Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing
The Only Trucking Game You Need to Play?
Some video games avoid realism, such as Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing. Other video games embrace it, like American Truck Simulator. American Truck Simulator was released in February 2016 to cash in on the video game simulator craze that included Farming Simulator, Train Simulator, and Flight Simulator. The game strives for realism so 4-wheel drivers can somewhat experience being a trucker from the comfort of their home. This article is not about that, neither the game nor realism.
This article is about Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing.
What Is Big Rigs?
Released in November 2003 for the PC (Windows XP), Big Rigs: Over the Road, Racing was developed in Ukraine with next to no development time nor budget. The result is a game that just barely manages to keep itself together. What is there leaves a lot to be desired. The game is notorious within gaming circles as one of the worst video games ever made, with some refusing to call it a game outright.
What Makes Big Rigs so Terrible?
The back of the box can only be described as false advertising: it says the player hauls illegal cargo while avoiding the police. There is no cargo. There is no police. The only vehicles are yours and a truck that you are racing against.
Assuming the other truck moves.
In the earliest releases of Big Rigs, the opposing truck does not move an inch. He sits at the starting line. In later releases of the game and through online updates known as “patches”, the opposing truck does move across the track, but stops right before the finish line, and refuses to cross it. This is why some are hesitant to call Big Rigs a game: Big Rigs does not have an official losing condition as it is impossible to cross the finish line after your opponent.
All of the modeled objects in the games have no collision detection, making houses, trees, and lamp posts mere suggestions. You can pass through them without any damage to your truck or slowing down. When you cross over a bridge, you simply fall through it, only to come up the hill on the other side through the bridge again.
Gravity does not exist in the way you know it. In Big Rigs, your car is connected to the ground. If you drive on anything uneven, your truck will never go airborne. Your vehicle can drive straight up or straight down with no change in speed.
Perhaps the most egregious violation of physics is driving in reverse. Driving forwards, your truck has a hard speed limit of approximately 83 miles per hour. Driving backward has a much higher cap to your speed. As long as you hold the down arrow key, your rig will travel faster and faster. It will keep accelerating until you let go of the arrow key (in which case it stops immediately, which is sure to create driver whiplash) or until you reach 12.3 undecillion miles per hour (that’s 12,300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles per hour).
The truck travels the distance of the entire observable universe in less than a millionth of a second.
The reason this is the cap is that at this speed, the truck moves fast enough to effectively be in every point on the track at the same time, including over the finish line. Occupying all points in space simultaneously makes no sense, but neither does traveling orders of magnitude faster than light. Completing a race grants a picture of a trophy with text that says “You’re Winner!”
When Better Isn’t Good Enough
Big Rigs had downloadable updates. As already mentioned, the opposing truck moves in later versions of the game, but still stops before the finish line. The original release of the game was silent; later releases have music and sound. Finally, later copies of the game have changed the victory text to be more grammatically correct.
You can still move at ludicrous speed in reverse while traveling up a vertical incline, though, so one has to wonder why the developers even bothered trying to extinguish a forest fire with a squirt gun.
Why You Should Play It
People consume media to be brought into new worlds. When a trucker has been driving for more than 12 hours in a day, the last thing he would want to do is play a realistic video game of hauling cargo across the country. Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing allows all of your wildest trucker fantasies to come true! No police officers or Department of Transportation authorities to stop you from driving straight up, through buildings and trees, all while traveling at speeds that would make light jealous.
Big Rigs is woefully unrealistic, and that’s its charm. Like campy, low-budget horror movies, Big Rigs has obtained a cult following for how unpolished it is. Yourewinner.com is a fan discussion forum for all things Big Rigs, but because the game has not been updated in well over a decade, the discussion there has stagnated.
Big Rigs is not a game so much as an experience. An out-of-this-world experience where “You’re Winner!”
You are always a winner with TopMark Funding. Whether you are an owner-operator looking to expand into a multi-truck business or own a vast fleet, TopMark Funding has the means to help you find the best rate on your next loan or lease. Whether you are looking to finance a semi-truck or a trailer, TopMark Funding can help you get the best possible rate for your credit.
Disclaimer: TopMark Funding does not finance any trucks that can travel vertically, nor go quasi-infinite speed in reverse.
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