Gaming Target - PlayStation 2: Big Mutha Truckers

Written by Chris Reiter on July 16, 2003

Full Review: That's a 10-4, Big Red! Your stink butt is proportionally larger than yer trailer size.

Ya'll remember Sega's 18-Wheeler: American Pro Trucker? Well don't cha!? Yessir, that there was a Dreamcast race drivin' title ported over from tha arcade, and then ported over again there to tha PlayStation 2. Its concept: become a truck driver an' race a rival across tha country ta deliver a package of some sort. While it ain't been tha most successful of them games, it did introduct a real fine idea fer publisher THQ an' developer Eutechnyx ta take on over. Wit' Big Mutha Truckers, yer not only some no name trucker...yer part of tha truckin' family bestin' yer siblings.

Momma Ma Jackson's getting too old for her own business. The founder of Big Mutha Trucker's Haulage Company is quitting the trucking franchise once and for all, and it's up to you to take over. Through a Trial by Truckin' contest, you choose to be the rigger rider of your choice -- whether it's Earl Jackson, a fat slob, Bobbie-Sue Jackson, a sexy hick chick, Cletus Jackson, a regular lunatic at the wheel, or Rawkus Jackson, the cool cowboy of the gang. Sixty days you'll have to rank up the most money in selling, buying, and riding your way to the top across the hick county. Win, and you're Mutha's new owner. Fail, and you're roadkill.

Composed of two main modes, Big Mutha Truckers isn't really your typical racing game. There's plenty of opportunities to race against the clock, rivals, and the like within the game for sure -- but mostly Mutha is separate from the crowd. In the one gameplay option, you have a Mission mode. Here is where you'll choose your driver and complete a various set of tasks that are actually duplicated from the Trial by Truckin' mini-missions presented from time to time. Rather than having much a purpose, the Mission mode is really more for fun if you'd rather not want to live the 60-day trial to experience each one of them. The missions themselves are of operations like smashing into mailboxes on a timed counter, or even playing tug of war with truck against truck. Each goal can be interesting, but again, they're just leftovers from the real rat meat and crushed potatoes of the Trial by Truckin' mode.

Every game has its main attraction, and Trial by Truckin' is it for Big Mutha Truckers. If buying and selling goods in order to retain your money flow through a sixty-day trial period on a hauling, rival racing, and encountering cop and biker gangs in evading multiple sprees across intersecting roadways sound like your cup of hard liquor, then Big Mutha Truckers has a lot of it in stock. Basically, to start your way to success in this system of play, you've got to first select your character. Choosing one or the other doesn't really matter that much -- it's the personality that counts here. Earl is the eldest brother. He's large and in charge...and he likes his beer. Bobbie Sue is the only daughter in the family. But growing up with three older brothers has taught her a few things...like how to crush her opponents even though her pretty exterior doesn't reveal that side of her. Cletus is the typical hick. He's awkward, he has awful cavities, and he's not too keen on some things...but his driving skills say otherwise. Lastly, Rawkus is the ladies' man. Even though he has a different skin color (black), he's just as much a brother of his family as anyone...and his slick charms are contending to prove that.

Once you have a driver you like, you're out the door looking to make your truck the best of the best against the rest. In order to accomplish this means of survival, there's a number of options open available for what choices will make you the most money and what upgrades will help you to get there. See, Big Mutha Trucker's like I was saying before isn't a normal racing game -- it's more like a trucker arcade/simulation title. The more money you make the better. And the better your driving skills are will make you the king of the long money trail. Gaining that kind of dough isn't exactly as easy as you think, however. One thing you'll take note of is that your truck is the most important factor in the game. The truck is what gets you from place to place and is what you'll spend a lot of time upgrading and repairing. Every rig in real life loses fuel and is able to suffer damages. So like in our world, stocking up on gasoline and paying damage expenses your rig can and will sustain is a constant method you'll practice while out on the open road.

