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Stunts Spawns A Spiritual Successor
Siliron writes "Back in the heyday of DOS gaming, there was one game that had more of a BBS addons-trading scene than any other, and that was Stunts. Now a German developer, Moon Byte, has decided to update the game in full 3D glory. Check it out at the official Crashday site." The new game, which is still in development, seems to be influenced by the original Crash (which was called 4D Sports Driving outside the US) in its custom track creation and stunt-making capabilities.
Back in my dorm in the early 90s, when a few of us had such blazing machines as a 386-25 and a 486-66, we played the hell out of Stunts. We had two primary modes of play. One, we had built a special speed track that let you exploit a bit of a bug that would max out your speed at some ridiculous, otherwise unattainable value (the exploit had something to do with catching some air and tapping your brakes, or somesuch), and then scream around the track. We took turns shaving hundredths of a second off each others times. Two, we built tracks that facilitated getting the most ridiculous crash animations. Max out your speed as above, and run up a ramp with a couple of wheels off the track, and watch the 2 minute, car flying 2 miles into the air crash animation ensue. :-)
JRjr
Carmageddon II for the PC had the best I have ever seen. Maybe not "realistic" in the sense that you could drive off after smashing the car pretty hard, but still a very cool damage model.
If you hit a solid object offset going 150-200, you could actually manage to shear the car in half every now and then. Since the game was really about hitting pedestrians and crashing the car doing crazy stunts, I guess they put a lot of effort into the damage part.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Pretty cool that the game is freeware.
:)
Misc. Stunts Trivia:
The developer Distinctive Software got bought EA in 1990. The studio was renamed EA Canada, which produced the famous yearly Hockey, Basketball, and Soccer (FIFA). Need for Speed was made by the same driving "Driving Team", but never got the same marketing dollars as the other "Big Three".
I agree that it was a very cool* game. The Track Editor was a brilliant idea at the time. I imagine I wasn't the only one who setup a high speed banked course and tried to take the corner fast as possible
* AS much fun as I had with Stunts, NFS PSX remains a favorite for personal reasons.
Stunts: Final Stage
http://www.mayhem.sk/index.php?l=1002&r=1002
Looks and smells like vaporware but this joint did just manage to get their Empire of Magic game published.
I've been wanting to see something like this for a long time, honestly I'm suprised it has taken as long as it has. Stunts had some amazing gameplay, back in a day when successful games depended a lot more on gameplay than graphics.
One major disappointment with a lot of the modern day racers is the lack of expandability. Take Need for Speed as an example. It's always had good graphics and gameplay. But they never provide any expansion packs, or ways to add more card or tracks. They are much more interested in just pumping out another sequel. I've seen where people have come up with their own tracks for it, but basically you have to hack up the game to do it, its certainly not a built-in feature of the game.
So what this means is that typically you get about a dozen tracks or so, then you get a couple of variants for each track, usually by driving it in reverse, and thats it. By the time you end up beating the career mode, or whatever the main objective is, you are sick of driving the same tracks and promptly quit.
This always struck me as such a stark contrast to a lot of the first person shooters out there that strive to make themselves as moddable as possible. You can even find driving games coming out of FPS engines.
But unfortunately for racing games, you really don't see the same kind of innovation. Instead there seems to be more of a focus on putting out yearly updates like other sports titles where you rarely see any great gameplay improvements, but usually just a few graphical ones.
Sadly, I guess that is the point. Software companies would much rather sell yearly sequels as opposed to making a moddable game that could provide years of playability like Half-Life.