 There's about a gazillion action platformers on the NES, but every so often you'll run into a game doing something that ambitiously combines genres like Guardian Legend or Vice Project Doom. Ultimate Stuntman is a majorly ambitious game, and dear god, what in the hell is that cover? Well, Angry Video Game Nerd already tore that apart better than I ever could. I'll just point out that this is one of those bait-and-switch games where you got some Dolph Lundgren, Brian Bosworth looking dude on the cover, and then you play the game, and who is this? I mean, this looks closer to Paul O'Neill, or even Paul Sorrento, or various other Pauls who played in Major League Baseball in the 90s. The goofiness doesn't end with the cover, this is a Camarica game, which means it's unlicensed. You know, one of those gold cartridges with a switch on the back to get around Nintendo's lockout system. It gets weirder from there, the story takes place in the distant year of 1997. Huh, I wonder if this is the same distant post-apocalyptic future as Chris Dallas. The Evil Doctor Evil has kidnapped a young scientist named Jenny Ackroyd, and I guess we gotta stop him from kidnapping other people who may or may not be related to the rest of the cast of Ghostbusters. The big gimmick with Ultimate Stuntman is that each level is a different gameplay mode. Level 1 is a top-down spy hunter-style thing, then it's a side-scrolling run-and-gun where you collect keys, then you're climbing a wall set to a time limit where you have a helper dude on the roof of the building next to you, apparently? I don't know, but there's a crosshair you can activate by holding down B or A to flip from climbing to shooting and aiming. Next there's this, it's just a puzzle where the number on the tile indicates how many times you can trace over it. Then we got more top-down shooting, only this time in what looks like a hang glider, then it switches to a horizontal shoot-em-up, then more climbing, then a boss fight, then you're on a boat, then a boss fight while you're in that boat, and yeah, you get the idea at this point. You get 3 lives and Unlimited continues to get through 8 levels with 3 stages each followed by a boss fight with no saves or passwords, and when you use a continue, you start at the beginning of the level no matter what stage you're on, and, well, some of this game works and some of it doesn't. The top-down shooter levels are actually pretty fun, they're simple enough and move along really fast and don't overstay their welcome. At least the first one does anyway, the problems really show up when you, uh, get to the rest of the game. It's rare when I come across a game that seems to get worse as it goes along, but Ultimate Stuntman pulls it off. The run and gun levels are as painfully generic as it gets. I mean, look at this friggin' enemy design. What are these mannequins? Drawing figures from high school art class? The climbing levels are at least kinda interesting, but get pretty boring after a bit, and the horizontal shooting levels seriously come across like someone whipped this together in like 2 hours. The puzzles are painful to get through, and again, not really unique to the game or anything, you're supposedly soldering to defuse a bomb, but the puzzle itself is just boring as hell. What was their second choice for a puzzle to shoehorn into this, a junior jumble? Then you get this boat level that doesn't even make any sense. What, I go under here? I go through here? And just to make sure there's some consistency in this game, it's also difficult to tell where the heck you're going in the side-scrolling level that comes after. Do you love blind jumps? Because here are some blind jumps. Well, at least if you manage to complete a level, you get a totally far-out graphic. For some reason, this reminds me of the dead soon text from Metamorphic Force. So yeah, as much as I admire when a game really goes all out and tries to do five games at once, Ultimate Stuntman just doesn't work. It's a classic case of being an awesome idea on paper, but it's extremely lacking in execution. Rather than feeling something like a cohesive game, like Vice Project Doom, instead it feels like a whole bunch of generic crap squeezed together like Action 52. You know the saying, more than the sum of its parts, Ultimate Stuntman, unfortunately somehow, ends up being less than the sum. It is not worth playing today. All right, I wanna thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.