My Abandonware is one of my favorite sites, and some of my favorite people ever are those who fix up old games just to make them playable on modern operating systems for those wishing to experience their childhood again. They didn't need to do that, but they did and I'm forever grateful for that, because I sure as hell wouldn't have been able to pull that off with my preschool level programming skill.
Imagine you were a kid and for some reason Mattel shipped you five hundred Hot Wheels playsets leaving them all on your front yard one morning, that's essentially the plot of this game. How did this happen? Are you a kid who got the house to themselves while stealing their parent's credit card number? Is it a power fantasy being daydreamed in your little mind as you're tortured at school from sitting through math class? I can relate, I'd slap at least ten members of US Congress for all those playsets in addition to just doing that for free.
Stunt Track Driver is essentially just an FMV time trial racer, there's a championship mode, but your only opponent is the time limit counting down that threatens you with a good ol' Famicom-esque punishment of sending you back to the first track if you dare to let it hit zero, and slow you to a crawl as your little wee diecast car suddenly runs out of Hot Wheels brand fuel. The Attic stage was, and still is my worst nightmare. Little corner turns with hops in them to make you inexplicably tumble offscreen as a wav file of someone kicking a dodgeball through a Lego set plays, then you got the damn cat making you have to correct yourself mid-air after it sends your car flipping upwards from gingerly pawing around in the mouse hole. All with the tiniest shred of time available to you, because fuck you we only have six (seven, one's hidden in the damn Mattel logo) stages, aside from the track editor where you can connect five Volcano Blowout sets in a row in your garage.
Who the fuck keeps a suit of armor with an axe in their attic? Who you duelin' at midnight grandpa?
Stunt Track Driver is wonky due to it's dastardly FMV nature, it has no opponents to race, a mysterious force of nature could suddenly take you out as you're navigating a hard corner, and it might take an hour tops to see everything it has to offer. What's with this game? I'll tell ya what's with it. It's a heartwarming return from a 20+ year absence from my heart, that's what it is. To be a wee little diecast car racing around playsets in a random suburban house with no viewable humans, that's what it means to be a kid again.
Unspeakable levels of pleasant feelings I have for this silly kids game about kids toys, I love it so.
Imagine you were a kid and for some reason Mattel shipped you five hundred Hot Wheels playsets leaving them all on your front yard one morning, that's essentially the plot of this game. How did this happen? Are you a kid who got the house to themselves while stealing their parent's credit card number? Is it a power fantasy being daydreamed in your little mind as you're tortured at school from sitting through math class? I can relate, I'd slap at least ten members of US Congress for all those playsets in addition to just doing that for free.
Stunt Track Driver is essentially just an FMV time trial racer, there's a championship mode, but your only opponent is the time limit counting down that threatens you with a good ol' Famicom-esque punishment of sending you back to the first track if you dare to let it hit zero, and slow you to a crawl as your little wee diecast car suddenly runs out of Hot Wheels brand fuel. The Attic stage was, and still is my worst nightmare. Little corner turns with hops in them to make you inexplicably tumble offscreen as a wav file of someone kicking a dodgeball through a Lego set plays, then you got the damn cat making you have to correct yourself mid-air after it sends your car flipping upwards from gingerly pawing around in the mouse hole. All with the tiniest shred of time available to you, because fuck you we only have six (seven, one's hidden in the damn Mattel logo) stages, aside from the track editor where you can connect five Volcano Blowout sets in a row in your garage.
Who the fuck keeps a suit of armor with an axe in their attic? Who you duelin' at midnight grandpa?
Stunt Track Driver is wonky due to it's dastardly FMV nature, it has no opponents to race, a mysterious force of nature could suddenly take you out as you're navigating a hard corner, and it might take an hour tops to see everything it has to offer. What's with this game? I'll tell ya what's with it. It's a heartwarming return from a 20+ year absence from my heart, that's what it is. To be a wee little diecast car racing around playsets in a random suburban house with no viewable humans, that's what it means to be a kid again.
Unspeakable levels of pleasant feelings I have for this silly kids game about kids toys, I love it so.
Reviewed on Feb 11, 2023
3 Comments
That flytrap spooked me so bad when I first beat the greenhouse lol, I think I might have the Sega CD version of MegaRace on my Everdrive Pro, thinkin' about tryin' that one eventually now.
MyAbandonware rocks, that and Internet Archive are prime go-tos for getting ~90s-late 2000s PC titles (though lately I've been leaning on IA cause I can use JDownloader2 to speed up the DL speed there)
PasokonDeacon
1 year ago