The legendarily terrible Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing is now available on Steam
18 Wheels Of Thunder!
'18 Wheels Of Thunder' boasts Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing's original box art, in a font forged from guitar pedals, light beer, and divorce papers. Flames jet from the snout of the marauding 'rig like snorted breakfast tequila following an especially piquant ex-wifely punchline. A rammed police car flails uselessly against the sheer girth of but one of those 18 thunderous wheels. Perhaps we might imagine a single tear trickling down the exasperated coparoo's cheek. As we reach out to wipe it from the case, we unwittingly dissolve the '1' from the tagline, leaving us with only '8'.
The 8 remains, smugly, for two decades. 8 is the Metacritic score for Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing. That is so incredibly powerful that words fail me. Not for Metacritic, meaningless institution run by and for leprous prestige weasels that it is. It's powerful for Big Rigs. To get less than a 61 on Metacritic, a game must either be so brazenly committed to its own bizarre artistic vision that it fizzles the minds of lesser critics like Skittles in lemonade, or simply be unplayable wank. I have read a lot of evidence that points toward the latter, but that can't be true, or it wouldn't be on Steam, right? Cheers for the spot, PCGN.
"Get ready for some brake jamm'in, CB talk'in, convoy roll'in action across America," screams the trailer, with all the hammy revisionism of Tommy Wiseau labelling The Room "a dark comedy" after the fact. It's a racing game, in case that wasn't clear, although Steam also has it tagged as 'psychological horror'. I'd call Steam users out for only having, like, two jokes but they're basically working with fridge magnet poetry so it's a noble effort. You'll drive one of four 'rigs over five tracks, hauling loads and trying to stay one step ahead of johnny lawman. Oh, you thought this was regular driving action? Hillarious. This is "non-stop driving action", you pitiful cornflake.
Is this new release in better shape than the original? Or, to put it another way, does it actually function? Reviews have it at a light-to-medium 'still mostly busted'. There are also a few complaints about an allegedly dodgy installer wizard. Interestingly, the current custodians do at least seem interested in keeping it playable. It's already received a few patches addressing fatal errors, the most recent of which arrived this morning.
Following the game's disastrous release in 2003, producer Sergey Titov apparently offered to personally replace any copies sent to him with a game of the buyer's choice from the Activision Value Catalog. Only 20 people took him up on it. I'd imagine the likely culprit here is malaise, although perhaps these thunderous wheels really do have an undeniable magnetism; a primeval, electric pull that writhes infinitely, like a big fat Metacritic eight.