[Perfect Stu]

....ctd

Once the director and stuntman finish introducing the setup (through pre-rendered and realtime cutscenes), each movie contains about five stunts apiece, ranging in time limit from 45 seconds to two and a half minutes. That may not sound like it adds up to a great deal, but finishing a stunt and executing it perfectly are two very different things. Each stunt sequence is built out of several smaller challenges -- 180 here, e-brake through here, smash something here, make a close pass there -- meaning even the shorter stunts take plenty of time to nail. The game isn't unnecessarily hard, and offers handy presentation elements to guide you (icon overlays and director comments point out stunts in sequence), but practice is certainly necessary to make perfect. Once it's off to the later levels, like the rooftop chases in Blood Oath, the challenge level is more than high enough.

That raises the question, though, of whether this is just the parking-garage sequence in Driver (cursed by more than a few gamers) repeated a great many times. As the Driver games proved, though, the right structure and presentation can make even the most mundane tasks original and thrilling, and the movie sequences in Stuntman are all about presentation. Early street chases may feel a little mundane, but roof-jumping in Bangkok is another matter entirely. Stuntman offers plenty of rewards to those who persevere, too. After straining to complete a stunt sequence in time, the reward of a clean cinematic replay is pretty fair payment for all that effort.

It helps, of course, that the game looks as good as it does. Stuntman doesn't have the flashy reflections and environment mapping of something like Gran Turismo 3 or Test Drive, but it does have some of the most thoroughly-modeled cars I've ever seen, inside and out. Beneath the windows and body shell, the chassis, drivetrain, engine, and interior (even the rear-view mirror) are all modeled in detail, to the point where you can pick out individual bits like suspension components and carburetors. The first-person view is touched up with textured windscreens and modeled dashboards, too. Combine this with a superior damage physics system and you get the best-looking car crashes in videogames, bar none.

Collisions in Stuntman see bits and pieces flying in every direction according to the dictates of the detailed physics model. Cars can lose practically every essential or nonessential piece, from bumpers and body panels all the way to the engine block, and all those pieces become independent objects in the game world, with which your car and others can interact. Sparks fly when metal scrapes the pavement while engine fires give off light and smoke, and inside the car, the driver and passengers are thrown around realistically. Of course, the physics model impresses with more low-key animations as well -- suspension behavior is tuned for each car and looks excellent.

While Stuntman's lighting effects aren't as in your face as those in some other games, it does include an excellent realtime shadowing system. Every object in the game world casts a proper shadow according to its shape and the direction that light is coming from, which in turn overlaps on other objects appropriately. Car shadows crawl up the curb at the proper angle, and buildings shade cars and pedestrians correctly (aside from a few obvious bugs that are being corrected at present). Another noteworthy effect is the smoke and dust kicked up by the back tires -- it billows up from the rear end in big, random clouds, rather than looking too uniform or seeming to appear from the wrong point.

The game's sound rather sits off in a corner by itself, because much of it isn't in the version shown today. Engine noises aren't final, nor are some voice-overs, the soundtrack is a patchwork of finished and placeholder tunes, and volume levels aren't balanced properly. What is complete sounds promising, though, especially the Indy-style orchestral soundtrack in the Scarab of the Lost Souls scenes. Other levels are to receive similarly appropriate sendup music, like James Bond guitar/electronic themes for the Live Twice level.

The aesthetic downsides? Well, the game has the usual bugs you see in an alpha version, things like seams in the environment, a little interlace flicker on those same lines, glitchy shadows, and so on. One issue that may raise complaints past the game's release, though, is the framerate, which will probably be locked at 30. That seems like a pretty fair trade for the amount of detail in the cars and environments, though. The latter are a particular standout, since while you don't necessarily see as much of them in a single mission as you would in Driver, the same attention to detail has gone into re-creating real-life locations, and the urban sections of levels like Monaco and Bangkok are huge (outdoor sections seem a bit Spartan in comparison, but they're still faithful to their inspiration). As in Driver, it's possible to unlock a Free Ride mission after clearing all the stunts on a film, where you can take any car and just tool around town, seeing what there is to see.

That's only the most basic of the game's unlockable rewards. After each stunt, you receive a grade and a bonus (points are toted up as the cash you're paid for your efforts) based on speed and accuracy. To complete a stunt perfectly, you can't miss any of the individual challenges, which are shown on a bar in the in-game HUD. It's broken up to indicate the relative importance of each task -- if each section is green when you finish the stunt, everything went fine. Time is a factor as well, though. With the timecode running in the lower-left corner of the screen (another of the game's movie-style presentation elements, along with the director calling out stunts as they come up), speed is of the essence to create an exciting sequence.

So what's the reward, once you rack up perfect scores in the Stuntman Career mode? That's where the other half of the game comes in. The Stunt Arena mode shows that this game has ties to both of Reflections' earlier projects -- it has one foot in the movie roots of Driver, and the other in the speedway daredevils that inspired Destruction Derby. Between each movie, an arena stunt challenge appears, set in a stadium full of fans (and even orbited by the Goodyear blimp, or a close cousin). These involve everything from bus jumps and flaming hoops to monster-truck car crushing.

It's possible to finish those interim challenges and be done with the Stunt Arena entirely, but dedicated fans of the game will find that it has much more to offer. Much of what there is to unlock in the career mode is contained in the arena, the hidden parts and cars necessary to build your own stunts. It's like the Tony Hawk create-a-park mode, but freed from the confines of a grid-based system and featuring smashable junk sedans. Ramps, obstacles, and special parts can be placed anywhere in the arena and at any orientation, resulting in a massive variety of potential stunts once the full catalog of stuff is available.

To begin with, there isn't much, just a couple of ramps and a few cars. Later on, it's possible to unlock specimens of daredevil gimmickry like remote-control drone cars, special barrel-roll launch ramps, and explosives designed to flip a car end for end. At today's demo, the Reflections reps showed a basic mid-air crash setup, where the player's car headed toward a twisting launch ramp while a remote-control car took off on a collision course. The timing is a little tricky, since the remote car has to take off at the right time, but the result is an absolute kick, and that's just a very basic concept. Serious fans of the game will no doubt come up with all kinds of madness, and it's possible to save any stunt layout for later use (perhaps when you have more parts and cars to add to it) or sharing with a friend.

to be continued in next post...