Stunt Race FX (SNES)
Racing games have been trying to believably present 3D gameplay almost since they started being made, and while technical limitations often meant these 2D racers with 3D perspectives inherently had to have simple and colorful looks that robbed from their realism, Stunt Race FX leans into that necessary compromise. Colorful cartoon cars with headlights for eyes race in some impressive simulated 3D for the Super Nintendo that are not just smart about how they are designed around the visual limitations, but occasionally outright playful.
Stunt Race FX’s living cars come in surprisingly few varieties, but this might be a bit to its benefit. The 4WD monster truck, the Coupe, and the F-type are all available from the start with one more vehicle being an unlockable, and besides that unlockable feeling like it’s meant to be an overly effective reward, the other three all can hold their own well in a race. The 4WD has the lowest top speed, but with its high acceleration, it can recover faster on winding courses. The other two default cars can reach higher limits, but they take more time to reach them so they require tighter driving to avoid losing progress, something that can be achieved thanks to the L and R buttons allowing you to tighten your corner taking, but if you try to do it too quickly your car can end up spinning out instead. Smaller cars are easier to bully as well and suffer more damage, and you can have a race prematurely end if you take too much damage. While there are repair orbs to grab, the damage is also represented in a rather cute way. Even minor damage will cause your car’s pieces to explode outward a bit, it needing to reassemble itself before it can get back to the race. The spread of your swirling pieces gives you a good visual to know how long the reset will take and it also gives you a better sense of how bad a collision was than just looking at the damage meter.
Generally though, driving requires a good command of a few different factors. Once you have a feel for how to utilize the shoulder buttons and when to let up on the gas, you can start more smoothly racing through the courses, but there are definitely difficult turns to still test you including ones where you can find yourself hanging off the edge of a suspended road in an exhilarating last second save. Stunt Race FX doesn’t always run the smoothest unfortunately, its efforts to create a polygonal world with the SNES’s Super FX chip sometimes pushed beyond their capacity for spectacle. Usually, there is at least a smart sense for how to accommodate the difficulty in displaying 3D objects on the system. You will see the road ahead pop in at times undoubtedly, but an arrow on the road will warn you of a coming turn so you are ready to take it before you see the wall appear out of thin air that would have punished you for continuing to go forward. There are areas inside tunnels where the entrance is a pure wall of darkness, but it not only lets the game avoid rendering the interior visuals, but once you’re inside there’s a grace period before you need to start considering how to drive. On the other hand, there are moments when you’re racing high in the sky and you dive into some clouds, this causing the game to chug. You basically don’t need to do anything special during these moments besides drive forward, but it’s not exactly an impressive sight when it leads to a hit to the game speed as a result.
A fairly important part of driving on many tracks though is how weighty your vehicle can be. Since you’re just as often racing on mountainsides and farmland as you are through cities and artificial locations like the Aqua Tunnel, the road isn’t always going to be smooth. Whether it’s a necessary jump or a bumpy road, Stunt Race FX asks you to accommodate for how your vehicle will handle uneven terrain or bouncing after a leap, the game even giving you your own jump button to help with airborne control. Managing your speed so it won’t damage you, properly turning to offset the vehicle’s traction being thrown off, and tipping your vehicle while in the air all become important considerations to avoid losing ground in the race, but then you also have a boost to account for. When a race begins you have a meter full of boost and it actually has a great deal of energy meaning you can boost quite a bit. There are pick-ups on the track to refill it some that you’ll almost always want to hit, further influencing how you plan your path through a track, but picking the right time to boost is just as crucial since it isn’t exactly a burst of speed. It helps you ramp up your velocity more quickly, meaning it’s good for recovering after a slip up, but using it at the wrong time can lead to the spin outs or bad jumps you wish to avoid. A car like the 4WD needs to really make good use of boost to beat the others on tracks where their higher top speeds can thrive, a strong understanding of your vehicle’s quirks and the universal systems key to clearing the game’s three tournament modes.
In the Speed Trax mode, there are three tournaments to tackle, each one featuring 4 unique courses to conquer as well as a minigame in the middle. Survival is a fairly important factor in Speed Trax, the player needing to hit checkpoints to refresh a timer or else they’ll lose the race once it hits zero, and these can be spaced quite far apart in the harder courses. You are given some lives to help you retry levels should you fail or place fourth place out of the four participating vehicles, but in an interesting touch, the spare time you have left over from one race carries into the next, giving you some buffer room as the tournament goes on. The minigame actually exists to help you get more time or lives as well, although it plays quite differently from normal races. Taking control of a larger trailer truck, you need to navigate through a specialized courses and hit as many checkpoints as possible to earn more bonus time in the races that matter. However, you can also try to aim to complete a lap instead, this giving you an extra life, so weighing which one to shoot for is an interesting consideration. On the other hand, the trailer truck is a ponderous vehicle, taking wide turns and hard to adjust in small ways, the viewing angle on the course fairly bad at parts when otherwise Stunt Race FX at least manages visibility well enough otherwise. It’s not a minigame with much entertainment value on its own, but it does have some tension as you’re trying to eke out whatever rewards you can to make your tournament runs more likely to succeed.
