Stuntman
The resurrected Atari brand finally gets a ding in the fender, and it's a whopper.
Published: July 3, 2002
Hey, wanna try something fun? Read this sentence: read this sentence. Now, read this sentence: read this sentence. Now, read this sentence: read this sentence. Now, read this sentence: read this sentence. Now, read this sentence: read this sentence. Now, read this sentence: read this sentence. Now, read this sentence: read this sentence. Fun, isn't it? Well, it's no fun when you're playing a game, either. Somewhere along the line, Reflections lost sight of what a fun game was, and I'm pretty sure it happened right around the end of the first Driver game.
Oh, how I wanted Stuntman to be great. Others scoffed and scorned its name without even playing it. "Just wait till you actually play it to pass judgment," I'd say. Playing would be believing. Believing that a game that was based entirely on a series of dangerous stunts for movies, license test-style, could be fun. And you know what? It was… for the first 15-20 times or so through a particular stunt run. See, I don't imagine myself as a gaming whiz by any stretch, but I'm good enough to stay in the running most of the time, and when I started to crack the 20 retries, then 30… then 40… then 50… I stopped having fun and started hating the experience I was being subjected to.
"But hey, who knows," I thought. "The game could end up being a lot more fun once I really got the controls of these vehicles down. Sure, these muscle cars are squirrelly, but then they were like that in Driver too, and I LOVED that game." Alas, when I passed up the Chargers and the Cudas of the low-budget movie biz, and started moving on to sleeker, sexier more robust racing machines, I was still constantly fighting the machines with that same sloppy out-of-control feel that made the torque-heavy cars in Driver so much fun. In fact, most of Stuntman's physics seem to be pulled directly from Driver. This is fantastic if you want to watch cops sail over your head in slo-mo at the crest of one of the hilly streets of San Francisco, but the apparent lunar gravity of Stuntman's SF-free world is nothing but frustration.
If you haven't gathered, by now, you play the role of a stuntman. The bulk of the game's experience is played out through the career mode, where you rise in notoriety and experience, moving from low-budget gangster pictures in England to a triad mob crime story in Thailand to a James Bond spoof in Monaco. As you advance in your career, you supposedly take on more responsibility and coordination of the stunts you're about to pull, but it's all rather irrelevant because you don't rehearse or go over your stunt in any detail, you just wing it, retrying over and over until you've memorized everything you have to do. This will take you a good 10-20 tries, of course, but just because you've memorized where every last little pixel of the level lies, it doesn't mean you'll be able to necessarily complete the run without another 10-20 tries.
Most of the difficulty comes from a combination of equally frustrating factors: the ridiculously difficult to control vehicles; the wonky low-gravity physics; and most frustrating, the unmerciful clock. These elements would be tolerable (barely) if served up individually, but they're mashed together with stunt requirements that are well designed, but ultimately pointless since you'll often spend more time retrying the first 10 seconds of a stunt a few dozen times in an effort to lock down control over the aforementioned frustrations. Once you finally do finish a movie's stunts, you're treated to a usually poorly executed "trailer" which intercuts actual footage from the replays of your stunts with pre-rendered CG footage. They aren't horrible, but the modeling for humans in CG seems limited to a choice few studios that can really pull it off correctly. The models in these CG sequences look almost ape-like. It's not horrid, exactly, since most of the production is done fairly well, and seeing your actual stunt run mixed in is fun. Jarring when switching from pre-rendered to real-time, but fun.
The biggest problem lies in just finishing a run. The clock forces you to run stunts with surgical precision most of the time, and the most frustrating part of this comes not in the usual stunt runs, but when you go off a jump, when the deliciously screwed up and floaty physics engine makes a routine jump into a game of roulette. Will your car land perfectly flat only to continue on course as usual? Will it take off at an odd angle and smash to the ground for a moment, then bounce into the air cart wheeling and spinning? Will it take off and seemingly land flat, then bounce on its side, chewing up valuable seconds while you wait for it to make contact with all four wheels again so you can continue? Well it sure is fun to guess when you've run the same stunt for the 100th time (no that's not an exaggeration) and you've got the parts before and after the jump down so perfectly you could do them with your eyes closed. Now that's what I call a fantastic physics engine!
