In my Dark Souls review, I assert that a game does not need to be fun to have meaning. Like any other creative medium, a videogame can be used to make a statement about something more profound, even about the world we live in. No clearer can this be seen than in Tough Trucks: Modified Monsters.

Tough Trucks is one of the earlier titles from Bugbear Entertainment, the studio that would later go on to make the FlatOut series and its spiritual successor, Wreckfest. On its surface, it has a fairly similar formula to its successors - a racing game focused on upgrading your car and progressing through a racing circuit. It's rather simple and honestly, not very good. But it's the very same mechanics that stop it from being an enjoyable game, that allow it to transcend its own medium and come into its own as a commentary on society itself.

After spending your entire life savings on a single vehicle to be able to participate in the races, one of the first things you'll notice is that these monster trucks do not handle like you would expect them to. Instead, they feel more like amateur ice skaters struggling to hold their balance. And don't we all feel like this sometimes? Life is capable of throwing so many hardships and challenges at us and we can easily find ourselves in situations and environments where we feel uncertain or vulnerable, yet through it all we are often expected to hold this front of a big, tough monster truck, to not openly express our pain. Tough Trucks uses this metaphor to suggest that maybe we should allow ourselves to drop our tough façades and express our feeling more honestly. A monster truck has no business sliding around uncontrollably, barely able to turn a simple corner, so what use do we have for a tough outward persona if it doesn't represent who we truly are?

The most profound application of game mechanics, however, comes from the vehicle damage. Cars getting damaged on impact isn't exactly a new or novel concept, however Tough Trucks weaponises it in an incredibly gripping way. Unlike most games, and against what many may consider to be 'good' game design, any damage to your vehicle persists between races. You can fix damage either by repairing it directly, upgrading the damaged part, or winning a free repair by placing first in a race you've already won. The first two options cost money, which needs to be won through placements in races, and the third requires not only placing well, but placing first. Hurt your vehicle too much, and you may find it too damaged to be able to make the very money you need to fix it, risking being unable to even compete any more. A powerful deconstruction of the workings of modern society, that expects you to work tirelessly in order to make the money you need simply to live. No amount of physical or mental damage or stress can do away with this simple fact: work, or die. If you can't keep up with the demands of the workplace, it's nobody's problem but your own. However, despite its poignant envisioning of these proposed problems, it falls short of being able to propose a solution to the issues it presents, even though its other commentary comes with a fairly clear solution. Could this be simply an extremely bleak worldview, or simply a consequence of limited development time and resources? Or perhaps I'm simply not media literate enough to understand all its intricacies.

Despite its creative presentations of social issues, especially for its time, I find that Tough Trucks isn't quite able to make a point as effectively as it might have wished to. Its two main arguments are quite detached from each other, leaving it a little bit confused about what its central point is supposed to be. Additionally, its assertions about society feel extremely pessimistic - assuming the problems did not come from a lack of development time, it feels like the message is that even though we can change ourselves, we cannot change society, which is a harmful message that I highly disagree with. Contemporary games in the trucking genre such as Snuggle Truck provide a much more nuanced take on the world, and I think Tough Trucks is only worth playing for anyone with an interest in how the genre formed.

Today marks the 23rd birthday of Majesty, a single drop in the flooded sea of the early RTS market; a sea that would eventually dry out for any game not named Age of Empires or StarCraft. This era of games is incredibly intriguing to me as someone who grew up playing RTSes, but these weird off-brand ones in particular. Those that come to mind include Battle Realms, Impossible Creatures, and, of course, Majesty.

Majesty departs from typical RTS mechanics, and in doing so ends up becoming part RTS, part city-builder, part god-game and part Peter Molyneux fever dream. In lieu of typical RTS mechanics, Majesty does not give you direct control over your units; instead, it tasks you with building a kingdom that functions fairly autonomously. Your only resource is gold, and building a strong economy involves balancing the creation of a kingdom that produces enough taxable income with building enough defenses to where your kingdom doesn't crumble to the slightest ratman invasion. Marketplaces and Trading Posts bring in passive income, but your heroes can provide a boost by spending their hard-plundered gold on gear and consumables, if you give them the means to do so.

These heroes replace the typical units you'd find in most other RTSes, and act more as DnD heroes than foot soldiers. Each type of hero not only has their own set of stats and skills, but their own behaviours as well. Rangers spend their free times exploring the map, Cultists run around charming beasts and planting poison mushrooms, Warriors of Discord slowly and aimlessly wander around the map, attacking pretty much everything they see. They also react differently to bounties - gold rewards you can put on the map or opn enemies to actually get your heroes to do what you want. The most notable example is how Rogues will chase after much smaller bounties than any other heroes, but are also some of the first to run away if they see it as remotely dangerous. It's all really sophisticated!

The game doesn't have a straightforward structured campaign, instead it gives you a world map with a bunch of individual missions on it. Each mission gets to explore a different, weird idea. It's not all about making a strong band of heroes and going out and killing all the baddies. I've played tower defense missions, missions about earning enough money in a set time, even one where I had to gamble in order to beat it. Sometimes the weirdness can feel a little gimmicky, but that's much preferred to the alternative - falling into the RTS campaign curse where you're just doing the same thing over and over and it gets boring. Majesty manages to avoid that!

This is all backed by some of my favourite presentation of any game from around this time. From an audio-visual perspective it's very similar to Age of Empires 2, with these 2D isometric graphics that aged really well backed by a soundtrack that has no reason being as good as it is. Seriously, just listen to this! But it also has some of the best voice acting I've ever heard?? It's all incredibly hammy and over the top but not in a "so bad it's good" way that you might expect from a 2000s computer game. It's just good!

This game really surprised me with how sophisticated and engaging it is, especially considering its premise of "RTS but you can't actually control anything". A must-play for anyone into these weird old RTSes, or anyone interested in more strange and inspired games as a whole.