Customizing your truck the way you want it might help to benefit you in the long run if you think it's worth it, though. Big Mutha Truckers has five different intersecting town locations in all -- Smokestack Heights, Skeeter's Creek, Capital City, Greenback, and Salt Sea City (which is unfortunate, given the limitations served through repetition in the game) -- and each of these pit stops has three areas you can visit. These are a store, a bar, and a garage. Through the garage, you can buy items that reserve your fuel drainage, new spoilers to keep the truck afloat, a horn to let biker gangs know you're coming as not to crash into them (which forces them to steal your cargo), or even fresh trailers for carrying different items (only refrigerated kinds can store frozen foods, for example) are just some of the features available to maximize your driving needs. Hell, if you want, you can also select from various logos or draw your own image to paste on the back of your luggage to help protect your truck from a police or a biker gang's detection of it.

Almost everything you do in the game burns a large hole in your wallet, and you've got to also make sure your wallet isn't on fire most of the time too. And that's what the store and the bar are for -- giving you the green and lending out a helping hand to cash in on some more. Through the store you can sell and buy independent commodities off the shopkeeper. The idea here is to sell items at high prices and to purchase them at lower ones so that you're always getting the better bargain. Green and red arrows indicate which ones are best used for this purpose, with green being the ones to sell, and red the ones to buy. Traveling over to the bar area also gives you tips from the bar tender about which destinations are desperate for certain items, as it does other things. Each bar has its own tender, a loanshark, a slot machine, and sometimes a customer waiting with one of the aforementioned driving challenges. By visiting a bar you're not only getting tips; you can also play the slot machine for extra money or have a seat with the loan shark and gamble your way to higher funding with his pay off. And if you don't remember to get him his money back, the repo men will for you.

On the road it's an entirely different story, however. Here you have sixty days to get all the money that you can to claim the final prize. A day goes by every time you enter and exit a city, so it's always best to make good of what you're doing while you can. If you're truly out to earn as much loot as possible, every time you do leave a city, a rival trucker is always lurking around to try and beat you to your next stop for a healthy bowl of cash winnings. But if you lose, say good-bye to greener pastures. Once you reach your next destination though, there are also always parking challenges lingering by, in which you have only seconds to park your truck into a red square. Though the square's location isn't always easy to find, and the more time you lose getting to it the lesser money you'll make. Other inconveniences on the road are made up of police and bikers, which by angering them (slamming into their vehicles) results in police arresting methods, or with the bikers they'll hop onto your ride and attempt to hijack your cargo. Sometimes the game's police and biker units may even work in unison with each other...and as it goes, life isn't always easy for a trucker.

As this is a racing game, you've also got to have the knowhow for control of your vehicle and where to get to where you're going. Spanning the highways, your truck is directed through popup pictures containing arrows for directions, or for when to shift gears. And it's a good thing to see that the trucks in Mutha behave closely to how a real truck would...in a console simulation sense anyway. They run on gas (X), they brake (square), they backup (circle), they turn (left analog stick), they let you see in every direction (L1, L2, and R2), and they even shift gears (R1). But it's the way in which the truck's not too fast or too slow that makes playing the game feel a little like being an overweight, portly fellow with a license to drive a truck in reality that's good about the game.

Unfortunately, you can't always have everything you want, and with Big Mutha Trucker's visuals, Gran Turismo's picture-perfect canvas is an unknown dimension to this racer. Not to say that Mutha is totally flawless in what niceties it does have, though there are some shortcomings in the overall package. For one thing, there's certainly a distinct restriction to what you can view within the game. Made up of five cities (or from the few hot spots in each, more like towns with a population of three), the roads you speed through, and Ma Jackson's home base, everything plainly ends up bearing a striking resemblance to the last place...minus the alterations between character models and place settings. But of what changes there does exist, there's a nice touch of detail in each. Roadways are textured decently with a gravel aspect and are covered in yellow and white lines that give the game a real authority on how to make a highway look like a highway. Fragments of snowy inclinations or multiple light and shadow sources filter your path ahead too -- where across bridges, lighted tunnels, or dusted mountaintops pass in a good sense of what they're trying to create for the visuals of the game (such as the snow will throw you off track as it's harder to trudge through, or with the shadows and light cast upon your truck that are well enough to represent bright and dark patterns across its heavy body, and a free flowing shadow that follows the vehicle wherever it goes). But then there's always the constant flow of tree, houses, and other recycled backgrounds along the side of the roads that don't really add a whole lot of anything to what you're going to witness in this hick-based arcade/sim of sorts.

