“The worst game ever made” – Morgan Webb
“It’s as bad as your mind will allow you to comprehend.” – Gamespot
“There simply aren’t any redeeming factors” – Thunderbolt Games
Every time a website, magazine, or random person utters the phrase “best game ever,” controversy quickly follows. Yet, no one stands up in defense of the medium’s worst games — no one is willing to forgive unresponsive controls, ugly visuals, or mediocre audio. So here I am, prepared to make a case for the game which Morgan Webb called “unplayable”: Big Rigs: Over The Road Racing.
Stellar Stone, a Russo-Ukranian developer, released Big Rigs in 2003 to universally negative reviews. The game was hardly finished and suffered from almost every conceivable technical and aesthetic flaw. To this day, Big Rigs occupies the lowest spot on the Metacritic, GameSpot, and GameRankings scoreboards. Yet, despite the unanimously negative opinion of the game, I’d like to give it a second chance and I’m confident that I’ll find value…somewhere.
After a friend gave me Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing in exchange for a bag of Skittles last week, I came home only to find out I had been cheated. The back of the game’s case boasted an exciting premise — armed with an eighteen wheeler and some slick trucker lingo, I was charged with carrying illegal cargo across the country while avoiding the police, enemy truckers, and road blocks. I quickly found out that all of these promises were shameless lies.
The game featured no police, opponents, or trucker slang. Of the four “playable” routes, three sent the game into an unrecoverable crash. The AI competitors were so poorly programmed that they were incapable of moving beyond the starting line. Moreover, there was no music or sound effects to accompany the horrendous driving mechanics. And don’t get me started on the physics…in Big Rigs, you don’t drive into obstacles, you drive through them.
[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VE3PDH23hdk 400×400]
Ex-GameSpot editor, Alex Navarro, has trouble reviewing Big Rigs
For a while, I was thoroughly dissapointed. But after a few hours with the game, I found myself laughing out loud and having a great time. The concept of “so bad, it’s good” rarely escapes beyond the medium of film, but in an almost Kafkaesque twist of humor Big Rigs has made poor gameplay design utterly fun. Without the rigid boundaries of traditional gameplay, Big Rigs afforded me the opportunity to poke and prod at the game’s fragile architecture. In minutes I exposed coding errors and technical miscalculations, drove through houses, and up vertical cliffs.
It’s clear that the employees of Stellar Stone were utterly incompetent, but their failure has unintentionally reminded me that games can be simplistic and poorly crafted while remaining fun. Don’t get me wrong, Big Rigs is a complete mess, but I can’t help but smile when I pull my truck into reverse and send it into an infinitely accelerating loop.
If a critic or a friend tells you that a game is bad, they’re probably right. However, some games have a silver lining around all the ugliness — in the spirit of the season, I implore you to look for that silver lining.
If you have any fond memories of playing bad games, feel free to share them in the comments section!
