Big Mutha Truckers Preview

While 18-wheeler games aren't an entirely uncommon sight, Big Mutha Truckers is perhaps the only one that doesn't focus solely on the racing element. In fact, the shipping and trading aspects of Big Mutha Truckers, which entail hauling goods to different towns, are so involved the development team actually hired an economist to help construct a somewhat realistic economy for the game that helps determine the prices for such goods. Of course, hauling your load isn't as simple as going from one town to another--the police and nasty biker gangs can make life much more difficult depending on how you treat these two entities out in the open. Big Mutha Truckers is deceptively deep and should surprise quite a few people.

What isn't surprising is the premise behind the game, which resembles something you might see in The Dukes of Hazard. A woman named Ma Jackson has been trucking for more than 50 years, going from town to town and delivering various items. Throughout the years she has given birth to four children, each of which has a different father. Her children are the playable characters in the game, and they're trying to win a trucking contest of sorts by seeing who can bring back the most money after a certain period of time.

There are five cities in Big Mutha Truckers, and each one has a distinct local population that will react differently to each of Ma's children, depending on which one you've selected. When you're in one of these towns, one of the first things you'll want to do is go to the store, where you can buy goods to haul on the back of your truck. Each of the items in the store has a specific price as well as an arrow indicating if the item is overly expensive or cheap for that area. You can either play it safe and purchase items that are well within your budget or get something pricier.

If one of the items you're looking to buy is a little too expensive, then you can walk over to the bar in the same town and speak with one of the local loan sharks, who will have no trouble lending you money, but in most cases, the loan comes with an incredibly high interest rate. The bar is also where you can interact with the bartender to get leads on various goods and how well they're selling in different towns as well as leads on secondary opportunities to make money in the form of challenges.

One other place you'll want to visit while stopping in a city is the garage, where you can refuel, repair, and upgrade your truck. Upgrades are actually quite important in Big Mutha Truckers, as they can determine the types of loads you can carry. For example, if you want to carry some sort of liquid, then you have to upgrade to a tanker. At the garage, you can even customize a logo using an in-game editor or select one of dozens of premade logos.

When you're actually out on the road, Big Mutha Truckers starts to resemble a traditional driving game, though you're not exactly driving a compact car. The physics for the truck seem to be a little exaggerated, with the trailer swaying back and forth with every movement, so the controls might seem a little difficult to handle at first, but they should become second nature after you make a few runs. Learning to control the truck well is absolutely crucial later on in the game if you want to avoid hitting police cars, which will come chasing after your truck and attempt to knock you off the road if you've been causing too much trouble.

But it's not only the cops you have to look out for--biker gangs also pose a serious threat to your truck. When you've entered biker gang territory, you'll see the bikers riding alongside your truck on their bikes, attempting to leap off and grab onto your trailer so they can climb on top of it and eventually hijack the truck. Fortunately, you can hit them while they're still riding their bikes, and you can also shake off any bikers climbing on top of the rig by swerving sharply across the road. It's worth mentioning that bikers can dodge your truck by ducking underneath the trailer, so you have to knock them off the road with your cab. Thankfully, you'll have a variety of directional aids to help you get to the next town to start the process over again before heading out to another town.

There are quite a few situations in the game that don't actually involve typical delivering. For example, you might have to help a local writer by knocking over a series of newsstands so that a newspaper carrying a false front-page article doesn't get sold, or you might have to deliver Mother's Day gifts in a residential neighborhood. Big Mutha Truckers seems to have a nice mixture of traditional and Crazy Taxi-style driving.

In the current build of the game, the Xbox and PlayStation 2 versions look nearly identical, though there seem to be a few more minor details in the Xbox version of Big Mutha Truckers. The game looks pretty good at this point when you're out on the road, with plenty of detail on the car models as well as some nice-looking environments. The sound in Big Mutha Truckers is made up of licensed music that you can listen to by changing radio stations--there's even a talk radio station similar to those featured in the Grand Theft Auto games. Both versions appear to be progressing steadily, and the game should have no trouble making a spring 2003 release.