YOU'RE 🏆 WINNER !
This is one of those rare instances when a game is so bad it's actually good if not so bad it's terrible. The game felt like it was being rushed for release or it was almost just like an unfinished pre-alpha demo made by college student that somehow got put on store shelves. According to the cover arts and back of the actual boxes, the game's will involve police chases, illicit activities (like illegal cargo), as well as more areas and locations. However, due to the game's lack of development, police chases and other types of said items are completely absent in the game, and every screenshot on the back cover is incredibly fake. Depending on what version of the game is played, there are debug coordinates on display in the lower-right side of the screen at all times during gameplay. There is no plot or challenge at all whatsoever. Because the opponent lacks AI, it is unable to move. As a result, it is impossible to lose the races. To address this, a patch was released that added AI to the opponent. Even yet, it will still never cross the finish line because there is no loss condition programmed into the game. The opponent comes to a halt near the finish line and never crosses it. The opponent is also slow and quickly overtaken, rendering the opponent pointless. There is also no collision detection on everything but terrain. You can just pass through almost everything in the game, including buildings, and the truck will simply pass through the bridges rather than crossing them. It can even run through the opponent! There is even no system for simulating terrain's effects on the truck: the truck treats every surface as if it is flat, easily accelerating up even the mountains that are supposed to act as barriers at the edges of the track. This allows the truck to enter the formless grey "out of bounds" void. The abysmally ugly graphics are worse than an early 3D mobile game, and probably even worse than the animation of the later 2006 mockbuster anthropomorphic vehicle-related film A Car's Life: Sparky's Big Adventure, a rip-off of Disney and Pixar's Cars from the same year, by Michael Schelp's defunct company Spark Plug Entertainment. They also look like an early PlayStation game as well. Lighting effects such as the shadows are practically non-existent, and the 3D models are very ugly and having poor texture quality. Same can be said for the color hues and effects too. The brake lights on the trucks are disembodied and float out a noticeable distance from the actual truck model (this can be easily noticed when driving up/down a hill). Plus, they also look like they were made with the brush tool in Photoshop. Even some of the light posts don't even have textures. Instead, they show their normal maps as an albedo texture compared to the rest of the terrain. Poor visuals include barely noticeable flashing "brown water" textures in the river, which is the water trying to exist but can't. Every stage looks similar to each other, only with very little variety. Some signs appear in the middle of the road, which makes no sense at all. As in real life, signs do not appear on the middle of the road, as an actual car would be destroyed if it would hit it. The signs are supposed to appear on either the left or right side, or even both sides at a time. You can find an unfinished, untextured, and uncolored model of a human. Even a car can be seen without any textures applied to it on the same map that the human is on. The map is actually "Forgotten Road 1", giving further evidence that the game was never finished. The box for the timer is so small, the timer slightly leaves the boundary of the box. The speedometer is unnecessarily big and takes up almost a quarter of the whole screen. There are also extremely long loading times, despite the abysmally ugly graphics and sadly the low amount of KB. They seem to last for about 15 seconds long. There's extremely loud, frightening, and also painful as well steady tire/braking sound effects, much like the collision detection sound in its own reskin (see below), especially when on the loudest volume set on. Also, terribly repeated engine sound, and they don't vary on different trucks. There are no other sound effects besides the truck engine and even the said tire sound effects. There's no hover over button sound and/or a clicking sound whatsoever, which is really unacceptable for a game, even for 2000s standards. There is a soundtrack (even more than just one, including a total of six songs), while actually somewhat fairly decent, but thankfully surprisingly not obnoxiously ear-bleeding and completely similar to the main theme of CrazyBus. But none of it is actually programmed to play in-game. However, there is a folder with the MP3 files that would play the music within the disc. The music, despite not having the ability to play in-game, was fairly decent. The six songs were pretty good and catchy. At least