There are bad games, and there are bad games. Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing is one of the truly awful ones. My former colleague at Giant Bomb, Alex Navarro, has a long and sordid history with Big Rigs. He reviewed it at GameSpot many years ago, and returned to the scene of the crime during Awesome Games Done Quick to speedrun the game in just over three minutes.
Navarro handed Big Rigs the lowest score possible back in 2004. Here's a little taste:
"Just how bad is Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing? It's as bad as your mind will allow you to comprehend. It is so disturbingly bad that even its budget price tag seems like a slap in the face. It really makes you wonder if the company that put out this dreck even took so much as a half minute to glance at the game that it was releasing. The game's readme file does assert that the game was thoroughly tested on various PCs, but the end result seems to suggest otherwise. The fact is, even if you tried, you couldn't play Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing the way it was seemingly intended to be played, and even if you could, you wouldn't want to."
Not convinced? Perhaps you think Navarro's overreacting. Maybe this screen shot will help:
That's a real screen shot from a real video game, and Navarro wasn't even trying to break it. It breaks itself. Big Rigs is a flaming pile of software created by a company called Stellar Stone. It was developed by the kind of studio who brags about being able to develop a game for $15,000.
The video review is even more revealing.
Navarro played Big Rigs during Awesome Game Done Quick's "awful" section. How does one speedrun a game like Big Rigs? It's easier than you'd imagine, but here's the important points:
- When you go in reverse, the game doesn't cap your speed. It just increases exponentially.
- According to the game's nonsense logic, racing in reverse is perfectly acceptable.
- Once a single track is completed, picking another track—not racing it—achieves victory.
It took him three minutes and 21 seconds to accomplish the task. Bravo, my friend? Bravo.