PCOverview
Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing is a truck "racing" game released for the PC on November 20th, 2003. The game was produced by the Russian company Stellar Stone LLC. It was first published by Activision Value Publishing, and later by GameMill Entertainment. As one would expect from a game that has received a large number of negative reviews, Big Rigs is notorious for its lack of functionality.
Infamy
Big Rigs claims to involve 'Four Big Rig Trucks with Trailers' and 'Thousands of Miles of Highways and Byways' as well as challenges such as rushing a police roadblock. However, the game itself is very different from this description. Big Rigs does include four trucks, but only one of them actually has a trailer. There are 5 tracks, although one map called 'Nightride' does not work. Two of the maps are identical, but take different routes. There are no police roadblocks in the game and no police presence whatsoever, and when added together, the game's maps do not come even close to "thousands of miles", not to mention the fact that there are zero highways or byways.
Most infamously, Big Rigs is criticized for its broken gameplay. The opponent you are "racing" against does not move ( AI was not programmed), the player's truck is not affected in any way by the angle of the road or texture of the surface they are driving on, and is capable of driving through any non-ground object. There are no gravitational limitations (in that you can drive up hills, no matter how steep), and the player can even drive off the map altogether. Furthermore, the rig has no top speed limit when it is reversing, making it literally possible to reach the speed of light according to the game's speed counter, and a lack of inertia means that the instant the player releases the reverse button they instantly halt in their tracks. When a player finishes a race, they are presented with an image of a three-handled trophy, with the text "YOU'RE WINNER!".
Initial releases of Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing had no sound whatsoever, though Stellar Stone eventually released a patch for the game (that would then be pre-installed on versions shipped afterwards) which added engine sound to the game, replaced the broken 'Nightride' map (With an exact duplicate of the game's first map), and changed the victory text to "YOU WIN!". The computer A.I was fixed to actually start although all racers will stop before the finish line as the game was not coded with a fail state for the player. There is still no music in the game, though there are five music tracks present on the Big Rigs CD.
On top of all this, the support page linked in the game's ReadMe file is not really a support page. If a player were to be maddened by the gameplay or bugs, the support page would bring him/her to a web browser, instead of actual support. The game, despite having no technical prowess whatsoever, takes around 5 minutes to load a level, and frequently crashes.
Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing received universally negative reviews. GameSpot awarded the game its first ever 1.0 rating (the rating system does not permit scores lower than 1), and NetJak.com re-worked its rating system in order to award Big Rigs a score of 0. The game was so horrible, that as punishment, Gamespot staff members would force others to play the game for an hour while locked in a room. On the compilation site Metacritic, Big Rigs has a Metascore of 8 out of 100, making it the worst reviewed game in their database. The game is so terrible, though, that it has actually created a moderate cult following. In fact, the game is sought after ironically by many as a "collector's item".
