If I had been carefully preparing for my 150th edition of What I'm Playing, I would have prepared a special review for this moment for my faithful reader. But alas, I simply followed the stirrings of passion and selected a game in a genre I have been feeling lately, and the result is that the 150th review here is Star Wars Episode 1: Racer, a game about which video game historians largely shrug.
150 games is a big milestone for me. The reason I love this blog isn't because of the traffic that it gets (not much), but because of the memorializing of my dedication, 4 years back, to tackle my backlog and track my opinions of a wide range of video game history. There have been many effects from this. My League of Legends career has taken a nosedive. My skills at a wide range of video game genres, but particularly 2D platformers, have increased tremendously. I know a whole lot more about a ton of games and series that I had never had the time nor inclination to complete before. And I know more accurately how far I still have to go to experience many of the big tentpoles in video game history that I have not yet touched. And while my backlog hasn't actually shrunk (I don't think) due to my ever expanding collection of physical and digital games, I have actually completed a metric ton worth of video games, most of them of good to great quality. According to the tool I use to track this kind of thing, I have now completed 367 video games in my life, so about half of those have been finished in the last 4 years, and that's an under-counting. I took a long break from blogging during a crazy time in my life, even though I was still completing games in that time. I completed and reviewed a bunch of games under different names, like my Pi Reviews. Through it all, I absolutely enjoy video games more than I did when I started, and that's saying something! So I am grateful to this blog for entirely selfish reasons, and hope that someday more readers may find joy in the games that I've highlighted here, or enjoy my writing at least. Anyway, enough reTROspective!
Star Wars Episode 1: Racer is a game that I had when I was a teenager, and I always enjoyed it. But I would always get stonewalled halfway through the second cup, when my podracer simply wasn't good enough to win anymore, and I could no longer win any credits from earlier races. This was still early internet time, for me at least, and I don't think I ever thought to look it strategies for completion. I just took it as a game that was too hard for me, and retired it.
Revisiting it as an adult, however, with the resources of the internet and my increased wisdom, I was finally able to complete the game. The key to understanding the mechanics of the game actually come from the basic theme of the podracer section in the movie on which it is based, and if you just treat the game like it's Gran Turismo, you are bound to fail.
Racer has a lot of good qualities, but the best quality it has is how excellently they translated the film's tone and character into a video game. The film tells a story of a young boy involved in a high stakes and lethal sport, completely out of his league due to his biology but given an edge by a mystical force beyond his control. This sport is one in which the vehicles driven are constructed flimsily out of desperation and cast-off parts. It's a battle in which there is no affluence, and so your guts and mechanical jury rigging ability matter far more than skill or finesse.
Racer creates a unique upgrading environment in that there are a lot of parts available, but only a limited amount of money you can earn. Each race will pay off once, and one time only. You can't just grind the same races over and over again to get more money. What's more, the parts you purchase will become damaged over time, so if you upgrade too many parts too quickly, you'll wind up with a rotting podracer around you, depreciating in quality over time without any money with which to upgrade. The key to playing the game is, thus, to understand that it takes place in a universe of scarcity, and to act appropriately.
The basic way this is done is by buying used, damaged parts, and sticking entirely to parts within a few classifications. You can buy droids that will repair your ship, but you can only have four of them. As such, the wisest thing to do would be to select four categories to upgrade on your ship, have the droids constantly maintain those, and realize that your racer will just suck at everything else. It's better than having it suck at everything, after all, and that's the reality you'll face if you try to build a pod that's fully upgraded in every area.
The downside to all of this is that without the internet, I don't think I ever would have figured this out. Maybe it's in the manual. I don't know. But the game gives you very little inclination of what anything does in the game, and it's impossible to assign your pit droids to particular parts or to even have any idea what pit droids do. Discovering this magical strategy took research on my part, and that's never fun.
Even with this strategy, it's still brutally difficult to control these stinking podracers. I know that's part of the messaging of the film, but it feels too difficult. I had maxed out steering with the character with the highest steering, and I was still smash into walls on the most tame of turns, necessitating my coming to a complete stop to navigate turns. In the end, I compromised by just slowing down by laying of the gas, and rubbing my way along the outside of the turns until my craft was finally too damaged to continue, at which point I'd smash the thing and get a fresh one. They created a mechanism by which you can repair damaged parts during a race, but it slows you down like crazy, and my experience was that it was better to maintain high speed until you smash rather than slowing down constantly to fix all of the damage. Your ability to get your top speed WAY higher than any other racer also encourages this strategy, as it's really easy to catch up on a straightaway, even if you crashed too many times and have fallen behind a few places.
The selection of tracks is pretty disappointing. There are a lot of retreads with sections that are different from their previous incarnation, much like a game like F-Zero. But I think they could have done a lot better than they did.
The music is generally good, with excerpts from the film. You can't complain about John Williams, even if it is a little emotionally manipulative and repetitive at times.
Graphically, the game looks nice, even today. They did a great job of translating the high speed action of podracing to the N64, and there's no slowdown to speak of. You'll get to explore plenty of other planets as well, and each has its own unique look and feel to it. There are some textures that look cheap and super polygonal, particularly the plants, but compared to its peers this is a fine graphical effort.
With a little better communication of core mechanics in game, this game had a chance to be really excellent. But the ludicrous incentives of the game cause it to be less fun than a racer that rewards skill and punishes high speed insanity, and this one definitely encourages the latter. It's good, solid fun with some really creative ideas behind it. But a few flaws keep it from becoming an excellent game, and instead, it's just another N64 racing game. I'll give it a 7.8/10.
Up next on What I'm Playing is yet another Batman game. I have a problem.
-TRO
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