Meh.

Somebody copied me that game, and (although I played it a lot) it would not be the racing game I'd play now.

The cars offered is a thing that needed more development time. There were cars that were useless (even as a joke), while others were too similar. On the other hand, the track builder is both the best and worst idea of that game... Trackmania was built around that feature and it's way funnier.

In the end, my opinion was influenced by Hard Drivin' (a game I didn' like even on arcade... so imagine playing it on a ZX Spectrum) and the crappy set of user tracks that have my copy of 4D stunts (I don't know what tracks were the "official" ones). So, if I had to choose a game from that era... Lotus III 😉

I agree that each car had to be maybe deisgned with better differences but considering the time (1990) maybe it wasn't a big project or there was no time for it who knows. There're I think some interesting interview to a developer and a still alive community around the game. For example the new cars designed for the games are simply awesome, there's a Ferrari F40 much better 3D designed than I thought for example. The one thing I'd have liked was a different specific car sound for each car and higher frequencies engine sound.
I remember Hard Drivin for the Mega Drive, a impressive but almost unplayable port (impressive for its time and it was one of the few porting that ran at almost (!) playable frame rate (not really but anyway...)). Lotus III I don't remember about it I'll look for the screenshots of the game.

I loved it, the 3D graphics were pretty stunning back then, yes... I must have built so many tracks for it ^^

Like Hard Drivin', it also has horribly glitchy crash sensitive vehicle physics 😀

If you like technically sound, fast racing games, Papyrus' Indianapolis 500 might be worth playing. Maybe even Stunt Driver (though that's way more flatter than Stunts and has no car variety).

Never played at that time, much more time I spent playing Stunt Island

leileilol wrote on 2020-07-12, 23:03:

Like Hard Drivin', it also has horribly glitchy crash sensitive vehicle physics 😀

If you like technically sound, fast racing games, Papyrus' Indianapolis 500 might be worth playing. Maybe even Stunt Driver (though that's way more flatter than Stunts and has no car variety).

Eheh yeah sometimes the car act really strangely in some moments like flying for an unknown physic logic but that usually happened because the car was pushed to some limits, like it was known it was impossible to came out of that situation and those "bugs" were almost ... "realistic". 😁

I remember Indianapolis 500 a great game even if I always preferred more freedom in the tracks choice/design, that's why I really liked a game like Test Drive 3 that at that time was awesome but it did have its problems (the trees on the border of the street were imho a design bad choice) even if really depending on the right cpu to be played at a right frame rate.. sometimes too fast sometimes too slow, sometimes accelerating itself.. it had to be fps limited! 😀
But I remember played a lot with Indianapolis 500. Also a remember a Moto GP game of that era that had really a great PC speaker sound high frequency engine you could almost break the engine before changing gear. 😁 Those were the probably the games I played the most back then.

This game "mysteriously" found its way to my schools computer lab in 97. Bunch of 486/33's with no networking so limited to what a few floppy disks could hold.
No idea who installed that 1st copy but that's how it made it's way back to my home PC as well.

1/2 the class would have time trails with the Indy car and I think the default track. I was never that high up.
Track editor is what made that game. I used to make tracks where the slower cars had the benefit, faster cars would land from a jump right in front of a wall where the slower cars would land shot and able to steer out the way.
Shame the AI wasn't able to handle the more complex custom tracks, it did alright for early 90's on custom tracks that the Devs had no real control over.

Not sure I'd call it a car sim though, other tracks had that indy car doing a bridge jump off the side of a cliff and directly onto another jump was always fun. Not sure what that was simulating 😉
I do fire it up time to time, it's main draw now is its quick play element as it hasn't any career mode or progression to speak of.

However I already had Street Rod and loved doing up the cars and the the original Need for Speed which had much better racing so poor old stunts wasn't played all that much by me.

stunts was awesome. desiging your own tracks. we only ever raced with the f1 car, nothing else was fast enough. there was a bug that also locked your engine at 100% which was cool. man i still remember that 🤣!

BloodyCactus wrote on 2020-07-13, 12:35:

stunts was awesome. desiging your own tracks. we only ever raced with the f1 car, nothing else was fast enough. there was a bug that also locked your engine at 100% which was cool. man i still remember that 🤣!

Sure I remember it. It was the 5th gear bug with the F1 car, accelerating to the maximun speed and basically making the car going forever at that speed and impossible to control.. I think that bug make the game more than the track designer tool itself.. 😁
Back in its time I thought I was very skilled with that game I wish I had those old time records saved for the default tracks to compare nowdays but once I discovered there's a community of gamers still racing with this game I understood as usual there're people that surpassed any limits. As usual with every games I guess.

I was playing this in 99/00 sharing maps and replays with mates trying to crash in riduiculous ways. This would have been after playing nfs 1 2 and 3 already... It held up well. It played fine on what i think was an early celeron. I will have a go with it on the mmx over the weekend 👍

Nice game with some technically interesting sound generation.
On my Tualeron 1400 I do not hear the engine sound with the emulation driver of my VIA chipset in a Shuttle FV25 motherboard. Sound effects and game music works.
Running it on another PC with a Gravis Ultrasound, you'd better use the MT-32 emulation.

I saw a NIB copy of this sell of feebay for $600 the other day. Classic game back in the day.

foil_fresh wrote on 2020-07-23, 15:06:

I was playing this in 99/00 sharing maps and replays with mates trying to crash in riduiculous ways. This would have been after playing nfs 1 2 and 3 already... It held up well. It played fine on what i think was an early celeron. I will have a go with it on the mmx over the weekend 👍

For me, the track editor was what made this game! Especially with that key combination that unlocked the ability to also build hills and such.
I also was able to build more crazy tracks that would be accepted by the game by making the road make a very small circle from start to finish (so the race track would be valid) and then creating a second track which then was my real track which I let my friends crash and bur...I mean which I let them try and race! For fun! 😀 😀 😀
At some point one of them mentioned that I was just trying to get them killed...after which I needed to think about it for about 5 seconds after which I replied "true" 🤣
But then again I did also race my own tracks, with bridges with gaps of 3 cells followed by an icy bent with concrete blocks and a corcscrew right behind it, these tracks were awesome! 😁
And of course we only used that one racing car as it could go insanely fast!!! This was such an awesome game! And I think the first game that had anything moddable, which the majority of games back then lacked.

It still worked on my Pentium 2 350 iirc. Can't remember if I tried it on anything faster but I can't remember ever having odd issues with it.

Stunts was one of the best games I have ever played. Me and my dad would spend a lot of time designing tracks for fun.