Stunts (video game)

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Stunts

Developer(s)	Distinctive Software, Inc.
Publisher(s)	Brøderbund, Mindscape
Designer(s)	Don Mattrick Kevin Pickell Brad Gour Rob Martyn Stan Chow
Release date(s)	1990
Genre(s)	Racing game
Mode(s)	Single player
Platform(s)	PC (MS-DOS), Amiga

This article is about the video game. For other uses, see Stunt (disambiguation).

Stunts (also distributed under a different title 4D Sports: Driving) is a racing video game developed by Distinctive Software, Inc. (DSI). The game was published by Brøderbund in 1990 for the United States and published by Mindscape for the United Kingdom in 1991. The influence of the classic game Test Drive (also by DSI) is easy to spot because of the similar graphics and game structure. The game was also similar in style to Stunt Driver and Geoff Crammond's Stunt Car Racer. The game was originally made for the PC and then ported for Amiga.

1 Description
2 Bugs and glitches
3 Stunts today
4 Cars
5 Opponents
6 Additional screenshots
7 External links

[edit] Description

A Stunts race in progress

In Stunts, players race a lap around the circuit, with the aim of completing the lap as quickly as possible without crashing. However, these laps often feature special track areas such as loops, jumps (including over tall buildings), slalom roads and corkscrews. The game area is restriced by a large fixed size square area defined and surrounded by a fence which the player can not leave. Players can either race against the clock or choose between six different opponents, there is no support for realtime multiplayer. Stunts features 11 different drivable cars, with either automatic or manual transmission. Replays of races can be saved and reviewed and there are several camera views available during replay and actual driving. In addition, there is a built-in track editor that lets players design their own tracks with different track parts, which is considered by many to be one of the best (if not the best) feature of the game altogether.

The cars can drive on paved roads, gravel roads, icy/snow roads and grass if driving off the track -- which all offer different levels of grip. The game has a relatively advanced pseudo-physics engine for its time which can i.a. simulate limited oversteer and understeer when cornering at the limit; and driving through a banked corner gives the car more grip. The graphics is a combination of 3D and sprites running in 320x200 with 256 colors, the game is written for MS DOS.

Stunts included a primitive form of copy prevention. Each time after running the program, players had to complete a specific phrase found in the game manual before being allowed to race. If the player failed to complete the phrase three times, the race was loaded, but about four seconds afterward, the player was told that he or she did not deactivate the car's security system, and the car crashed. After this, the player was returned to the main screen.

[edit] Bugs and glitches

Some of the cars in the game have a critical speed which when reached allows the car to keep its maximum speed despite i.a. hard cornering and/or driving on grass (which would normally make the car decelerate). This bug has become a major feature among the modern Stunts fans and is highly exploited during both track design -- tracks are specifically designed to make it possible to drive at maximum speed continuously -- and while driving to set fast lap times. The critical speed is difficult to reach on the slower cars. An easy way to reach the critical speed of the fastest cars is to drive repeatedly through the loop by using a special technique. When a car has reached critical speed arbitrary strange behaviour rarely can occur, such as the car bouncing up and down and sometimes flying higher up -- usually resulting in a crash.

Other bugs include (but not limited to) the ability to cut certain obstacles by "beating" the collision detection through various techniques, i.a. the loop, the slalom and the corkscrew, the latter example however might be considered more of an advanced technique and not a bug.

Since the user was free to design his or her own tracks, some of them could be very long (over 10 minutes to complete a lap) or contain multiple paths to the finish line, without a clear indication of which ones were considered valid by the game. In that case, the game could become confused when deciding which the main path was supposed to be, and either accept alternative paths to the finish line as legal, or on the contrary, assign them a substantial time penalty.

[edit] Stunts today

Although the game is more than 17 years old, it has a large fanbase worldwide. There are many web sites that increased public exposure by providing information and copies of the game. The compact size of Stunts, which is only 1MB when zipped, may also had contributed to the game's popularity. Online Stunts competitions, in which the competition master would receive race replays on certain tracks via e-mail, is also booming.

At present, worldwide Stunts communities remain strong and active. Forums and websites dedicated to the game remain operational, several Stunts competitions are still organized (see the Stunts Racing Portal link below for active competitions links) and the first World Stunts Meeting took place in Budapest, Hungary on August 2004. It has been followed by 2 other meetings : Aarhus (Denmark) in 2005 and Budapest again in 2006, proving that Stunts community is and will remain active.

The games TrackMania, TrackMania Sunrise and TrackMania Nations are widely considered to be the spiritual successors of Stunts. GripShift for the Playstation Portable also draws heavily on Stunts. Each of these games feature a track construction kit, allowing players to create Stunts-esque courses, with the option to race against other competitors or play in a time trial mode. Both games offer loop-de-loops, spirals, and banked curves in addition to allowing the player to create courses that utilize the third dimension much more than Stunts was ever capable of.

There are also some free software games called Ultimate Stunts (an attempt to create a modern Stunts-like game from scratch) and Maniadrive, which is a bit more like TrackMania.