Cylinders firing, you ease the car out of neutral into first. The clutch grabs the gears, gently plucking the stick out of your hand. Softly, but with enough force to hint that your steed isn't quite the tamed animal you assumed - passion still exists in this silverback, regardless of its age. You accelerate, leaving just the slightest screech in your wake, echoes filling the void.
First turns to second. Second to third. And third to fourth. Your speed stabilises, your life hanging in the balance of a few clicks. You check the speedometer, then check it again. The world seems slower now, too slow for the task at hand, yet still somehow fast enough to kill.
The thump of the ramp comes suddenly, sooner than expected. The world is almost still now - time has slowed to the point where you can make out the individual bolts that hold your fate together. You start counting your life not in years, but in metres, and still everything seems too slow. Your fate has become inviolate, set by the choices made so recently, yet so long ago. Less than a metre. You wonder whether you made the right choices. Whether you kissed your wife before you left. Whether you did everything you could. Centimetres. Whether you were happy. Whether you lived your life. Whether you were.
Now.
With a rush, the world launches around you. Time accelerates, turning your existence into a blur and narrowing your world to a point. In a single instant, you simultaneously soar and plummet, a fallen angel. Briefly, you are God.
And then you land.
Wheels contact the ramp, your neck whips, your foot falls on the pedal, time fills the void, you find yourself returned. Alive, joyous, and empty.
Until the next time.
Watch you don't smack your head when the car lifts.
To celebrate the upcoming launch of Stuntman: Ignition for the PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360, THQ recently invited PALGN along with a number of gaming and non-gaming media publications to an all-day event showcasing the game and the reality of stunt driving. Not necessarily in that order - after being picked up in a stretch Hummer limousine we were ushered off to Sandown International Raceway where we were met by Driver Dynamics, providers of the "Stunt Driving Experience". Between Street Commodores magazine, PALGN, and Erin McNaught (Miss Australia 2006, host of Cybershack on Channel Ten), it's fair to say that we covered the spectrum. To give us a basis for comparison, we were shown over the course of a few hours how to do a 180 handbrake turn, a 360 degree controlled spin, and a ramp jump. The fun (and sheer terror) was completely incidental, of course ...
After a quick change of underpants, we were off to the THQ studios to play a pre-release version of Stuntman: Ignition. While the game is also being released on PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 2, only the Xbox 360 version was available to play. We were assured that the differences between the 360 and PlayStation 3 version would be negligible.
The original Stuntman was a great concept plagued by bad design choices. The core concept was strong - you took on the role of a stuntman in highly scripted movie roles, trying to make the stunts without buying the farm in the process. The biggest problem wasn't the game, it was the game - like the archetypal zombie in an old-school horror flick, it was cursed with unreasonable slowness, poor movement capabilities, and an otherwise totally unforgiving nature towards any mistake. Unless you were among the most obsessive of the Otaku, it's highly likely that you never actually played the whole game through.
No longer, however. The game seems to be shaping up well so far. Things haven't changed significantly since our preview back in May, but what has is additional content - featuring 6 movies, 36 different stunt runs, over 25 vehicles, a stunt constructor, and extensive local-play and online multiplayer with one to eight players, there's a lot of content for your dollar. While the final build isn't yet available, we were assured that the only changes remaining primarily involve performance improvements and other relatively minor adjustments. Performance improvements, we might add, that don't seem to be entirely needed at this point, at least not for the single player. Controls, level design, and single-player graphics were all extremely close to, if not already, complete.
That put a quiver in my liver.
In addition to the two movies we enjoyed last time, we also got the opportunity to play another movie and have a go at four-player multiplayer. The trailer tells you all you need to know about the game - while it's pre-rendered, it's pretty darn close to how the game actually plays. After having another go with Aftershock and Overdrive, we also got to play A Whoopin' an’ a Hollering II, an homage to the original A Whoopin' an’ a Hollering from the first Stuntman. Just remember - it isn't The Dukes of Hazzard. Really. Because then you'd be playing a licensed game, and you'd be subject to all the restrictions enforced by the license holder. Or something like that, anyway. Look, just look the other way and enjoy it - it's fun.
As with the other movies, fast scripted action take prominence - you're racing an orange coupe through a small country town, driving through the back streets, a building yard, and a farm, in that order. In between avoiding the on-coming trucks, hitting your jump queues, and doing 180 handbrake turns, you also have to make sure you're keeping up with the lead car. Fall too far behind and you've blown your shot and you'll have to reshoot. Leapin' through barns, dodgin' chickens, and raisin' a ruckus was never so much fun.
The difficulty system has been reworked since the original. To make things more accessible for the stuntastically challenged, an "easy mode" is now available, increasing the number of allowed mistakes from five to seven. The trade-off is a significantly reduced scoring bonus system, limiting your ability to unlock new scenes and movies. While it's relatively easy to play through the introductory scenes with some quick practice, getting higher than a three star rating takes some work. And, now that the load time issue has been fixed compared the original Stuntman, you don't need to have OCD to actually feel like finishing the game.
As with last time, slow-downs were positively nonexistent. Not that we wouldn't have actually minded them at times - if the game's anything, it's frantic. Things are always happening, right up to the point where you will be missing things. On the fifth or sixth play through though, you start to notice the more subtle details. Your driver looks behind when reversing. The easiest path to follow actually synergises (in a cinematographic sense) with the path of the cars you're supposed to be hitting. Your stunts are actually very deliberately set up to mimic various stunts from various real movies. A lot of thought has clearly gone into the level design - when and if you actually finish off an entire movie, you'll not only get to see a preview for the movie, you'll also apparently get to see your stunts incorporated into trailers themselves. We say apparently because we were unable to get to that point in the afternoon, which in itself probably says something positive about single-player longevity.
Incoming!
After revisiting the single player, we had a quick go at four-player simultaneous local-play. Overwhelming is the only word that really fits, and not in a technical sense. Take the hectic set design of single player, multiply it by four, display it all on a single screen, and throw in the ability to crash into each other, and you've got a fair idea of how the gameplay feels. The visual quality was noticeably less detailed than the single-player, but that's understandable given the amount of information being shown across what amounts to four simultaneously rendered images. While the final build may offer slightly higher image quality in single-machine, four-player mode, the drop in image quality is supposed to be non-existent when playing online against other people. The 360 may be a workhorse, but there's only so much one can draw out of it.
Four multiplayer options are also on offer. Back-lot Battle gives players the ability to string together stunt combos while also stealing points from other players, while Back-lot Race gives players a "standard" racing option, if your definition of a standard race includes corkscrews, two-wheeling maneuvers, and jumps. Movie Race challenges a ghost car on any stunt run from the single-player campaign, and Stunt Tourney gives multiple players hotseat fun.
Overall, the game looks good. We look forward to reviewing the final build, as we sure didn't get enough time to unlock as much as we would have liked. Paradigm Studios seems to have fixed a lot of the shortcomings of the original Stuntman without losing the core ethos.
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