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STUN RUNNER


Stun Runner 87

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The best way to play SR at home is either on the Lynx or on the emulated XBox / PS2 Midway's Arcade Treasures 3 (although the control is a bit ropey).

From the available 3D games (ranging from very good to very terrible) I suspect the Jag *could* have been able to do a reasonable facsimile of the arcade version, polygons and all. Maybe at a slightly lower res. IS2 and Battlemorph are miles ahead of the early 3D flat/gouraud polygonal games, so why not? *opens can of worms* ;)

 

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  • 1 year later...

Forgive the thread bump, but until recently i had no idea Ed Rotberg and other Atari coin op engineers felt so strongly over the home versions of games like Stun Runner, Xybots, Toobin etc Domark were putting out.

 

Ed was apparently going to raise the issue with Tengen, as they had the say on who the home conversion rights went to.

 

What he must of made of the version on Midway Arcade Treasures 3, i dread to think.

 

 

 

I know Ed sold a prototype version of the Stun Runner coin op on Ebay some years ago, but not sure what differences there were to the standard game.

 

He's also talked of the game originally being played in the 1st person viewpoint, but play testers would get disorientated/feel sick...

 

They also experimented with various control schemes, including a slide left to right control, but that killed playability, they also tried 'reverse'controls and a Gas Pedal type controller...

 

So much went into this game, bar the Lynx version which he liked, the others were dire.

 

Crying shame.

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From what little i know of Tunnel Hunt..Owen tried again and again whilst at Atari to turn the game into the game he wanted it to be, but it never quite came together.

 

 

 

Years later it inspired Stun Runner so things came good in the end :).

 

 

Re:The Tie Fighters, from the interview with Owen at Atari museum. Com

 

 

How did the concept of Tunnel Hunt evolve?

 

Tunnel Hunt was actually my first vector game, although it did not end up as a vector game. I really liked the opening sequence of the movie Alien (the part where they landed) and thought it might be fun. Using the vector system from Asteroids and some software from Night Driver, I created a early version where you could fly down tunnels. But because the system did not do hidden line removal, the tunnels could not move much, It just did not work. A hardware engineer at Atari came up with an expensive hardware that drew ellipses. I re-wrote the game to use that. It looked great. Multiple tunnels with splits and rotates. But it was too expensive. Then the hardware was changed to circles, but still too expensive. Then it was changed to rectangles. That was what finally shipped. But marketing felt just flying was not fun enough, so we added Star Wars like objects that flew down the tube at you and you had to shoot them. It was a good game, but they kept wanting changes. It did a solid #2 and #3 for 12 weeks in tests, but Atari could not decide to ship it.

Edited by Lost Dragon
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What he must of made of the version on Midway Arcade Treasures 3, i dread to think.

 

Ill admit that I havent played this version in years, but I have it on the Xbox. What were the problems with it? I was reasonably impressed with the fact that it was obviously miles better than the ST and PC ports. I think the controls were challenging, but I remember the framrate being good.

 

Im tempted to bust out the old Xbox and have a go at it over the weekend but I probably wont have time in the immediate future.

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Definitely! One of the best games for the Jaguar IMO. Just needs a save function to mark that you have beaten level 9 so it can move on! I cannot seem to get past BBQ to enjoy the other levels :( The time limit of 1:15 is too hard to beat! Do you have a patched one that can go further without needing to beat that time?

 

Can't wait for the SainT cart so I can check Tube out.

Skunkboard that beast! Or burn the CD and try it if you have a Jag CD

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  • 6 months later...

Many thanks to Digital Eclipse for taking time to clear up above claim etc:

 

'Digital Eclipse didn't do any work towards bringing STUN Runner to the PS1. The platform was known not to be powerful enough to emulate it and no source was available for porting. Even getting it emulated on a PS2 was a challenge.'

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  • 1 month later...

 

I think with arcade sounds that would improve that a lot.

 

I was looking at the Lynx version and was thinking the Jag's blitter can pull off what the Lynx did with the sprites... It'd be cool to maybe create a sprite and 3D based version of the game to get a close proximity of the arcade version.

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

I have this one on the Lynx and beat it on the tiny screen a year ago. I just played it on my Modded XBOX on the MAME arcade version on the big screen TV in all its glory. I beat it as well. It's a fun game for sure! I'd say it is my favorite Lynx game by far.

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Arcade sounds with Jaguar speed up trick? Sometimes helps.

 

(Goes back to playing Tube on the Jaguar)

 

Considering that video is of the game running on a MegaSTE, I don't think the standard Jag port method as done by CJ would result in much improvement. It would be better to have the game rewritten with the engine running off the GPU instead of the 68000.

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Considering I don't like the game anyway (and never have) and also that the ST version is a really shitty port of a game I really don't like, I don't think you'll have to worry about a port icon_wink.gif

 

Way to crush everyone's hopes!

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Yea... The ST version is very lack luster. Atari really should've pushed a little harder for that game on their computer even if they had to do a cartridge version with extra hardware; it would've been totally worth it, but this was during a time when the arcade version was always better than the home version. Just another product of the 80s I suppose. Of course I'm very bias about "StunRunner" arcade version; that game incredible at the arcade in the 90s... I wanted to take the machine home after playing the game; felt very futurist TRON like for its time. That game is probably the result of early works they did on "The Last Starfighter" and "Air Race" back in 84 or 83 (I could be wrong). A lot of fun looking back on stuff like that.

 

 

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