What's that you say? You'd like another example? How about the second to last stunt in the game, where right off the bat you have to hang a 90 degree turn left, down onto a bridge and then smash through some boxes. There's something fundamentally wrong with a game when the very boxes you smash through get under your car and don't shatter or otherwise break under your car's weight, but instead flip the car over, effectively ending the stunt before it even really got started. Mind you, these are boxes that fly through the air like they were papier-mâché and don't damage the car in any way, but are apparently made out of feather-light titanium.
In case you hadn't noticed by now, I feel nothing but loathing for most of Stuntman's torturous gameplay. The extra modes, unlocked (of course) by completing Career mode include a few sections on beefing up your driving skills in speed, driving, and general stunt moves, and there's the option to build your own stunt course (again, of course) with pieces unlocked in Career mode. For the masochists out there, you can re-run stunts from the Career mode to get perfect scores and unlock more pieces and cars for the area and driving tests. No matter what, though, if you want to get the most out of Stuntman's other modes without using something like a Game Shark, you're going to have to suffer though the main Career experience.
It does bear mentioning, however, that Stuntman is not an ugly looking game, and hardly anyone can slight it for . Each of the levels is absolutely slathered in gorgeous high-res textures that are incredibly detailed and varied. There's very, very little repetition in place, and it gives everything a very true-to-life organic feel. No two stunts feels like any of the other ones from a different movie. Lighting, too, is fantastic. Sunlight glints off of everything, dynamic shadows are cast off your car (but sometimes not others and usually not off of any pedestrians). Anyone who still says the PS2 can't compete in texture and lighting detail need look no further. Stills of the game in action (which you can see to the upper right there) look almost photo-realistic.
Of course, all this comes at a terrible, terrible price: the framerate. The game manages to clip along at a usually quasi-steady pace, and at times ventures into more smooth territory, but this usually the case only at the very beginning of levels. Once you start into the heart of the level, usually buried within a densely populated locale, the framerate nosedives and you're treated to the marvelous experience of trying to drive a car through a slideshow. The whole experience is a massive headache (quite literally; I had to stop playing after a few couple-hour stretches), and it's the final nail in the fun coffin for a game that had plenty of promise, and had it been tweaked a bit, could have been so much more.
Stuntman's audio experience is just that; an experience. Parts are fantastic, parts are ho-hum, and most of it meanders around right around the middle of the road. The effects have plenty of pop; machine guns rat-rat-rat and bullets ricochet with plenty of fidelity, tires squeal and screech as they should. The crunch of metal smacking into brick, mortar, pavement, dirt, metal, wood and any combination thereof is satisfying, but not especially potent. The voice acting is decently played, though after hearing the director direct you around that same car you've driven around fifty times already, it would have been a massive relief to just have him shut up; you'd think you would know where to go after hearing it dozens upon dozens of times in a row – especially when there are telltale icons that direct you as it is.
The music is perhaps the most varied. The faux Bond and Indiana Jones themes are dead-on in their impersonations, but most of the other music falls short on stimulating you for more than a few go-arounds. By the time you've heard the same opening almost a hundred times, it gets very, VERY old. The music that punctuates the trailers after you finish a movie's stunts is well done, but again usually manages only to fill in and add a little more depth to the CG, nothing more.
Stuntman could have been great. I can still think back on the genuine fun that gripped me when I first started playing and it didn't take more than a dozen or so tries to move to the next stunt. It was once that dozen tries started multiplying that I started losing the fun factor. The game would have been ridiculously short if I'd been able to do that, but better to have something short and sweet than manufactured BS game length. Unless you're a glutton for punishment, treat every copy of Stuntman as if it carried the plague, because it'll be one of the most over-hyped, over-priced games you ever pick up. If you absolutely, positively must play it, give it a rental. You'll probably get far enough to realize it's not worth full-out buying by the time you have to return the game, and perhaps you'll still be able to walk away with an enjoyable experience. I certainly wish I could.
