Where or where to begin? How about with the instruction manual; it clearly states that when you run out of fuel or breakdown, the “Hick State County Roadside Recovery Company” will come and help you out – yet in the game, there is never any mention of the HSCRRC - ever. They also mention that you can hangout at the bar and play “The Fruit Machine.” Oh sorry, but do you mean The Slot Machine, as that is what it is commonly referred not only in real life, but in this very game? The other interesting inclusion in the instruction manual is that it tells you the exact things you need to know in order to make money – the instructions state which commodities match which trailer, buy low and sell high etc – so you don’t actually need intellect to play this game. And it’s all downhill from there…
The menus are incredibly bland. New game, load game and multiplayer are your first options, then once you’ve loaded your old game or started a new one, you have the options of Trial by Tuckin’ (The main game), Mission Mode (Mini extras taken from the main game) and a useless options menu in which can choose to do things like turn off the backlight, making the game unseeable (which in retrospect, isn’t such a bad thing). The whole game is built around the premise of “buy this, drive it to here,” rinse and repeat exactly sixty times. This title isn’t so much a racing game, as it is a driving game. In Trial by Truckin’, there is no racing against the clock and the gamer has the option to race against a rival rig to the destination, but even if you’re beaten by them, you can still successfully make the sale. So with no competitors, (if you choose so, sometimes there is no choice but to drive unopposed) no time limit and law abiding drivers (most of the time) – where is the difficulty? It lies in the place every gamer dreads to find it – buggy AI and the wonky controls.
Gamer’s first attempts will be ended swiftly by the inevitable ‘pinballing’ between surrounding traffic and if you are very unlucky (like one reviewer), you’ll meet your fate at the hands of the police after accidentally shunting their entire fleet. Presumably, the Hick State County Road Recovery Company would be impounding your rig, alas they are nowhere to be seen. Instead, players are greeted with a one-letter-at-a-time message that reads “You are being held in jail by the police and you can pick up your truck up tomorrow from Salt Sea City.” Now, apologies if the italicising of the error was an underestimation of your proof-reading abilities, but it seemed necessary since the developers, coders and game’s testers all missed it themselves.
The collision detection is wonky, as is the penalty to reward ratio. In one gamer’s experience, after slamming into a police car numerous times with not a penalty or police chase, but a nice little cash bonus, the rig decided to drive itself and swerve into a motorcycle that was slowing down to change lanes - suddenly, the rig was the centre of a biker chase – hooray, a challenge at last. Yet to gain complete control over the rig, it slowly swerved, alongside the said biker into the side of the road and somehow, even though we weren’t touching him, the biker flew up into the air, spun around a few times, shot over the fence barrier and instead of landing in the brown blur (which is either dirt, mud or dry grass - we can’t be sure) he simply disappeared - straight from Hick State County into The Twilight Zone. The rest of the biker gang who decided to ram the stationary rig suffered the all too familiar Twilight fate and with that, the chase was over – most likely because every biker in Hick State County has been transported into another dimension.
Being on the wrong side of the road and swerving awkwardly is not an unfamiliar occurrence.
Another nifty ‘shouldn’t-happen-but-does’ feature are the private earthquakes one will encounter when the rig latches on the side of the road. A simple graze of the gutter is enough to make the entire rig swirl around so it has gone from being parallel to the side of the road to being perpendicular to it. This is where the entire game will start shaking and making the ‘gear change’ noise over and over until you can reverse it out from it’s magnetism-like attraction to the sides of roads – but don’t reverse too far because you might just reverse it out of the screen completely. There are surprises around ever corner in Big Mutha Truckers DS, but what is possibly the biggest surprise is how ineffectively it uses the DS’s unique touch screen functionalities.
This is probably the first DS title where the touch screen is actually an inconvenient method of sifting through menus. Why? Because the game is inconsistently under and oversensitive, sometimes finding yourself digging craters into the touch screen to register a hit and other times a well placed gust of wind will do the trick. The sensitivity problem seems to have also tainted the R button. When gamers press it to change gears it just doesn’t seem to register – sometimes requiring 3 or 4 consecutive hits (Note: The DS unit’s R button is in working order, as it has tested perfectly on another game straight after.).
