Article by: FinalGamer 12/21/2010 11:02:53 AM
[i]AWFUL GAMING[/i]
Stuntman
Developer: Reflections Interactive
Publisher: Infogrames/Atari
Year: 2002
Genre: Racing/Action
System: PS2/Gameboy Advance
What's the best part of any action movie? It's divided amongst people but there's generally three things. Fight scenes, car chases and explosions. The latter are more thought of since they're all high-octane action-packed adrenaline-pumping crap, performed by one of the most dangerous professions in the world, the stuntman. Now what if I told you that a game existed where you were the stuntman for the movies? Course you can be a hero doing any of this awesomeness, but come on, you're a STUNTMAN, that's a kickass title! So, for a game made by the makers of the Driver series, was it awesome? Or was it AWESOME!?
Story - You are a Stuntman, simple as that. I really wish I had more to tell you but no, you're some American dude with a crew cut in a racing jacket, without a name because nobody respects you enough to even ask for it cuz hey you're just here to be a fancy driver and make everyone else look good right? You take part in the filming of six different films.
Toothless in Wapping which is basically Snatch or Lock, Stock, Two Smoking Barrels, A Whoopin' And A Hollerin' (the Dukes of Hazzard), Blood Oath (John Woo films), Conspiracy (Tom Clancy-style films), The Scarab of Lost Souls (Indiana Jones), and finally Live Twice For Tomorrow which is of course James Bond.
Inbetween you also partake in daredevil shows ranging from synchronised drives to riding monster trucks to Evil Knievel stunts, to keep your skills sharp inbetween movies.
So okay, this SOUNDS awesome, but how good did it go in practice you ask? I mean this is all just driving, is it really that fun?
(It's also the same answer to the question "would you take your driving test in Baghdad?")
Gameplay - Well....firstly you have to get an idea of the fact that this is a racing game, pure and simple. A racing game that not only demands you to be on time, but also demands you to do SPECIFIC things during your imaginary race. It's not just getting from point A to point B, you have to hit an acceptable enough number of stunts to even pass the damn scene. While you drive, the director will kindly scream into your ear a variety of things for you to do, indicated by yellow markers ahead of you.
These will include:
Hitting specific objects, racing through gaps, leaping over ramps, overtaking specific vehicles, dodging near explosions, and in later final scenes, using a specific stunt such as rolling your vehicle or hitting the nitro with a specific button for only that level. Your score on how well you do in the scene is rated as an accuracy rating of percentage.
It's not just stunts you have to do however, it's also having to reach certain parts of the scene in enough time, or else you fail for being too slow. Most of the stunts you can avoid doing if you're not OCD about this kind of stuff, but a few like the ending stunts of most scenes are the only way you can finish properly. Some levels are not truly that difficult, and with enough patience you can do them.
You see, there are only two types of people who play Stuntman. Those who are humble, and those who are about to be. Patience is your greatest friend, because you will fuck up. You WILL fuck up. It's not a question of IF, but a question of WHEN.
(Not pictured: Your fault (maybe) )
How you will fuck up will be entirely up to the game. Maybe you didn't hit that ramp just right, maybe you juuuust grazed that snowman, maybe you hit a small bump of a pebble in the road that suddenly makes your car act like a ladder in a WWE Ladder Match. The only way, repeat, the ONLY WAY you can be good at this game, is by repetition. Repeating the same goddamn stunts umpteen times over until you can make a fucking flipbook from pure memory on how to do the entire stunt run flawlessly.
And you can't even be TOO good at it, since some stunts such as the Explosion stunts, are timed and you MUST go through them when they go off in order to do them. Too slow or too fast, that doesn't cut it. Okay, you don't have to do all the stunts in the game, but it's going to really grind down on you soon enough.
As much as the game is an entertaining idea, it is immediately crippled by the chaotic physics engine. Perhaps you may recognise these shoddy-looking pointy cars and ramps from Driver. You may also recognise that this is not a good sign. Even the most simplest stunts can be rendered pointless by hitting an incline just a tiny bit wrong and the car ends up flying and spinning insanely, over and over again in an unpredictable roll, all to the chagrin of you and the fucking director.
One of the big failings of Stuntman is that, no matter how well you do, some particular stunts are built in such a way, that your success or failure is judged purely upon the luck of the physics engine.
