Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing

What Could Have Been.
YOU'RE WINNER !
—Victory Screen, Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing

Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing is a brake jammin', CB talkin', convoy rollin' "action" game for the PC, "developed" by Stellar Stone and released in 2003. The player controls one of four semi-trailer trucks on one of four (plus one, as another level was added in an update) tracks, wherein the objective is to drive through the checkpoints and get to the finish line.

Features never-before-seen freedom, as the trucks can go up cliffs, through buildings, and into an endless void. The AI is infamously brutal and unrelenting, so a challenge is guaranteed.

See it for yourself.

Tropes used in Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing include:
  • Artificial Stupidity: Averted, as there is no AI at all. If you download the patch, the opponent rig will move... and then stop short of the finish line because there is no code for what happens when you lose a race. If anyone but the player happened to win, the game would crash.
  • Broke the Rating Scale: Types 0, 1 and 5.
    • 0: Net Jack apparently rewrote its code so it could award the game a zero.
    • 1: GameSpot reviewer Alex Navarro commented that the only reason the game received a 1.0 out of 10 (the lowest score ever given by GameSpot) was because they couldn't go any lower.

"We don't hand out zeroes, but maybe we should have for Big Rigs Over the Road Racing".

    • 5: X-Games didn't have a zero, and they refused to give this game anything higher.
  • Covers Always Lie: Let's count the ones that are just on the front! A truck with flames[1] spouting from it ramming[2]a police car[3] with the tagline "18 Wheels[4] Of Thunder." Even the concept of this game as carrying cargo is debatable, as all vehicles end where they start.
  • Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Well, you ARE a big rig, racing over the road. The back of the box, on the other hand...
  • Faster-Than-Light Travel: What you eventually achieve if you continuously accelerate in reverse. And when you release the reverse key, you instantly stop.
  • Foregone Victory: You absolutely can't lose, and even if you download the patch to make the opponent rig move, it still stops short of the finish line. Even if it did somehow cross it, it still wouldn't win because there is no programmed failure state! Basically, it is literally impossible for any race to end in the player not winning.
    • It gets even better! Sometimes the game's code has trouble distinguishing between starting and finishing, so you might win the race the moment you begin.
    • On the other hand, if you're playing Big Rigs Racing, you've kinda already lost before the race began...
  • Gravity Barrier: Averted, as gravity doesn't work.
  • Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: Non-existent. There are no walls at all. To quote a fellow on YouTube describing it:

"You don't drive into things. You drive through them. And by "things", I mean anything and everything."

    • The only thing in the game that you don't drive through is the ground. Bridges do not count as ground.
    • They certainly weren't kidding when they titled it Over the Road Racing.
    • You can easily surmount the one wall you can't drive through, MOUNTAINS. Without the slightest change in your speed.
  • Invisible Wall: Also non-existent. You can pretty much just drive off the edge of the world and stay there.
  • Ludicrous Speed: Just how fast can your truck go in reverse? It depends entirely on how long you're willing to keep your finger on the Down Arrow.
  • Obvious Pre-Alpha: And a buggy one at that. For the sake of perspective: programming-wise, this... "game"... probably represents less than a day's work for an experienced game developer.
    • In a desperate further attempt to pass it off as a real game, they actually released a patch. It fixed the opponent trucks' immobility and a broken map... and nothing else. And the opponent trucks now stop before they reach the finish line.
      • And the "fixed" map only turned it into a mirror of the first map.
    • Resources from this game were used in a better, non-truck racing game, but it unsurprisingly sucked too.
  • Refuge in Audacity: The developers, releasing the thing.
  • Unwinnable: Inverted. It's impossible to lose in this game. See Artificial Stupidity and Foregone Victory above.
  • A Winner Is You: The three-handled "YOU'RE WINNER !" trophy has become more emblematic of the game than anything else.
  1. ↑ No vehicles move anywhere approaching this fast when travelling forwards.
  2. ↑ No collision detection.
  3. ↑ No police.
  4. ↑ Not all trucks have loads and are 18 wheelers.
This article is issued from Allthetropes. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.