If you haven’t seen this before – man, you’re missing out!  This is Big Rigs: Over The Road Racing, and features the following ground-breaking features:

• There is no collision detection with anything other than the ground. Bridges are simply a mirage. You can also drive off the end of the map. Physics? Pah, take that Newton!
• The box and gameplay description of the game advertise that the player must escape from the police. Lucky for you, there are actually no police in the game. The law is a lie. In fact, there is pretty much zero plot to the game whatsoever.
• In the originally released version, enemy trucks had no AI and, as such, never left the starting position. Praise be that a patch was eventually released which gave life to these lumbering beasts. The patch also gave the great privilege of adding sound effects to the game.
• Text on the player’s HUD doesn’t fit properly.
• The game fails to distinguish between the player starting or finishing when crossing the line, so you may receive a “YOU’RE WINNER” message within a second of starting the game. Rewarding feedback leads to high levels of player engagement, right?

Despite all this, the game still sold 20,000 copies. In fairness, from watching the video, it looks pretty damn entertaining.

Check out this rather excellent short animation. Perhaps the best way you’ll spend 5 minutes today.

Crater Face from Skyler Page on Vimeo.

I was first introduced to Carcassonne thanks to it being given away free of charge for a limited time on Xbox 360 to celebrate the 5th anniversary of Xbox Live. After a few plays and having grown accustomed to the rules (well, most of them) the game really began to grow on me, and I’ve since played the original board game. Within the last few days an iPhone version of the game has been released… and its pretty damn good!

Read my full impressions of the iPhone version…