See it doesn't matter how good a driver you are, or how quickly you can pick up the skills, what matters is how much or how little the physics engine will fuck you over six ways to Alaska quicker than Sarah Palin in a Balto movie. You will be blasted, crushed, rolled over, driven down chasms, thrown from your vehicle, pummelled by microlites, THE FUCKING MICROLITES I HATE THAT MOTHERFUCKING WORD, and above all else, you will be verbally abused by the director to the point that beaten housewives will pity you, right up to getting your own Lifetime movie.
(FUCKING MICROLITE STALKING ME LIKE A BITCH)
And if you think THAT'S bad, there's the loading times of the game as well. Maybe I was unlucky or something with a bad copy and I never bothered to check, but every time I had to load a stage....every....fucking....time, I had to wait, for a goddamn 10-15 minutes before ONE stage loaded. And by one stage, I mean one chase through some streets where no more than six cars show up, and no matter WHERE you failed in that stage, even if you fucked up AT THE START, it aaaaaaallll reloads again, the same amount of time.
I actually went and made toast, then finished said toast, and STILL had to wait three more minutes before a fucking level loaded.
Graphics - Seeing as it's 2002 on the PS2, you're not going to expect anything majorly awesome from this game. When you realise it's the makers of Driver, you KNOW it's going to be a jagged mirror of washed-out colours. Seriously, did ANYONE enjoy Driver? Anyone? I mean this isn't a review of that game no, this is Stuntman, but it's got a lot of connections to it in the same way you're rough around the edges and then there's your kind-of retarded cousin who doesn't SEEM to have any kind of actual condition but fuck is he an idiot.
As an early PS2 game, there isn't a lot of shine in it. Sure we had these pointy graphics for a long time but Tomb Raider was actually fun enough for us to ignore that and get on with it. When you're replaying the same stretch of land over and over and OVER again, you are going to notice how weirdly sharp the snow looks on that incline.
There is nothing really redeeming about the graphics other than the trailers which look okay, not in a terrible sense, and they DO actually replay the stunts you did in them in a very blatant graphical cut, but what else can I say? It's 2002, and it's made by the makers of Driver. What do YOU think you're going to see?
(Retards sponsored by Atari, apprently)
Music/Sound - As far as the music is concerned, there's nothing truly bad about it. In fact some of it is actually pretty good to hear, and it's actually different for each scene like a film's soundtrack would be, which is actually a good effort in giving the feeling of being in a movie at the very least. Problem is you'll be repeating some scenes so many times that you will undoubtedly be sick of some of the music VERY quickly.
Particular cases are the entire generic-action-feeling Conspiracy (and I mean Arnold Palmer generic jesus), the annoyingly-Asian Scene 3 of Blood Oath when riding the Tuk Tuk, and the blatant-Indiana-Jones-theme-ripoff in Scene 2 of The Scarab of Lost Souls. All this however, pales in comparison to one special sound. The director.
He is your worst enemy, hell he should be the final boss. The man is an unfeeling, cold-hearted, sadistic bastard who not only demands a tiny-ass margin of error AT THE VERY LEAST, but he's also constantly screaming in your ear with such helpful titbits as "THROUGH THE FENCE! BETWEEN THE TREES! OVER THE TRAIN! THROUGH THE CARS! CUT, THAT WAS SLOW! CUT, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH THE VEHICLE! CUT, RETAKE! CUT, YOU'RE TOO DAMN SLOW!"
Even when you actually fall off A FUCKING MOUNTAIN during Conspiracy and paramedics have to be called, he just says "CUT, DO IT AGAIN!" You think Navi was annoying? Fuck you, Navi was your best friend in the goddamn world, unlike THIS jackass who ticks off all the checkboxes of videogame annoyance except for laughing at you. Now if he did THAT, we would literally have a guy more hateworthy than the Duck Hunt Dog.
Actually no, fuck it, he IS worse than that fucking dog, fuck the director, fuck his shitty-ass movie ripoffs and I hope to christ that if they ever made a game of this in future, they say the previous director died in a fucking tragic Hollywood accident.
(At least when Heath Ledger died, they gave him an Oscar)
Fun and Innovation - 2
Replayability - 5 (CUT, GODDAMNIT YOU WILL DO THIS AGAIN AND AGAIN UNTIL YOU FUCKING DO IT RIGHT, THAT WAS TOO SLOW YOU WORTHLESS FUCK, I WILL FUCKING CUT YOU LIKE A BITCH, I WILL CUT YOU LIKE 4KIDS CUT ANIME, YOU FUCKING GRAVELSUCKING SMEAR)
Gameplay - 1
Presentation - 2
Also, Merry Christmas you cunts :D