Like high-top sneakers, savings accounts, and waving-your-hands-in-the-air-like-you-just-don’t-care, accomplishing monumental works just for the hell of it has gone out of style. Sure, some crazy guy made a circular section of his building rotate, but it’s just not en vogue to do the really big stuff anymore. I’m talking stuff like carving the heads of dead people into a mountain, building a giant triangle out of really big rocks, and shooting human beings at stuff we see floating around in the sky - people just don’t aim high anymore. I envy the time when it was socially acceptable to burn through untold resources to make a statue of Jesus that’s just a little bit taller than the last.

Brings a tear to your eye, doesn’t it?

At least game developers take a stab at bombastic creationism now and again, something that Fuel recently demonstrated to me. Fuel’s virtual space is massive, as I discovered when trying to unlock one of its achievements (not that I’m compelled to do that or anything). The task entailed driving from one base camp to another without using any quick-jump abilities. On the game’s map, the trek only represented about a tenth of the total game area. Compared to any other open-world racer, this would be no big deal - five minutes, tops. However, I arrived at my destination after 45 minutes of driving, checking my e-mail, chatting on AIM, and getting up to go to the bathroom.

And this was but a fraction of the game’s total area. Trying to mentally extrapolate this out gives me a nosebleed. The amount of virtual space contained within the game is absolutely incredible, especially given how fast it whizzes by on a kickass dirt bike. The game world isn’t particularly empty, either. Broken roads, bombed-out old shacks, gnarled trees, and abandoned cars spot the landscape and prevent that cookie-cutter look that games with such expanse often feature. From this standpoint, Fuel is a technological achievement. Shame that it also has to be a video game, though.