Almost to a certain extent, Mutha tends not to differ much in its character model frequencies too. The basics of these rounds aren't that many, as the aspect is mostly made up of things your truck or a rival's truck, the predestined computer AI vehicles, and even the differentiating store, bar, and garage characters you'll meet and greet along the way. While the truck models don't have a whole lot of personality to spark attention to, and the routine traffic is even of a lesser status, the human models themselves have to be the worst I'd say. These particular imagery devices appear like clay people almost in a virtual realm. With pretty much just a standard model type for each one, it's not that they're not sore on the eyes...but these molds won't be winning any awards ether. Animations are a saving factor for Big Mutha Trucker's however, since the action on the road is without a doubt near enough to the way in which the behaviors of these hauling monsters act. Your truck's trailer for example really swings back and forth when making those nasty turns. Other functions like the braking and backing up maneuvers is good looking too, like with any heavy ride that big, the rig will pace baby steps behind itself to learn how to walk better. And with the ability to destroy any guinea pigs of the speedway, be it with the randomly generated computer drones, or the police and motorcycle thugs, the physics is appropriately placed in how beating up any car forces friction between the two hosts, or while a biker is snatching up your good's from hopping off the bike, climbing up the trailer's fidgety ladder, and attempting to remain put while your actions force you to shake him off and sending him home in crutches. It's just too bad the motions between each city's fill of business partners don't share a similar quality in animations - the characters instead remain in one place only (except when leaving a city area, a short clip of your driver walking or waddling back into their truck begins), moving their arms, their eyes, and their head (but not their mouth) when they provide your protagonist with tips, demands, comments and the like.

Speaking of the character dialogue and this being a hick county racing type of racer and all, you can probably tell that Mutha's innards are packed with stereotypical unknown actors to pepper the game with an extra spice -- and you'd be right. In visiting one city or another there lies the three typical selective attractions you'll be able to revisit through the game's two month session. What's interesting though is that not every bar tender and its attendees, shop keeper, or garage suppliers are not the same one as the last in voice patterns. One area has a homosexual-like bar tender, where in another you might find a moody shop owner. And if you wait around long enough, sometimes your selected person of persons will speak or be spoken to with many extra humoursly intended clips between the truck driver and the clerk. But once again, each of the voices activated segments only provide you with generic, trite lingo that while there's a lot of it to be heard, the voices aren't of a greatness caliber that defies odds.

Mostly Big Mutha Trucker's audio seems to be one of the most ignored phases of the drive ahead. Barely existent in some city area cases, and drowned out from your truck's considerably loud music and talk show station, the sounds of the game bear its crashing, horn touting, wheel jolted experience through each time you take control of the truck. Though the sounds aren't entirely gone from the picture, what's there is nothing special from out of the ordinary racing genre filler audio. And with the music that's usually in the way of the fewer than stellar audio effects, it's sometimes a good thing or a bad thing this is the way it is. For starters, music is chosen by the player in opening the gameplay radio (triangle button). Just like in Grand Theft Auto 3, you have a list of different stations to jam to -- despite that fact that the genres of songs available are only stuff like country, techno, rock, and talk stations (which for the techno especially seems to be totally out of place in a game of this sort). Unfortunately however, Steppenwolf's famous Born to be Wild track is the only recognizable song you'll be able to switch the knob over to in this radio's unknown collection.