RETRO REBOOT | Jackie Chan Stuntmaster (PlayStation)

By the late 90's, Jackie Chan has become a legend among American action film fans. Yeah, the box office returns on his movies were diminishing over time and the stories were paint-by-numbers, but his self-performed stunts remain daunting, fearless, and impressive. Especially in an age where action sequences are mostly heavily green-screened in all this superhero stuff, but I digress.

Jackie Chan Stuntmaster was produced by Radical Entertainment (who once had a robust staff, before being completely gutted, following the Microsoft purchase of Activision) and released in 2000. May be a broken record with how many times I've mentioned it, but action brawlers were fairly passe during this period. A name like Jackie Chan could inject new life into the genre, especially as the martial arts star would be motion capturing the action to give it as authentic a feel of a Chan movie as you could can get.

Not that it's very difficult to replicate the feel of a Jackie Chan movie; he's either an agent or visiting his uncle, and then runs afoul with a vaguely European crime syndicate. People seldom will dissect these plots for nuance, as long as Jackie spins around on an office chair, leaps across rooftops, or dodge heavy industrial equipment, that's all the viewing audience needs. Legit, this is the plot of Stuntmaster!! Chan was already a trope by this point, Radical Entertainment merely hit the template for the script, and put 98.99% of the effort into the game.

Jackie Chan Stuntmaster is mostly played as a side-scrolling beat'em up, and in that regard, there isn't too much to say; you merely proceed forward and take out waves of doppleganger thugs. It's a formula that works, but for video games around this time, fans were definitely looking for something a little more robust. That certainly wasn't provided by Square Enix's The Bouncer, which would be released in the United States about a year later, and while CORE Design's Fighting Force has a charm to it, it also showed there was a long way to go for brawlers to ingratiate themselves on the home market. When the mechanic doesn't involve popping quarters into a machine, what's the reason to keep playing?

Aspects of the combat are a little unique. Chan's counter-based fighting that makes the movies a delight is replicated in earnest, triggering a lot of his attacks through blocking and timing. Combat is juggled through throwing enemies into each other and smashing them through boxes. You can also pick up weapons like frozen sturgeon and life preservers, which is amusing. It can get tedious, as thugs can be quite spongey. While the motion capturing looks great and some of the animations are pretty fluid, the overly blocky visuals are a little dated and bland. Bad guys are crude blobs that resemble humans into loosest sense. Jackie himself is a merely clad in a white T-shirt and jeans, so he's fallen right out of Rumble in the Bronx or Mr. Nice Guy.

The stages don't really offer much. Jackie runs across one of the most desolate, drab incarnations of downtown New York. Credit where it's due, it's all fully 3D rendered. The PlayStation 2 and the Dreamcast were out by this time, so the limitations of what's visually impressive on Sony's very aged grey box was pretty bleak. I don't recall seeing much slowdown or lagging, there just isn't too much to take in, when it comes to talking graphics. There's points where the camera tries its best to kill you during the quick-time event minigames. It can feel like there's little depth perception when gauging my jumps, this led to a lot of cheap depths.

As mentioned, Stuntmaster's gameplay gets a little repetitive. The combos are kinda fun, this was a game that took advantage of the Dualshock technology by holding down attack buttons for heavier strikes. Jackie can jump off walls, flip tables and chairs, etc., and even though there isn't a dedicated lock-on system, enemy tracking is fine. Maybe the animations can be a touch indulgent, and you'll find yourself kicking and punching in a direction where there's nothing.

Outside of Chan-centric chop-socky, the aforementioned timing-based tests of agility and platform jumping break up the monotony. There's also a lot of collectables that unlock secret content, i.e. the red dragon heads. The thin enemy types and repetitive level design makes what should be an hour long experience and stretches it out for double that length. Even the comedy quips from jackie himself start to end up in a short loop and gets grating after a while. Granted, the audio is great. Background music may not stand out that much, but the landing punches and kicks sound crisp and satisfying.

Jackie Chan Stuntmaster does break the mold, as it was the first console video game for the movie star. The attention to detail with the motion capture is well done, and the aforementioned sound effects are evocative. The story is far from important, and probably one of the reasons this game feels like it lasts forever, as once the thrill of the combat wears, there's little to latch onto.

I wonder if this is a game that would have been better served being on the PS2. It may have helped reach a wider audience, as opposed to launching on a console that was getting rapidly pushed into sundowning. Maybe there's some charm with the cartoony visuals, which does cater to Jackie Chan's style of humor. Overall, Jackie Chan Stuntmaster may be a fascinating venture to toy around with for about a half hour. But you can have considerably more fun either just watching a Jackie Chan movie, or firing up your Sega Genesis and playing Streets of Rage 2.