Star Wars Episode I Racer: A Review

The Star Wars Episode I Racer game is another one that I've spend countless hours on, it's one of the best racer games from its era, and it's based off of that relatively short sequence in the SW: Phantom Menace movie, where Anakin takes his pod against some aliens, amongst the canyons of Tatooine. It features a lot of references that will make the fans of the movie happy, and an excellent gameplay to top that off. 


The Tracks: The game naturally starts with a race on Tattoine, that closely resembles the areas seen in the movie, the home stretch with the spectator's seats, the caves with stalactites that you have to dodge around. From then on every race is pretty much set on a different planet. There's the Cloud City, some mining colonies, a whole plethora of alien worlds, with their unique look and feel.

The Pods: In total there's over a couple dozen playable characters in the game, all with their unique pods. Before each race you'll choose your reward scheme. That is, because in the movie the money gathered in the races is based off of gambling, before the race you can choose whether the 1st place gets all the money, or weather its redistributed between the first four places. If you finish first as an added bonus you'll win a pod racer, I believe it's the home-planet's pod racer, but either way it's a different one with each race. On top of that there's upgrades for your pod, that play on that flying pint-sized alien guy's repair shop from the movie. After each race you'll have an option to either upgrade your pod, repair some old parts, or replace them entirely. There's a good list of twenty or so parts that can be swapped around, and each time you make a change you can see your pod's statistics like boost/acceleration/traction/cooling before and after, so it's easier to choose the right upgrade for your money. In that manner, sometimes it might be beneficial to swap a better piece of gear that's been broken up for an inferior one, but of a better condition.

The Gameplay: Star Wars: Episode I: Racer handles pretty much like any other racing game if you took it and supercharged every vehicle. The speeds achievable through the pods are unlike anything else you might have seen with possible exception of the Wipeout series. The controls are exciting with two sets of steering, one that forces your pod to turn left or right, and one that forces it to pivot around its mid-section length-wise, to help with the steepest corners. Also if you use the second set, when facing a crash you'll sustain much less damage, than if you simply slam your left or right engine against a wall. The boost is activated with the Shift button on the PC, as soon as you reach a certain speed, and it temporarily speeds you up to almost double, but in this mode your engines quickly heat up and if you don't let go of the throttle, before the counter reaches a maximum, they'll explode and set you back a good few seconds before you're back on the track. Keep in mind, though that it takes time for them to cool down again, and some parts of the game require you to boost up to clear a jump. All of this together makes for a unique and exciting racing experience, with tight twists and turns, that require your attention at all times.

All taken into consideration SW: Racer is an excellent game, it's fun, exciting, the racing never gets old, and even though I myself had made a habit to clear the whole game with just Anakin's yellow and blue pod for the first half (because of it's light and maneuverable body that makes it easier to handle at top speeds) and another one that I've forgotten the name of, you can have countless hours of fun trying out different pods. The Star Wars references in-game are a nice touch, other racers will yell at you in their alien languages, if you overtake or crash into them, and Anakin will scream 'It's Working! It's Working!' every time that you repair your pod mid-race after a crash. All of this makes it  a wonderful game for both the fans of the series and anyone who enjoys racing games, alike.  

Carmageddon 2: Not Another Racing Game

It's one of my favourite game of the 90s, a game I've spent the better part of my childhood playing. It's Carmageddon 2 and it's not your average racing game. It's bloody, gory, and overall it's tons of fun. It was so controversial at the time it had been banned in some cases.

The game revolves around racing through checkpoints in different open locations - a quarry, several towns, a junkyard, even an aircraft carrier. The levels are varied with lots of hidden secret places. Power-ups make up a large part of the game, some will give you speed, some will make you bounce off the walls like pinball, and some are plain sadistic. But you'll see what I mean.

The twist in this game is you can either win a race by completing all the check-points in a timely manner (you start with a time limit of a minute and a half and each time you pass a checkpoint you get some more time), or you can win by wrecking all of your opponents, which also gives you extra time. Additionally you get a few seconds added for each pedestrian you kill, and this game has thought of ways to slaughter pedestrians beyond anything you could have ever expected. Take this for example. You're cruising around, running over people, which is nice but generally inefficient, then you pick up a power-up that makes pedestrians explode into gory bits as soon as they touch your car. Then you pick up another one, which makes bolts of lightning shoot out of your car whenever a person is near, electrocuting them in an instant. So now you can simply drive at full speed around the streets and watch your points add up as you kill hundreds of people per minute. See why this game got banned? It gets better!

Beyond ways to grief the unfortunate people on the streets, there's ways to destroy your opponents in similarly amusing ways. Naturally you can blind-side another car at full speed smash it into the edge of a building, splitting it in two and sending the two flaming pieces flying apart in opposite directions. But what if before you did that you hit the Pinball power-up. With that one as soon as you touch something you'll bounce off of it increasing your momentum with each bounce and the same goes for your opponents. There's nothing more satisfying than watching them smash through the air into buildings into the obligatory land-mines and barrels of explosives (even the water-areas of this game are riddled with mines).

The best part of Carmageddon is the imaginative levels, though, with each three standard levels of racing around and murdering the other drivers, you get one special one, where you have to either complete a timed race, or you have to do some platform jumps around the city or you have to kill some zombies. In order to avoid any more bans than it already has whenever the game actually requires you to kill people to progress it  calls them zombies, messes up their walking animations, and turns their blood green. So who would have thought that you were actually the good guy?

Lastly there's tons of cars in the game, all with a wacky design, and a couple dozen levels, enough to keep you occupied for weeks. And even if all you do is race around the first three over and over you'll find tons of stuff to do every time. To illustrate that when I got the game, I wasn't even aware there are more than three levels, I didn't know that you have to complete the timed event to unlock the next set. So I spent weeks just collecting points in the first three, and when I finally found out, it was like my birthday all over again. I'd already gathered enough points to buy all the cars in-game and max out all my stats. Oh yeah, you can buy the other opponents cars if you'd killed them during the race. And you can upgrade stats like armour, speed etc. But honestly who needs that in a game that's already almost as fun as any game could ever be.

Several other titles came out of the Carmageddon franchise, although the second one remains my all time favourite. The other ones didn't get it quite right in my opinion.