IGNPS2
Gamers\' Day Impressions
Reflections founder Martin Edmundson showed off his new PlayStation 2 game Stuntman today at Infogrames\' Gamers\' Day, emphasizing the sturdy new PS2 engines technical capabilities, the movie-like play structure, and a wide array of devastatingly powerful stunt vehicles.
In Stuntman, Reflections\' puts gamers in the role of a newbie stuntman in Hollywood, who builds up his career through performing harrowing stunts with precision and skill. Players can become a part of six different movies, each in a new location in the world. Stuntman is built upon a totally new 3D engine and features totally different graphics and technical abilities than Driver 1 and Driver 2, but for those who have played those games, the driving controls are exactly the same. For example, the handbrake and burnout abilities from the Driver games are available in these cars.
There are a few modes in the game, but the Career mode delivers the biggest, fattest set of thrills. Players get the chance to handle \'70s style cars that are easy to spin out and perform doughnuts with, and theyre entirely deformable. Unlike in Driver, where lots of little triangles flew off your car when it smashed into a wall, whole segments of the car break off in Stuntman, and then become part of the environment. For instance, if the car pulls off a barrel roll, but lands on its side, the side panels bend, but might also break off entirely. Once back on all four wheels again, players can then roll over those panels and the car shocks will react to those broken off pieces, which has never been done before in a videogame.
Visually, the game is worlds above the clunky, low framerate chugging Driver 2, and looks great on its own as a standalone PlayStation 2 racer. After seeing the deformable cars and the level of detail used to construct them, we were able to witness various vehicles, including the rickshaw shown in the early shots, a World War II-looking jeep, a car that looked very much like a 1970s\' and 1980s\' Capri, as well as a snow-level based snowmobile. Players have access to motorcycles and sidecars, as well as an Aston-Martin-style James Bond car. None of the vehicles are licensed but their likenesses were obvious.
Another excellent aspect to the game visual appeal is its shadowing. Cars cast realistic shadowing on flat surfaces, which is a natural, but they also cast fully realistic shadows on every single other object in the environment, in realtime, with alterations to the shadow depending on its shape and size. For instance, when the late afternoon sun shines down on a desert level environment, the jeep casts a shadow, and as its driven it may come across a column, or in this particular case, a bush. The fully polygonal bush showed the light filling in every single nook and cranny, as the shadow passed over it.
The gameplay, of course, is very much like driver, but split up into precise stunts that are set up by the director of the movie. In the career mode, players must get hired and do as the director says, and is rated on his performance, with a meter. By achieving 75% or better in all of the challenges, players can finish the movie project and then move on to work on another film. Reflections set up a brilliant set of movie trailers that the players can watch based on the movie they just finished. The movies are fantasy films of course, but one, starring Dakota Scott in the Scarab of the Lost Souls caught this journalists attention.
Stuntman is still early in development, and is due in May-June 2002. Make sure to return for media next week.
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