Ah, the open road. One thing
weve got in the USA is a lot of open roads. Our highways are fairly impressive, and
an icon of the American highway is the American Trucker. These folks lead nomadic lives,
making sure our goods make it from point A to point B and keeping our truckstops full of
down-home je ne sais quoi. Eighteen Wheeler: American Pro Trucker brought the trucking
experience into the arcade, and as the game moves into our homes on the Dreamcast I had
hoped that experience would translate nicely. The arcade version of the game puts you in
the cab of a big rig, complete with oversized steering wheel. The home version illuminates
that fact that sometimes its the bells and whistles of the arcade machine that
really make a game enjoyable. Stripped of its snazzy cab façade, the DC port, while
arcade perfect in every other respect, becomes just another mildly entertaining and way
too short game.APT allows you to choose from four truckers to play: Asphalt Cowboy, Highway
Cat, Stream Line, and Long Horn. Theres a generic country trucker, a hot trucker
lady, a 70s-throwback disco dude with an afro, and a big, fat leather bear. Each trucker
has his own rig, and each rig has different statistics: Speed, Torque, and Toughness. The
Arcade mode of the game is just like the original arcade version: You haul freight on four
runs across the US, travelling from New York to Key West, St. Petersburg to Dallas, Dallas
to Las Vegas, and Las Vegas to San Francisco. Along the way you can choose from two
different types of cargo for each trip, both types giving you a different reward for
prompt delivery.
To
add a bit of flair to the game, you are also challenged to beat your rival truck to the
delivery point. Once you finish a run ahead of the rival trucker, youre invited to
play a parking mini-game. You are given a certain amount of time to navigate your truck
into a parking spot. Points are deducted for any damage you cause to your surroundings. If
you are successful at that, you will win new components for your truck, such as a new horn
and new mufflers.
There
is also a Parking mode, where you only play the parking mini-games. These are meant to
help you practice for the Arcade mode, and there is another mode that will allow you to
get some practice in called Score Attack. In Score Attack you make a run, trying to
destroy the bonus vans and to reach the finish line in time. In addition, you can race
against a friend in the Versus mode, which is a split-screen version of Score Attack. In
both Score Attack and Versus modes, you are given a "horn attack." When you honk
your horn, cargo will fall out of the back of your trailer and you receive points if you
hit your opponent with the cargo.
The
control is fairly simple. Your triggers serve as gas and brake, and you have change gear,
reverse, horn, and change view buttons as well. These controls are the first of my
complaints. While the setup is incredibly easy to use, and youll get good with it in
no time, it is too simple. Big rigs like these have a dozen gears or so, and its
incredibly frustrating to find that downshifting on a grade doesnt help you
accelerate at all. Most of the time you feel like youre in too high of a gear, and
your truck doesnt take off with any kind of pep. It felt a lot like driving my old
mans VW Microbus that van had an opposed four cylinder engine and always felt
incredibly underpowered. Similarly, there are many points in American Pro Trucker where I
wanted to just get out of the truck and push. Or walk. Once you get up to speed, the game
feels pretty good, but only highly skilled truckers will be able to maintain top speed for
very long.
The
graphics and sound are really wonderful. The first person view from inside the cab is
excellent, and very detailed. Each truck has some kind of dangly accent hanging from the
rear-view mirror, as well as various items on the dash that slide left and right as you
drive. The vehicles and environments are rendered very nicely, with excellent lighting
effects and crowded highways. Little extras like the tornado on the second level are also
a lot of fun to watch. Still, there are some issues with the way the graphics work. For
example, in the first-person view, you have a rear-view mirror. A rear-view mirror is
almost useless in an 18 Wheeler all you see is the top of the trailer youre
towing. Why are there no side-view mirrors? These would have been very helpful for
maintaining that in-the-truck feeling.
In
spite of the things American Pro Trucker does right, it is ultimately a huge reminder of
what could have been. The overall problem is that the game is just too damn short. Each
run takes less than two minutes to complete. That means that in about ten to fifteen
minutes of gameplay you are forced to believe that: a) you have actually completed the
game; and b) you just travelled from New York to San Francisco the long way. The
game is difficult enough to mask its brevity for perhaps an hour or so while you get the
hang of things, and if it takes you more than two hours to master the entire game (extra
modes and all), then you need to put the training wheels back on your Dreamcast.
What
makes the brevity even more outrageous is the fact that Hitmaker (one of Segas
development houses) could have added so much to it. As it stands, your CB is a one-way
communication device that allows you to hear taunts and advice from other truckers. There
is no kind of communication to NPCs in the game, and there is no way to form a mighty
convoy. Cops dont hassle you, and if they do you can just bounce them off the road
with no repercussions. Between the lack of a complex gearing system (half of what makes a
big rig so fun to drive) and the lack of any kind of story or NPC interaction, American
Pro Trucker is completely devoid of anything to broaden its horizons. Even creating a thin
storyline for each of the truckers would have been immensely helpful. It would have at
least given you a reason to play the game four times. As it is, theres not much
reason to play it even once.
I
cant even recommend Eighteen Wheeler: American Pro Trucker as a rental, unless you
plan on renting something else, too. Youll be very upset after youve had it
home for two hours and youve already cleared everything there is to be cleared. A
couple rounds of the Versus mode will satiate that curiousity, and youll be back at
the video store, hopefully before it closes. Its sad to see a game with so much
potential be so incredibly thin. Rent Convoy instead.