Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing Review

A racing game is a short list of promises: a track that holds you, a rival that runs, a clock that matters. This keeps none of them. The opponent truck sits at the line for the length of every race, so the only way not to win is to stop driving. Collision is absent, which means you pass through buildings, guardrails and bridges and drop into the gray nothing beneath the map, where the terrain simply continues.

Reverse has no speed cap, so holding it long enough accelerates you past any number the game is willing to display. Hills do not slow you and dirt does not slow you, because the physics that would do that were never written. The box promises police pursuit. There are no police. Of the five selectable routes, the fourth crashes the program. The victory screen carries a typo nobody caught, which tells you how many eyes the build ever got.

What is genuinely on the disc is a set of competently modeled trucks and a menu, and that is the only axis here off the floor. This is not a rough launch or a botched patch. It is a first month build sold as a finished product, and the language reviewers reached for in 2003, that it is unfinished rather than merely bad, is still the precise description.