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Video Game: Big Rigs Over The Road Racing

They Just Didn't Care :The Game.

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.

This game provides examples of:

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.
- There is, however, a great amount of AI stupidity in the coding. This game is an utter memory vampire - if you pull up Task Manager, you'll see that the game uses 50% of available memory. Which raises the question, for what?
Broke The Rating Scale: Types 0, 1, and 5.
- 0: 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. His video review grants the "No. Just... No" Reaction rating as well.
"We don't hand out zeroes, but maybe we should have for Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing"
- 1: Net Jack apparently rewrote its code so it could award the game a zero.
- 5: X-Play 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^note spouting from it ramming^noteno collision detection a police car^noteno police with the tagline "18 Wheels^note 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 You Tube 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 or how long the game can run without crashing.
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.
Wasted Song: The game actually -does- contain some surprisingly catchy music. Too bad none of it actually plays in-game...
The Wiki Rule: Yes, the game has its own Fan Wiki ! It's all just an Affectionate Parody...we hope.^note
Unwinnable: Inverted. Inloosible. 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.
Zero-Effort Boss: Oh goodness, YES.
The Mockbuster: The game has "18 Wheels of Thunder" on the bottom of its box. This could be seen as an attempt to fool people into thinking that it's an entry in the "18 Wheels of Steel" franchise due to how similar the two titles are, which seems weird since 18 Wheels of Steel is a simulation franchise (and Big Rigs would have been much more arcadey if it were finished).