Free Trax mode allows you to tackle the 12 tracks individually in time trials, but the multiplayer Battle Trax is a bit of a strange case as its races only allows you to access 4 tracks that are brand new albeit often based on ones seen in Speed Trax. This is likely because having two players share the screen required less demanding level visuals to run properly, and while you can also race against a computer player in Battle Trax with a little trick, the multiplayer definitely feels a bit pared down due to the technologically necessary alterations made to how it plays. Stunt Trax though adds a nice extra layer to the experience for after you’ve mastered the three tournaments. Stunt Trax presents four obstacle courses to conquer in your car, there being 40 stars to collect while trying to keep your car on target despite many jumps, slippery ice, and other types of interference. All four of the Stunt Trax challenges are split further into four sections with 10 stars each, this reliable design approach meaning you can gradually figure out the best path through the stars without wondering too much where they might be. The stars are also important as each one grants you some extra time on your timer once you move from one section to another, the time pressure encouraging you to better learn how your vehicle reacts to the obstacles as you pursue that perfect run.
Once Stunt Trax’s four obstacle courses are conquered, you unlock a few new remote controlled challenges despite the game generally being pretty bad at alerting you about your unlocks. These actually involve trying to destroy the other cars in small arenas, much closer to what the name Battle Trax sounded like it promised, but it is pretty poorly designed. The remote control designation is likely to justify a pretty poor camera angle where almost half of the arena can’t really be viewed properly since driving towards the player’s view will lead to rough overhead perspectives. When the goal of these is to smash into other cars, these perspectives mean you can’t even see them, and while the AI vehicles don’t drive too intelligently here and pose no threat, trying to beat your time in this mode feels meaningless when it seems so dependent on odd luck and overcoming the poor camera placement. Perhaps this is some leftover of an attempt to make the idea work, but it’s not a mode with longevity so much as your weird reward for mastering the stunt mode.
THE VERDICT: Stunt Race FX isn’t always an even experience, but a straight road is hardly a thrilling one to take. Its pushes beyond its limits in small ways but still makes sure vital information is provided to the player so they can race properly rather than resent technical limitations. Growing to understand how to control your vehicle well in terms of boost usage and accommodating jumps and bumps makes the regular racing entertaining, and once you’ve conquered its 3 tournaments you can then tackle the Stunt Trax for an equally interesting test of how much control you have over your car. While the multiplayer is lacking, Stunt Race FX still works well as a single-player racer once you start to get a feel for how it handles.
And so, I give Stunt Race FX for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System…
A GOOD rating. Stunt Race FX can muster a good sense of speed despite having literal slowdown thanks to its graphics, but at other times, its much easier to appreciate the sights that are quite impressive on a Super Nintendo. The track design is usually pretty smart about not letting your driving be hampered by visibility problems, greater render distance obviously a way to make things smoother but it knows how to provide information to avoid truly being caught off-guard by the course ahead loading in. What really gives the races their substance though is your ongoing battle to keep your car under control. It’s not so unwieldy that you’ll be frustrated, but when you reach high speeds or hit uneven terrain, you obviously should have to work to keep command of your vehicle, and even if you do mess up and take a heavy hit, the game usually won’t resort to disqualifying you unless it was a catastrophic failure or the latest in a line of slip-ups. You need to not just build up course knowledge on when to boost and where pick-ups are to replenish it but also have that reactive adjustment based on the terrain, and Stunt Trax makes even better use of your car’s weight and suspension with its special trials. Remote control battles are unfortunately a wash, the truck minigame isn’t great on its own, and the multiplayer feels like it didn’t have the room to really provide the same tense races as Speed Trax, but the main races and stunt courses are more than enough to make up for them and provide a meaty experience that will take some time and skill to master.
Reaching beyond what the technology can do at the time can hurt many an old racing game, but Stunt Race FX can still be a fairly clean experience because it protects the most important elements. You will see slowdown, you will struggle with camera angles in certain modes, but when you’re trying to conquer a course or overcome the stunt trials, you will be able to focus on your efforts to move quickly and properly. Rather than an archaic but necessary step as racing games kept trying to push into 3D environments early, Stunt Race FX built itself to be a proper racer while also looking a bit advanced for its time. It certainly isn’t going to be able to measure to something modern or realistic, but it has the solid gameplay at its heart to be worth the effort to master its approach to 3D driving on a primarily 2D system.