Oh, how I wanted Stuntman to be great. Others scoffed and scorned its name without even playing it. "Just wait till you actually play it to pass judgment," I'd say. Playing would be believing. Believing that a game that was based entirely on a series of dangerous stunts for movies, license test-style, could be fun. And you know what? It was… for the first 15-20 times or so through a particular stunt run. See, I don't imagine myself as a gaming whiz by any stretch, but I'm good enough to stay in the running most of the time, and when I started to crack the 20 retries, then 30… then 40… then 50… I stopped having fun and started hating the experience I was being subjected to.
"But hey, who knows," I thought. "The game could end up being a lot more fun once I really got the controls of these vehicles down. Sure, these muscle cars are squirrelly, but then they were like that in Driver too, and I LOVED that game." Alas, when I passed up the Chargers and the Cudas of the low-budget movie biz, and started moving on to sleeker, sexier more robust racing machines, I was still constantly fighting the machines with that same sloppy out-of-control feel that made the torque-heavy cars in Driver so much fun. In fact, most of Stuntman's physics seem to be pulled directly from Driver. This is fantastic if you want to watch cops sail over your head in slo-mo at the crest of one of the hilly streets of San Francisco, but the apparent lunar gravity of Stuntman's SF-free world is nothing but frustration.
If you haven't gathered, by now, you play the role of a stuntman. The bulk of the game's experience is played out through the career mode, where you rise in notoriety and experience, moving from low-budget gangster pictures in England to a triad mob crime story in Thailand to a James Bond spoof in Monaco. As you advance in your career, you supposedly take on more responsibility and coordination of the stunts you're about to pull, but it's all rather irrelevant because you don't rehearse or go over your stunt in any detail, you just wing it, retrying over and over until you've memorized everything you have to do. This will take you a good 10-20 tries, of course, but just because you've memorized where every last little pixel of the level lies, it doesn't mean you'll be able to necessarily complete the run without another 10-20 tries.
Most of the difficulty comes from a combination of equally frustrating factors: the ridiculously difficult to control vehicles; the wonky low-gravity physics; and most frustrating, the unmerciful clock. These elements would be tolerable (barely) if served up individually, but they're mashed together with stunt requirements that are well designed, but ultimately pointless since you'll often spend more time retrying the first 10 seconds of a stunt a few dozen times in an effort to lock down control over the aforementioned frustrations. Once you finally do finish a movie's stunts, you're treated to a usually poorly executed "trailer" which intercuts actual footage from the replays of your stunts with pre-rendered CG footage. They aren't horrible, but the modeling for humans in CG seems limited to a choice few studios that can really pull it off correctly. The models in these CG sequences look almost ape-like. It's not horrid, exactly, since most of the production is done fairly well, and seeing your actual stunt run mixed in is fun. Jarring when switching from pre-rendered to real-time, but fun.
The biggest problem lies in just finishing a run. The clock forces you to run stunts with surgical precision most of the time, and the most frustrating part of this comes not in the usual stunt runs, but when you go off a jump, when the deliciously screwed up and floaty physics engine makes a routine jump into a game of roulette. Will your car land perfectly flat only to continue on course as usual? Will it take off at an odd angle and smash to the ground for a moment, then bounce into the air cart wheeling and spinning? Will it take off and seemingly land flat, then bounce on its side, chewing up valuable seconds while you wait for it to make contact with all four wheels again so you can continue? Well it sure is fun to guess when you've run the same stunt for the 100th time (no that's not an exaggeration) and you've got the parts before and after the jump down so perfectly you could do them with your eyes closed. Now that's what I call a fantastic physics engine!
