“Wrecked the vehicle” – Stuntman

As celebrated as Driver’s expansive driving was, a significant subset of its players never got to see any of it. It started with a driving test in a car park which required the player to carry out a list of precise moves within a limited space of time, while avoiding too many crashes, to prove their skills before they could proceed. A portion of its difficulty came from unclear and fuzzy objectives, and even after overcoming that it was difficult and quite a stumbling block. My understanding is that the test was more infamous than popular, but it was referenced back to in later Driver games. More unlikely still in terms of developer Reflections sticking by it, they went on to make an entire game based on it.

Stuntman is all about precision driving, presented as sets of challenges of carrying out sequences of stunts filmed for movies, interspersed with bigger single stunts. The concept is an update of the checkpoint racer, really, the scripted challenges of Lotus Turbo Challenge 2 taken a few steps further. Levels get introduced by the driver you control speaking to camera and calmly explaining the stunt that you’re about to do. He bears some resemblance to TOCA Race Driver’s Ryan McKane, with video games’ convergence on a single white man for all occasions already well underway. The movie posters for Toothless in Wapping, A Whoopin’ and A Hollerin’, Blood Oath etc. on loading screens are a nicer touch, and a needed one given how much time you’re likely to be spending staring at them.

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That’s because the game needs to reload every time you fail, and Stuntman is very unforgiving. Each level consists of a series of marks to hit, be that smashing through roadworks, jumping off ramps, overtaking other cars in close confines, or just going through a certain space. Sometimes it throws in something a bit more complex like reversing along a pier without going off the end of it. You can get away with missing certain points in theory and sometimes even in practice, but the bigger issue is the countdown timer which gets replenished as you hit your targets. Or even more so, it’s the fact that everything else is in place for your stunts and isn’t going to hang around waiting for you even if you’ve technically made it to all your checkpoints. Good luck jumping through a train that’s already left. Succeeding involves stringing together an awful lot of different little successes.

The difficulty makes it satisfying, in a quite old school way, to get a perfect run, or even a good-enough one. It’s also a bit like doing Gran Turismo licence tests but with explosions, which turns out to be a better idea than it sounds. I found the same compulsion to keep repeating challenges, failure after failure, working out how to shave off risk, time, or ideally both. But just as Stuntman gets momentum going, the length of levels increases at a ludicrous rate alongside the challenges involved. The first part of the second film feels about on par with trying to pull off a perfect run through all five parts of the first film in one go. And at least getting to the end of a whole film meant getting a chance to watch its cheesy trailer. 

Not only does the lengthening feel unnecessary from a gameplay challenge perspective, it sits at odds with an aesthetic that tries to keep somewhere in the bounds of reality, starting with low budget small-scale films. You can’t tell me that the director of A Whoopin’ and A Hollerin’ (“hilarious feel-good action”) was trying anything grand with single tracking shots, so why would they ever try to chain all of these stunts together with tight races in between them? I’ve seen plenty of games sacrifice realism for the sake of gameplay concerns, but it’s rare to see one undermine both in such perfect tandem.

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Top of the charts for week ending 7 September 2002:

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Top of the charts for week ending 14 September 2002:

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