Is there a special reason why all the strippers are cross-eyed? In the other Mutha Trucker titles, these girls were bartenders, but it appears that they have been given a promotion. Chastity, resident exotic dancer of Smokestack Heights, informs you that “Greenback is desperate for supplies of fish” – geez, not making it too hard for us are you Chastity? Sadly, you’ll never be able to tell whether this was the intention of the designers that all women in Hick State County would be toothless, cross-eyed hookers (since token male stripper/bartender ‘Larry’ appears to be all there) or that it was just another blotch from the graphics department. Going on previous Mutha Trucker titles, it’s looking like the former, but having to focus on the pictures to work out whether it is a “hilarious” southern stereotype or not takes away from whatever humour there was potential for. And just a friendly word of advice Chas, you might want to use some of those tips for some corrective eye surgery - and some front teeth.
One of the rare instances where the directional signs match the way you have to go.
Then there are the directional arrows which so subtly inform you of which way to go - by taking up almost the entire screen. Don’t follow them too closely, as they can sometimes throw you off the scent. You see, an arrow may flash informing the player to turn their rig right, when the player turns right, a u-turn sign flashes up on the screen notifying them that continuing straight ahead is what the sign really meant. If in some freak out nature you manage to navigate your way to destination B, players are confronted with a “Parking Challenge”. Where blurry road signs indicate which way the rig is supposed to turn and find their park. If Raylight Studios have made it impossible for players to successfully turn without slamming into five other cars on a generous stretch of road, what are the chances that a gamer will be able to pull off a pin point turn? Not bloody likely. You have about five seconds to work out which way the arrows are facing, follow them to your parking spot and then make a perfect park – not even a little out of line otherwise it’s a big fat “Failed” sign for you. The process might remind you of that one family member who can always find something wrong with you, no matter how much you’ve done right. Anyway, the screen fades and what are you greeted by - the elusive Hick State County Roadside Recovery Company? Another gammy-eyed hooker? Nope - it in fact marks the end of that “race” – fancy doing that again another 59 times?
Following suit come the graphics - shoddy. Raylight Studios have created somewhat of a successful 3D world for BMT to take place in. Everything is like one giant Impressionist painting, from a distance they are fine, but up close they are murky, pixelated textures. While every vehicle is presented in 3D there is actually only one design for every vehicle type (be prepared to be attacked by the cloned biker gang), trees are flat and everything is blurry – street signs are unreadable, most of the time the only differentiation between terrain is that one is a road and one isn’t. The noises and sounds fall under the category of bad. All vehicle noises are stock sounds and the background is filled in with the horrible repetitions of the Hick County radio stations which play constant ear bleeding tunes randomly interspersed with “You’re listening to this generic country radio station.” You’ll probably want to play with the volume turned down.
One of the rare instances where the directional signs match the way you have to go.
With all of these problems, you are bound to find the need to pause and grab a tissue and dry away the tears (of laughter or disappointment) that are obstructing your view. Returning to where you left off requires a bit of skill since the left and right arrows of the D pad seem to temporarily switch commands, making right-left and left-right (Ala, Earthbound when you get a mushroom on your head, except, it’s not so much intuitive as it is a mistake).
This game also proves that the Nintendo health and safety warning isn’t just for show. When you’ve got the ‘change gear’, ‘damage critical’, ‘fuel low’, ‘time bonus’, ‘police chase’ and directional arrow signs blinding you with their strobe-like erratic flashing, you’ll suddenly find yourself less interested in the game and more concerned about whether or not you will start having convulsions. The icing on the cake is that these flashing warnings fill the centre of the screen from top to bottom, making the action literally unwatchable - never a good thing.
Raylight Studios have managed to squeeze a multiplayer mode on too, where you and a friend race each other from one place to the next in best out of 3, 5 and 7 matches. The funny part is that all participants must have their own cartridge – it’ll take more than ancient voodoo to con a mate into buying a copy of this.
Once you work out all the kinks in the controls, overlook all the technical glitches and turn the volume down, there is a semi-playable driving game here. Unfortunately, all the missions from Mission mode are ripped straight from Trial by Truckin’ and when you’ve played them once, you’ll be praying that you never have to play them again. Also, there is nothing compelling you to make more money and there is no rewarding feeling once you have made some cash (if you did feel some sense of accomplishment on your first delivery, it’ll be gone by the 30th). This game is not fun and there is no overlooking that.
Big Mutha Truckers for the DS is a world of no - unresponsive controls, poor execution on every level and it’s no fun. It simply is not a good game – no two ways about it. One would hope that this game and all subsequent copies will one day be warped into The Twilight Zone with the biker gang. Just a thought to leave you with - the instruction manual comes translated into a whole bunch of other languages – God only knows what gobbledygook they’ll be trying to interpret.
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