FOSSPicks
Driving game
Stunt Car Racer Remake
Geoff Crammond is one of those 1980s bedroom programmers who was able to escape the confines of 8- and 16-bit home computer hardware and forge a hugely successful career in the 100 billion dollar game industry he helped to create. He's best known for the Grand Prix series of racing games that changed our ideas of what a driving simulator could be, thanks to their exacting detail, brilliant 3D performance, and a burgeoning series of real life Formula 1 seasons those games replicated. But what's most amazing about Geoff Crammond was that he was a playability polymath. Long before Grand Prix, he created an incredible first-person puzzle game called The Sentinel. This game holds up even today and is aching for a virtual reality reboot. He also wrote Revs, a 3D racer for 8-bit hardware. But Mr. Crammond also wrote another genre defining title, another driving game called Stunt Car Racer.
What made Stunt Car Racer so incredible was its audacity and addictiveness. Its audacity came from being a first person driving game for 8- and 16-bit computers (the Amiga had the best version), and for dropping the player into a drag-racing car on a track that has more in common with a rollercoaster than a Grand Prix circuit. There are jumps, huge climbs, and even a loop-the-loop. The modern Trackmania doesn't come close. All of this was tied together with a driving mechanism that ached to be played. The more you crashed, or the harder you hit corners, the closer your vehicle got to destruction, and your progress depended on winning each race against an increasingly hostile AI. It was amazing and very difficult to play authentically on modern hardware. Until now, that is: Stunt Car Racer Remake is an utterly faithful remake of a classic you can play on your Linux box, which is what you should do right now.
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