You may or may not recall the PC game Stunts back from the early 90’s. It was a fairly basic driving game, but the fun part was it had a track editor that allowed you to make your own tracks that you could share and race on. I remember being stuck in the back of a suburban on long family vacations, playing Stunts on my father’s borrowed-from-work laptop.
According to the Wikipedia article there still is an active community on the internet on Stunts. They make unofficial patches to keep it working on newer OSes, and have hacked the code to enable putting in new car models. There are also 2 free clones of the game currently being produced.
However, there is a much newer game that I am calling the spiritual successor to Stunts. Like Stunts, it is a free racing game with a track editor. However, it is much newer and very awesome. It’s called Trackmania, and since I started playing it a few weeks ago I have spent far too much time on it. There are several versions available, the free one being Trackmania Nations. As far as I can tell, the only thing that you get by purchasing the paid version is customizable cars and paint jobs. Otherwise it seems to have the exact same functionality.
For solo play the game has several dozen tracks for you to try out. Many of them have to be unlocked though: you have to score certain times on previous tracks to unlock subsequent ones. It seems to be a pretty good system, because by forcing you to improve your times on the previous tracks, it prepares you for the more difficult tracks ahead. And I must say, some of them are unbelievably difficult.
There is a large online presence to the game, and there are many servers across the world that you can connect to and race against others. One interesting thing that the developers have chosen is to make collisions nonexistent: essentially every other car on the track is a ghost: you can see it, but cannot interact with it in any way. Of course the track itself is a different story, and collisions there are all too frequent. At first I thought this system was a little strange, but then I saw the wisdom in it: without collisions, it means that it doesn’t matter what your ping time or lag is. Basically the server uploads the track to everyone connected to it, everyone races at (about) the same time, and then the server compares times at the end to declare the rankings. The only thing a fast connection with the server changes is how often your position is updated on everyone else’s screens. Also due to this lack of direct interaction, cheating is extremely rare, as is trash-talking.
Since the game also has a track editor, you can go here and download literally thousands of fan-made tracks or of course make your own.
Finally, here is an example track in a youtube video:
Ah, Stunts; good times. The new game looks good; it’s a shame I’d have to use a Windows partition to play it however. Any idea if the clones are multi-OS platforms?
Read the wikipedia article I linked to at the beginning of the post. It gives links to both of the clones, and one is open-source and hosted at sourceforge.