"YOU'RE WINNER !"
—The victory screen
Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing is a "racing" "game" for the PC, developed by Stellar Stone and published by GameMill Entertainment in 2003.
The objective is to race your selected semi-trailer truck to the finish line before your opponent, while passing through each checkpoint on the track. While the game is sufficiently functional to allow the player to drive the truck, it does not contain an AI to control the opponent's truck, which negates the alleged "racing" aspect of the game.
Despite the stopwatch displayed in the corner of the racing screen, there is no further mechanism for tracking the player's race times, providing little motivation to reach the finish line in a timely manner. Physics and collision detection were likewise not implemented, so the player doesn't need to stick to the course, either. Your truck can drive up vertical cliffs, sink through bridges, go infinite speed in reverse and even leave the boundary of the map, all while your opponent sits there in silence, not moving an inch.
Given the above, there's no way to physically lose the "race"— either the player crosses the finish line and wins, or they get sick of the game and quit. See it for yourself.
Distinct from Euro Truck Simulator, which takes the basic premise of a Big Badass Rig driving game and takes it in a more playable direction.
This "game" provides examples of:
- Advanced Movement Technique: There is no acceleration limit when moving backwards. This means that your truck going in reverse can theoretically reach infinite speeds, easily moving several times faster than light. Fortunately, there's no collision detection and therefore no risk of crashing into anything.
- And Now for Someone Completely Different: It's actually possible to take control of your opponent in the middle of the race by pressing tab twice. This is pretty much the only way for that poor driver to win the game. Not that it matters for you, as you still get the "YOU'RE WINNER !" trophy.
- Artificial Stupidity: In the base game there is no AI at all. If you download the patch, the opponent rig will move... at a fixed speed of 1 MPH, 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 cross the finish line first, the game would crash.
- Artistic License – Physics:
- Countless examples, but most notably what happens when you throw your rig into reverse. Your truck will gradually accelerate faster and faster as you hold the reverse button - way beyond the 60 miles per hour limit of going forward. After almost an hour of holding that button down, you will eventually reach the golden speed of 12.3 undecillion (1.23E37) miles per hournote . To put this in perspective, the speed of light in a vacuum is only 671 million (6.71E8) miles per hour, meaning that you are travelling approximately an almighty 18.3 OCTILLION (1.83e+29) TIMES FASTER THAN LIGHT (you cannot go faster because your truck will inexplicably cross the finish line once you've reached that "speed"). If you were traveling at the top speed a truck in the game can reverse, you could cross the entire known universe in under 160 picoseconds (and destroy it as well). And yet, your truck will stop on a dime, inertia be damned to hell, if you lift your finger off the reverse button at any point in your dimension-killing faster-than-light backwards trucking adventure. As one commenter in this video puts it:"At that speed, the big rig travels around the observable universe so fast that it basically occupies every single point in the universe at the same time. Not only you have achieved omnipotence, you have also achieved omnipresence. Big Rigs is love. Big Rigs is life."
- In the "sequel", Midnight Race Club: Supercharged!, certain items were given proper boundaries… but none of them were given proper physics. That means that hitting anything with boundaries results in your car violently recoiling upon collision, even if it's something as small as a traffic cone.
- Countless examples, but most notably what happens when you throw your rig into reverse. Your truck will gradually accelerate faster and faster as you hold the reverse button - way beyond the 60 miles per hour limit of going forward. After almost an hour of holding that button down, you will eventually reach the golden speed of 12.3 undecillion (1.23E37) miles per hournote . To put this in perspective, the speed of light in a vacuum is only 671 million (6.71E8) miles per hour, meaning that you are travelling approximately an almighty 18.3 OCTILLION (1.83e+29) TIMES FASTER THAN LIGHT (you cannot go faster because your truck will inexplicably cross the finish line once you've reached that "speed"). If you were traveling at the top speed a truck in the game can reverse, you could cross the entire known universe in under 160 picoseconds (and destroy it as well). And yet, your truck will stop on a dime, inertia be damned to hell, if you lift your finger off the reverse button at any point in your dimension-killing faster-than-light backwards trucking adventure. As one commenter in this video
- Ascended Meme: Inverted. After "YOU'RE WINNER !" became a meme, the developers took the hint that this was a sign of the game's overall low quality and replaced it with "YOU WIN!" in a patch.
- Bladder of Steel: An odd subversion. While you can pause the game, the game is so broken that even the pause feature doesn't work properly; after unpausing the game, the time will have jumped ahead, and if you are playing on a later patch, the opponent will have moved on from where they were when you paused. This does not matter though, as the opponent will never cross the finish line and the game has no time limit.
- "Blind Idiot" Translation: Stellar Stone itself was an American company, but they outsourced most of development to a Ukrainian one, hence "YOU'RE WINNER !"
- Covers Always Lie: The box appears to display a collection of features that the completed game was intended to include. Since the game was released in an unfinished state, it fails to contain the cinematic imagery shown in the artwork. Likewise, the cargo trailers, police pursuits, and AI competition, advertised on the back are absent.
- Driving Up a Wall: Since the game cannot simulate gravity, the player can easily drive up vertical cliffs.
- Faster-Than-Light Travel: What you eventually achieve if you continuously accelerate in reverse. When the down arrow key is released, the truck stops on a dime.
- Foregone Victory:
- It is impossible to lose the "race", as the player's opponent does not have the ability to move in the original release. A subsequent patch animated the vehicle to drive around the track, but neglected to add a programmed losing state, requiring the model to stop short of the finish line to avoid breaking the game.
- On occasion, the game may fail to distinguish between starting and finishing a race, so it may award you a win the moment you cross the starting line.
- Game-Breaking Bug: Among other things, in the pre-patch version, selecting the fourth track causes the game to crash.
- The Juggernaut: The player's truck. Nothing can stop, damage, or slow it down— including buildings or the opponent's truck.
- 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. According to one curious user on YouTube, gameplay ends at 12.3 undecillion MPH (that's about 36 zeroes in that number). At that speed the truck can traverse the diameter of the observable universe in under 160 picoseconds. At that point the vehicle is travelling so fast the game detects it everywhere at once, so it trips the finish flag—including the checkpoints—and ends the race.
- Unintentionally Unwinnable: Selecting the "Random Race" option on the main menu will frequently render a race impossible to complete, as the game will try to increase the number of laps, but cannot register you driving through any checkpoint more than once. Effectively, you cannot complete the race if this happens.
- Unwinnable: Inverted. The developers did not program a losing condition into the game, and your opponent doesn't move at all in the original release. Although they created a patch that animates your opponent's truck, they never did insert the losing condition, so the model of your opponent's vehicle will stop short of the finish line after circling the track.
- Very False Advertising: The back of the box advertises features such as "police roadblocks" and "wicked challenges", which aren't present in the game. See it for yourself.◊
- A Winner Is You: The three-handled "YOU'RE WINNER !" trophy. It doesn't even spin: Rather than a 3D model, it's a static image. And the entire game (including the audio) pauses when it appears.
- Wins by Doing Absolutely Nothing: The game does not unflag checkpoints that the player has driven through when the player starts a new race after having already completed one. Therefore, the game will declare you WINNER as soon as you cross the starting line, as it believes that all of the checkpoints have already been passed through.
- Zero-Effort Boss: In the original release, your opponent doesn't move at all. Even when it does move with the patch, it can't be interacted with and stops short of the finish line, meaning you cannot lose to it.
YOU'RE WINNER !
