5. Big Rigs: Over The Road Racing
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHv4YzQHFIg&feature=youtu.be Ah, Big Rigs. Where to start? Big Rigs: Over The Road Racing is a 2003 racing game for the PC. It's the first game that came to mind when I thought of writing this article. It has to be the worst game I have ever played. The little gameplay it has it shockingly bad, technically it is horribly broken and the presentation of the game is gut-churningly bad. I will run out of adjectives for the negative descriptions by the end of the first paragraph. I don't know where to start with this so I'll just dive in. Big Rigs advertising on it's box art informs the customer that they will be "delivering illegal cargo, with cops chasing them". However, there is not a single police officer in the entire game and not once it is even implied that your truck contains any sort of illegal or suspicious cargo. So, already, Big Rigs is a game with completely misleading advertising.
Big Rigs calls itself a racing game, although I do not know why. You begin each race with one rival truck beside you. A rival truck that never ever moves. Big Rigs is a racing game where you never have any competition. I should however point out that a patch was released for Big Rigs which "fixed" the AI of the trucks and allowed them to move. However, they just stopped before reaching the finish line so the game is still impossible to lose. When the game is loaded up, you can select Random Race or Custom Race to start a match. Selecting Custom Race provides you with a incredible wealth of different ways to customise your race! Some sarcasm there for you. You choose one of four truck (all the same except looks), then you choose one of the five completely diverse tracks, either Devil Passage 1, Devil Passage 2, Forgotten Road 1, Nightride and Small Town Road, and then you race (against the unmoving opponent. Oh, and if you choose Nightride the game crashes). So, the race begins and the opponent has had a heart attack and died. You have no competition but surely you could just treat the game like a time attack gamemode and try to beat your scores? Nope. Not in Big Rigs. In Big Rigs, there is no collision detection. The truck will drive straight through trees, buildings, fences, your unmoving opponent, everything. So now not only is there no challenge from rivals, there is now also no challenge from driving as steering is now rendered pretty unnecessary. Your truck also has no sense of physics or gravity. Your truck will not be slowed down by steep vertical slopes, driving over hills and mountains without slowing down a bit. Oh, and also you can drive out the map into a grey void.
By now, we have a pretty broken game. But we are not done yet. When the trucks are driving forward, they are pretty slow at accelerating and, as reality will dictate, they do the same when reversing - but with one small difference. The trucks will, when in reverse, never stop accelerating. There is a YouTube video of someone reach one billion MPH in reverse in Big Rigs. Oh, and when you let the reverse button go, the truck stops instantly. When you finally do finish the game, the game congratulates you with the now infamous phrase "YOU'RE WINNER", and with this fantastic grammar your first (and almost certainly last) race is over. But you are only treated to this amazing screen if the game manages to realise you have won, which some of the time it doesn't. Oh, and also sometimes you instantly win the race and crossing the starting line.
Big Rigs is a unique game. There is only one way to describe it: A completely misleading, broken racing game where you race against a stationary rival in a intangible truck that defies the laws of physics and gaming to a degree that can harm the human mind. Also, there is a
lot of graphical glitches, and the game was released in it's Alpha stage. Oh, and no sound whatsoever.