This is Stunt Car Racer, the first racing game I ever obsessed about. There were others that interested me, Pitstop II and Buggy Boy among them but I really loved Stunt Car Racer. So much so, that when I got a C64 emulator working on a Nokia 7650, this game was the first and only game I put on it! (And eventually wore down the joystick nipple on it from so much playing!)
I’d dabbled with other racers over the last few years, first with NFS Underground (quite enjoyed), Dirt 2 (meh, got boring), then Blur (ARGH!), and finally to NFS Hot Pursuit (barely played). Not a good track record eh? What possessed me to buy Trackmania United Forever? Well, it was 75% off but then this tweet convinced me!
https://twitter.com/#!/retroremakes/status/73470101822779392
What can I say? It is as close as you’ll get to Stunt Car Racer in a modern racing game. That’s not surprising as the developer was a fan of Stunt Car when he was all of 12 years old!
It looks great, and beyond the “time attack” racing mode it also offers other more unusual modes. I love the platform mode in particular.
As a modern game it of course does online play, and that can be a mixed bag. I’ve only played a few servers and the borders of the screen can at times be littered with a huge amount of difficult to read information. There’s a web browser of sorts too where you can check out the mods, skins and maps other players have made. They’ll cost you though. Those “online stores” really let the game down. The ones I saw were garish and ugly and very slow to load. Often most of the page would load but important action buttons didn’t. AFAIR there’s no “loading bar” to tell you something is happening either.
The game has a currency, “coppers” which I’m still learning about. Here’s a great article about them. Not sure I like how you have to bet on getting an official time on a track.
This isn’t what a normal game of Trackmania looks like. This is what happens when you render 1,000 races all at once!
Next September the next installment in the Trackmania series will be released: Trackmania 2 Canyon. The developer is also going to be branching out, Shootmania is a version for FPS players. I can’t wait to see what that brings! Joystiq has a preview of it, and the latest issue of Edge also has an extensive article on the game which I’ll be reading later.
Want a new car? Check out Trackmania Carpark. Kinda disappointed nobody created an Alfa Romeo 147. I wonder how hard that’d be?
Finally, don’t forget the Steam forum for the game. Plenty of help there if you need it.
It’s gone back to full price now, $39.99 in the US and probably the same numeric price everywhere else (grrr) but there’s plenty of fun to be had in this game. Recommended.
TrackMania Nations Forever is free on Steam. I downloaded it but got bored of it quickly. To me it was mostly a “do this a 100 times until you memorize the track and can do it fast enough to win”.
With that said, I’m a big fan of watching press forward videos where the track itself is the star (there’s no steering, you just press the forward key). This is one of the favorites:
Nice video! That’s description of the time attack is true, but going for gold on some tracks is really hard. Every single little nudge and turn has to be perfect! You could say the same about all racers and other genres of games too I suppose. You have to know the maps well to do well.
Anyway, through that video above I discovered tm exchange where there are lots and lots of tracks! 🙂
I’m quite surprised and disappointed that I could only find 2 Stunt Car Racer tracks, here and here. I haven’t tried them yet but I must give the track editor a go sometime…
And here’s the Steam page for TrackMania Nations Forever!
The Canyon Announcement vid reminded me of those orange flexible snap-in Hot Wheels tracks that I used to play with as a kid. That was some good ol’ fun and a little lesson in physics, as well. Ahh, memories… 🙂
You should go grab TrackManian Nations that I linked to in a previous comment. It’s free and it has lots of tracks 🙂
Actually, I’m not even sure what the difference between the United and Nations versions are. I think the paid-for version has more tracks and cars and possibly better graphics but you can download lots of tracks and cars too! 🙂
And Giant Bomb have a long look at video of this game.