Episode 181 - It's Jar Jarring - Star Wars Episode 1 Racer

NOCLIP

Do goola podcast sa bantha poodoo. Welcome back to the podcast! As we near the end of the year, we like to look back on a game or two that are more nostalgic for us, and Racer somehow got overlooked until now. Racer is maybe the first of our nostalgia picks that really holds up, at least in our opinion. This is a very straightforward video game, all the things considered, but the focus makes for a surprisingly solid racing experience. True to the movie, podracing in the game is extremely fast and almost 100% guaranteed to end with a lethal explosion. The tracks lose a bit of their focus as the game goes on, but the core mechanics are skill testing in an enjoyable way and the game is short enough that you can get to the point where you’re playing it to improve very quickly. It’s very mechanics first, but it being Lucasarts, due is paid to making sure that the world, characters and sound design fits with the movies. The presentation suffers in some ways, but the worlds of the game are well realized for the time and also Watto is there, which is great. We’re going to talk about the feeling of playing the game for the first time and once you get used to it, the mechanics we did and did not remember using as children, and we spend a decent amount of time just complaining about the prequel trilogy. Thank you for joining us again this week! This is a great palette cleansing game after what has a been a heady year and one that I was really surprised by. I’ve come to expect the games we liked as kids to pretty much always be worse than you remembered, so for this to hold up as well as it does was pleasant, at worst. If you haven’t played this game in a while, or god forbid, not at all, it’s surprisingly accessible with a recent remaster and the original PC version on Steam, so maybe give it a look. Post your fond recollections of the N64 in the comments or over on our Discord. Next time, we’re going to be talking about Slay the Princess, so we hope you’ll join us for that.