there's thankfully no obnoxious soundtrack playing on the main menu screen, unlike with a lot of the other very bad games. There are just only five stages in all. If the player selects the stages "Nightride" and/or "Small Town Road," the games will crash. When you select them on a patched version of the game, you get doubles of the first track. Furthermore, just only four trucks too (which are actually somewhat based on the Volvo NH12 and FH12) that are playable, with no discernible performance differences. Every truck has the same stats (whether speed, weight, power, traction, etc.; despite not being shown), and just only differs in appearances. Speaking of the AI, you can't even make it a different truck. However, selecting either of those two trucks, named the "Thunderbull" and "Sunrise W12" in the unpatched (first) version would cause the player to win instantly. Meaning you win in just 0 seconds without even driving at all. Speaking of which, the infamous "YOU'RE WINNER !" victory sign along with a three-handled trophy. The hilarious grammar error made this quote viral that was only fixed thanks to a patch, to where it was corrected to “YOU WIN!”. Trucks are lazily and erroneously referred to as cars, most notably seen in the truck selection screen, which is very pointless and makes no sense at all, but why are the tracks still referred to as tracks in the correct way which does make sense? It may imply that the developers might've forgot what was a "truck" called. However, even the .exe file used to start the game is named "CarZ", which will become apparent every time the game crashes (or when checked in the game's program files folder). Not to mention that the game's original logo can be seen closely in the loading screen. And even lazier than ever out of ALL: Despite the name, one track is called "Forgotten Road 1", even though there isn't a second Forgotten Road. The games have many bugs and glitches. When the player presses the spacebar or even starts the race in the unpatched game, there is a good probability that they will win right away. Trying to install the patch can prevent the games from booting up. There are a variety of ways to make the games crash: The trucks can drive normally like only 80 mph (about 128.74752 km/h) in forwards, but almost indefinitely in reverse (by the same principle as the infamous backwards long jump (BLJ) from Super Mario 64). This emits a painful, high-pitched, 80's Atari arcade-y-esque noise from the engine going to such a high pitch. The truck also stops immediately as soon as the player stops reversing. The maximum reverse speed of the truck is 12.3 trillion, another trillion, and again another trillion (undecillion) miles per hour (apparently about 1.23×1037 mph) or over 1028 times the speed of light: this is fast enough to cross the entire width of the observable universe in 160 picoseconds (in the same period of time, light would have traveled about 2 inches). Above this speed (which takes about very nearly 50 minutes to achieve), a floating-point arithmetic overflow occurs, causing the odometer to change to "1. $" and every checkpoint to turn green, which means the player wins immediately. The truck also slowly picks up a bit more speed when driving up a steeper hill, which makes no sense at all. The truck should've slowed down when driving up the steep hill (see below). In addition, there is no option to switch to km/h/kph/km/kilometers (metric) units, unlike a lot of other driving games. Though this has been a rare standard for some driving games, like Cars: Lightning League, exclusively only available for mobile ports, which are Android and iOS. In another addition, the speedometer gauge's needle somehow freezes/gets jammed during that, minutes later. Furthermore, ironically, if you haven't noticed before, unlike most genuine semi-trucks, none of the trucks even have back-up beeping sound effects when driving in reverse. The checkpoints (called Ultra-Nav in the game) are poorly programmed, and the games frequently counts them out of order, occasionally making the player win as they drive through the first checkpoint. The Random Race mode has the potential to cause the games to malfunction and cause the player's vehicle to stutter in movement. Turning off the games does not resolve this issue. Not even by deleting and reinstalling the games helps. The ground clips through the road as if there are areas left unpaved. The player's truck can travel faster uphill than on flat surfaces. This seems to be a glitch like Straferunning in the original Doom, where the games calculate the player's total speed when they are moving on more than one axis using vector addition (in this case horizontal speed + vertical speed). Even despite the bugs and glitches, there are no mods to fix all of them. This game is so bad it's too funny and ridiculous to really hate on. I wouldn't change anything about this game. It's legendary!