What's that you say? You'd like another example? How about the second to last stunt in the game, where right off the bat you have to hang a 90 degree turn left, down onto a bridge and then smash through some boxes. There's something fundamentally wrong with a game when the very boxes you smash through get under your car and don't shatter or otherwise break under your car's weight, but instead flip the car over, effectively ending the stunt before it even really got started. Mind you, these are boxes that fly through the air like they were papier-mâché and don't damage the car in any way, but are apparently made out of feather-light titanium.
In case you hadn't noticed by now, I feel nothing but loathing for most of Stuntman's torturous gameplay. The extra modes, unlocked (of course) by completing Career mode include a few sections on beefing up your driving skills in speed, driving, and general stunt moves, and there's the option to build your own stunt course (again, of course) with pieces unlocked in Career mode. For the masochists out there, you can re-run stunts from the Career mode to get perfect scores and unlock more pieces and cars for the area and driving tests. No matter what, though, if you want to get the most out of Stuntman's other modes without using something like a Game Shark, you're going to have to suffer though the main Career experience.
It does bear mentioning, however, that Stuntman is not an ugly looking game, and hardly anyone can slight it for . Each of the levels is absolutely slathered in gorgeous high-res textures that are incredibly detailed and varied. There's very, very little repetition in place, and it gives everything a very true-to-life organic feel. No two stunts feels like any of the other ones from a different movie. Lighting, too, is fantastic. Sunlight glints off of everything, dynamic shadows are cast off your car (but sometimes not others and usually not off of any pedestrians). Anyone who still says the PS2 can't compete in texture and lighting detail need look no further. Stills of the game in action (which you can see to the upper right there) look almost photo-realistic.
Of course, all this comes at a terrible, terrible price: the framerate. The game manages to clip along at a usually quasi-steady pace, and at times ventures into more smooth territory, but this usually the case only at the very beginning of levels. Once you start into the heart of the level, usually buried within a densely populated locale, the framerate nosedives and you're treated to the marvelous experience of trying to drive a car through a slideshow. The whole experience is a massive headache (quite literally; I had to stop playing after a few couple-hour stretches), and it's the final nail in the fun coffin for a game that had plenty of promise, and had it been tweaked a bit, could have been so much more.
Stuntman's audio experience is just that; an experience. Parts are fantastic, parts are ho-hum, and most of it meanders around right around the middle of the road. The effects have plenty of pop; machine guns rat-rat-rat and bullets ricochet with plenty of fidelity, tires squeal and screech as they should. The crunch of metal smacking into brick, mortar, pavement, dirt, metal, wood and any combination thereof is satisfying, but not especially potent. The voice acting is decently played, though after hearing the director direct you around that same car you've driven around fifty times already, it would have been a massive relief to just have him shut up; you'd think you would know where to go after hearing it dozens upon dozens of times in a row – especially when there are telltale icons that direct you as it is.
The music is perhaps the most varied. The faux Bond and Indiana Jones themes are dead-on in their impersonations, but most of the other music falls short on stimulating you for more than a few go-arounds. By the time you've heard the same opening almost a hundred times, it gets very, VERY old. The music that punctuates the trailers after you finish a movie's stunts is well done, but again usually manages only to fill in and add a little more depth to the CG, nothing more.
Stuntman could have been great. I can still think back on the genuine fun that gripped me when I first started playing and it didn't take more than a dozen or so tries to move to the next stunt. It was once that dozen tries started multiplying that I started losing the fun factor. The game would have been ridiculously short if I'd been able to do that, but better to have something short and sweet than manufactured BS game length. Unless you're a glutton for punishment, treat every copy of Stuntman as if it carried the plague, because it'll be one of the most over-hyped, over-priced games you ever pick up. If you absolutely, positively must play it, give it a rental. You'll probably get far enough to realize it's not worth full-out buying by the time you have to return the game, and perhaps you'll still be able to walk away with an enjoyable experience. I certainly wish I could.