DRUULD – all trucks
DRUULR – all movies
DRUULU – all tracks
DRUULL – trophies

You’ll hear a sound after each sequence is acknowledged.

Believe it or not, there’s a great game from 2002 (Ubisoft) called Monster Jam also, likewise for PC, and it’s sad to see that for all the years passing, this game has major flaws: no truck differences I can tell aside from body skins, nothing very “violent” (2002 edition has flamethrowers and missiles in some modes, plus far more vehicles total), and the engine noise is awful, sound like (and handle a bit like) R/C cars! Engines and truck variation are perfect for long-term enjoyment in the 2002 game; what the blazes were they doing with this edition? Had hopes more correct engine sounds would be in the Activision patch, but no. Patch is worth it for resolution and aliasing controls, highly recommend it for that if nothing else.

Enough whining, here’s some tips:

Those who want to unlock vehicles. You must get first place in all events for a given “area” to unlock most of the trucks (example: first place in all of Coastal or Southern). The rest are points-based. The points gave me fits, things like the stadium races giving 300-500 points. You can, on the PC, replay however, without goofing your “place” from an earlier run – so once you hit 1st (or 2-3 spot though again note unlocking trucks means first), go back and run the same race, but just treat it like one great big freestyle, donuts and airtime and linking crushes and smashes until you get 50-100k for a race you spent 20 minutes losing. Lame but kids tend to enjoy roaming all over destroying everything they see, I let them do it.

For you struggling freestylers out there, the key is “linking” which in short means, lay off your nitrous enough to have extra without blowing your engine. Contrary to common sense, don’t use it at the last minute to jump cars, etc – use it to get from one place to another, and for “air” – using it immediately after you come down from a jump, supposing for once you are not pointing into a wall and have some space, like a real truck, hit the NOS and leave it down when you see the shocks springing up naturally from your bounce-back of the initial jump. It doesn’t work 100% but with some practice it works enough to keep enough “linking” multipliers to raise scores significantly. The links (watch for the x2, x5, etc multipliers where mini-scores show) help you gain huge points, another tip is to do a little smash, little crash, etc – then once you have a big multiplier built-up, go for the whole rack of houses or boxes or whatever and boom, 10k points in a heartbeat. I was able to get a multiplier of 13x going in the finals and scored a 40 the first run, lucky me. Note that the “same stunt” can be a multiplier when not used consecutively, so for example, crush-smash-crush gives a 3x even though you crushed twice in there. Airtime often leads to the slap-wheelie and if you land turning, donut links, and watch for the “big stuff” often in the middle as this is another stunt type called “monster” that doesn’t do much alone, but will give big points if you build a multiplier first.

For the laptop video card problems please note this game is ridiculously bad about detecting GPU (video card) power. I initially installed it on a Dell laptop that runs 2 external monitors at 1920×1200 each and can play anything else on the market, games with far more (real) system requirements. But as others with laptops have said, no dice, no video card to select. So I installed it on my much older single-core, single-GPU desktop rig and no problem (except full-tine 100% CPU usage crashes the entire system every 10-15 minutes, sigh). If there’s a video workaround I haven’t figured it out yet.

And yes I am lame for writing this much. Love my kids though, and hopefully this helps some of you spend time with yours. See a bargain bin near you for a PC edition of this game; cheers.