Stunts

The Good
If Stunt Driver was about realism, Stunts was about arcade racing fun. Sometimes you just want to fly around a track, make a massive jump, land without a scratch, and tear off into the next bend. Stunts fit this bill nicely.

The track editor extended the life of the game. Got the top score in all the tracks? Bulid a new one! This was half the fun, though; Stunts was a buggy game, and you could build a track that, when properly exploited, would unleash some bizarre racing behavior. I've made a massive jump, crashed into something, and flown almost a mile high into the air.

The Bad
Like all DSI games, control was digital, even if you were using an analog joystick. (I go into why this is a really, really bad thing in my review for Test Drive.)

Sometimes the bugs in the game bit you in the ass when you were playing normally. They didn't seem so funny then.

There's no multiplayer support. This wasn't common for 1990, but Stunt Driver had it, and Stunts didn't.

The Bottom Line
Yes, it's a cheesy game and hardly realistic, but it's still fun to play. So fun, in fact, that there are still several Stunts fan pages around today.

The Good
I played this about 5 years ago on my decked out 386. :)

I love this game. It doesn't have the best graphics, The sound is adequate, and the controls OK.

Although these are the games shortcomings, this game is completely addictive. The tracks that are included range from easy to challenging. But the great things about this is the track editor.

Creating your track is pretty easy. You have a Grid of sorts and pieces of track that you place down to create the track. Quick, easy and simple. I used to trade tracks with friends and try to make the best time to complete laps. A great competitive game in that sense.

The physics engine was not the best, but taking jumps and missing the landing ramp... or hitting a steep incline and making your car SOAR into the sky.... Or just witnessing an awesome crash over and over (thanks to the built-in replay camera) is just too fun.

The Bad
There wasn't a lot I didn't like... It was a great game!

The Bottom Line
A racing game that you can't take seriuously. Great fun.

The Good
Ah, the MIDI music. What compelled games designers in the early 1990s to emulate heavy metal guitar solos, with a medium - the ADLIB sound card - which was so utterly unsuited to the task? And yet the music was extremely entertaining, and I can hum it even today, and that encapsulates 4D Sports Driving's appeal. It had grand ambitions, it was for the most part competently put together, but it had lots of quirks and was above all entertaining. It's interesting to compare it with one of the modern 'Gran Turismo' games, as well, because there are lots of similarities (although, as far as I am aware, only the Honda NSX appears in both games).

In a nutshell, it was the arcade's 'Hard Drivin'' on the PC, but with a track editor. And lots of bugs, most of which sent you flying into the air and/or along the ground at supersonic speed. With a few creative friends you could create huge novelty levels which took ages to explore, and the polygonal graphics were fast and smooth on a bog-standard 386. Nowadays the options menus are themselves little history lessons, with CGA, Hercules, MT-32 and other odd terminology which the kids of today will never need to know about, bless them. I saw a boxed PC copy in a second-hand shop a few days ago; it was £1.50.

The Bad
It's hard to poke fun at it; rather like 'Serious Sam' it's clearly not meant to be evaluated with the same rigour as, say, yer average Noam Chomsky pamphlet. At the time I loved the game wholeheartedly, even its flaws. Still, it won't be long before the Porsche/March Indycar is the only car you ever drive, and you might have trouble getting the game to work on XP.

The Bottom Line
There was a '4D Sports Boxing', donchano? It was rubbish.