In Stunts you are a sports car driver who competes against other drivers on more or less whacky tracks with loops, jumps, concrete obstacles and so on. You have several cars to choose from, all of the cars were state of the art when the game were published, for example the Lancia Integrale 16v, or the Corvette ZX-1. These cars feel a bit old with today measures but it doesn’t really matter.

The player chooses whom to race and there are about ten different drivers, all with different experience and different driving styles. After each race they crack some pretty ridiculous comment about winning or loosing but still these comments are a bit interesting, for about a minute.

You can design your own tracks within the game, and that had to be very advanced for 1990. Let’s be honest, you can’t design your own tracks in the latest Need For Speed without a third party utility. The ability to design your own tracks within Stunts makes it a game which you can play on and on without ever getting bored (ok eventually you probably will).

As usual when running oldies like this you will encounter problem, and as usual we expected the worst with this game. It ran like a charm under Windows XP, we had to move over to Windows 98 to take some screenshots and it ran fine in there too, but remember to allocate memory for the game in Windows 98 before starting otherwise you will get some memory errors during the game.

The driving characteristics in Stunts are actually quite good, and the game is best when the transmission is set to manual. I tested some racing tricks like driving on high rpms to get some extra power and believe it or not it worked. The steering is a bit tricky with the keyboard, especially in the narrow bends were you have no indications whatsoever when the car will slip. Let me tell you that the graphics are not that overwhelming in Stunts, you can get it to run in VGA but if you expect great graphics you will be disappointed. They are simply not great at all.

The sounds in Stunts are not that great either. Especially not with the internal PC-Speaker, but then again what sounds are great with the internal speaker? The music in the menus are quite annoying so I recommend you to turn it off, the in-game sounds are well beeeeeep and on the higher rpms beeeeeeeeeeep. Don’t expect to much from them. An interesting part of the game is the replay feature that allows you to see replays of your laps. Quite entertaining to see and remarkable considering the game is from 1990.

Overall the game is nice, there is so much different cars, drivers and tracks that it will probably keep you occupied for quite a while. The ability to design your own tracks within the game is something that I think game developers today should take a look at.

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