'18 Wheels Of Thunder' boasts Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing's original box art, in a font forged from guitar pedals, light beer, and divorce papers. Flames jet from the snout of the marauding 'rig like snorted breakfast tequila following an especially piquant ex-wifely punchline. A rammed police car flails uselessly against the sheer girth of but one of those 18 thunderous wheels. Perhaps we might imagine a single tear trickling down the exasperated coparoo's cheek. As we reach out to wipe it from the case, we unwittingly dissolve the '1' from the tagline, leaving us with only '8'.
The 8 remains, smugly, for two decades. 8 is the Metacritic score for Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing. That is so incredibly powerful that words fail me. Not for Metacritic, meaningless institution run by and for leprous prestige weasels that it is. It's powerful for Big Rigs. To get less than a 61 on Metacritic, a game must either be so brazenly committed to its own bizarre artistic vision that it fizzles the minds of lesser critics like Skittles in lemonade, or simply be unplayable wank. I have read a lot of evidence that points toward the latter, but that can't be true, or it wouldn't be on Steam, right? Cheers for the spot, PCGN.