter affects the time needed for the runner to recover after falling down; stamina influences the steadiness of the speed throughout the whole course. Each stage consists of the three races. If the player loses one but wins the other two, a mildly explicit erotic picture of a generic girl corresponding to the stage’s country is shown. Should the player win the first two races two more explicit images are shown.

[From Moby Games]

ReadMe by BabaJeanmel:
"It’s an action game, reminiscent of some very primitive version of Deshing Desperadoes. Except you lead a female runner team and there is a bit of strategy and resource-management involved (not to mention pathfinding for the later levels). Notable for being one of the few eroge that can actually be played in competitive 2 player mode.

This project is a very fast one. The main issue was the lack of space and some nasty hardcoded routines preventing to expand them. You’ll have to go with abbreviated names for the runners, sorry. Apart of this, the script was both short and simplistic so it was basically a no-brainer.

As it’s an early Elf game, it’s completely uncensored. It’s also very dumb and light-hearted, so don’t expect serious or unsettling stuff like in later games such as Isaku, Yu-No or Words Worth."

HOW TO RUN:

-If you play on an emulator, you should use Neko Project FMGEN (np2 variant, not np21 - otherwise the image will be filled with ugly black lines to compensate for the different resolution). Keep the CPU at 1x for accurate timing, or raise it to 2 or even 4x if you find the game to be too janky. The gameplay will greatly benefit from it, but you should then turn the music off to avoid losing your sanity. If you use save states, don’t reload a save after finishing a race and viewing the event CG or you might hang the game and corrupt your savegame, which WILL break the game.

-Other emulators (Dosbox-x anyone?) should work too, as long as you emulate an old model or you keep the CPU speed between 8-10 Mhz (or something between 16 and 40 if you want a faster gameplay).

-If you play on real hardware, early models (up to the UX I guess) will run the game just fine, but later ones may need to enable slow cpu mode to run the game without issues.

GAME HINTS:

-Each girl depletes her “VITAL” meter when she runs. You must not rely to the same ones for each race, or she may run out of “VITAL” and be disqualified.

-Red powerups raise your stats (running speed, jump height or stamina aka recovery time). Blue powerups lower your stats so avoid them. The black ones make your opponent fall.

-You must win two races to be qualified for the next round. If you beat the opponent 2 to 0, you get an explicit h-scene. If you win 2 but lose one, you’ll have to content yourself with an ecchi picture. If you lose both races, it’s game over.

-Winning every 7 rounds without losing a single race takes you to a special round which unlocks a final h-scene. If you lose this round, you can replay it without having to start the game from the beginning.

End of ReadMe.