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.  

Star Wars: Jedi Knight: Jedi Outcast

So what happens if you cross Quake 2 with Blade of Darkness in a Star Wars setting. Something that I've played over more than a dozen times in the last ten years. Jedi Outcast is another one of my favourite games, it's expansive, it's fun and it's challenging enough. More than that it has an awesome multi player. 

The game starts at an Imperial outpost, where some mining works are being monitored. You're a Jedi, or at least you used to be one, but you've lost your will to use the force, at some point and abandoned the ways. So the game starts with just you and your partner from a first person perspective, as any normal FPS. Later on you'll be forced to return to the light-saber swinging, but for now enjoy the first few levels - roughly 3-4 hours of game-play as your average FPS. 

The story revolves around the stormtroopers mining some crystals that are used to give the force to ordinary people and turn them into weak-sauce Jedis with barely any training at all, but still there's supposed to be thousands of them by now. So the first levels are at the mine, trying to stop its crystal production, and the latter ones are more towards looking for who's responsible for the whole mess. 

The weapons in the game are a standard mixture of blasters, some grenades, a rocket launcher, a crossbow. The initial blaster that you get has infinite ammo, but it's ineffective against anything other than stormtroopers, and it's only advantage is that it's dead accurate and you can right click to charge it, and snipe someone out of a window if you have to. After you've had your fun doing that, ala Quake 2 or Half-Life, you'll be sent to the cloud city, where some more stuff related to the story happens, your attractive female companion/partner gets abducted, and you finally bring yourself to come to terms with your hate for the force, and go back to the academy, so you can re-train and come back out with your old light-saber. 

The Jedi Academy level, acts as a nice tutorial, although it comes after a good few game-play hours. Later on, the light-sabre will prove to be your most valuable weapon. You can use it to solve puzzles, throw it at enemies over a few yards, or simply chop them up old-fashioned style. Finally the game is pretty epic, some of the levels take place at one of those large triangular Imperial ships you see in the movies. 

And that's about it basically, you run around shooting stormtroopers, or chopping them up. Also some aliens, and some mechanical thing at some point. There's a nice swamp level, where cloaked trooper things attack you from the shadows. And finally you fight some guy named Dessan who looks like a space lizard. There's five difficulty levels if I remember correctly, so you won't have trouble beating the game on Initiate, and you'll have a nice challenge, if you set it on Jedi Master. By now you should have figured out I'm not much of a Star Wars geek, but you don't need that to enjoy this game. It's epic and it's full of puzzles and action in equal proportions.

Let's Play - Guess the Movie

Here's your first clue ;). It's a classic movie with a brilliant actor, who also played a similarly dysfunctional man in another equally enticing movie, about a small town in Newfoundland, fishing, some myths and some dark family history.

I'll probably review both movies sometime next week. For those of you who hadn't figured it out yet, the box art and one of the scenes in the beginning of the movie, features one of Julie Andrews' 'Favourite Things'

"Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens

Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens

Brown paper packages tied up with strings

These are a few of my favorite things"

(From the classic musical and the 1965 movie 'The Sound of Music')

Chess 2.0 Arimaa : Proof that we're still smarter (or at least more imaginative) than the bots

Here's something I didn't expect. Apparently Chess has gotten way too easy for AIs, consequently the last time a human won against a top AI was around 2005. So now there's a new game, called Arimaa, that's been designed specifically to make it difficult for the bots to outsmart us. A sort of last chance to feel good about ourselves, before Skynet takes over ALL THE THINGS, or at least the nice things... but I digress. 


The rules are simple and you can play the whole game with a standard chess set. Only this time instead of capturing each other the pieces push, pull, freeze, and help each other out in pursuit of getting a pawn(dubbed rabbit) to the opposite end of the board. It's pretty fun actually:

You can read all the rules of Arimaa here: Arimaa Creator's Web-Site

There's also several Wikipedia pages devoted to guides and strategies: ArimaaWiki Rules and Guides

The best part is probably for those with a background in AI and programming, since there's a $16000 (and going up) reward for the first Bot that can beat two top human players 2 out of 3 games each. So far none of the bots have been able to, even though the game's creators have been hosting a championship event every January for the past several years.

There's some interesting elements that add variation to the game (and further confuse your silicon opponent), like the ability to arrange your side of the board however you like, and the fact that each player takes 4 moves per turn (but pushing or pulling an enemy piece takes 2 of those) and so on and so forth.

So check it out, if nothing else, for the fact that it was voted the most likely new game to still be around after 1000 years. And perhaps by then the corps would have caught up with the fad and much like FortressCraft we might have the thing made awkwardly available  for Xbox360, to play on our interplanetary Xbox Live during the holidays, when ever so often it's free, of course. 

Breakfast at Tiffany's, Minecraft and Sci-Fi: An Update

Truman Capote is one of my favourite authors so I got the audiobook to Breakfast at Tiffany's. I'm thinking of doing a joint review of the book and movie later on.


Also working on the Minecraft series. I love how Minecraft allows you to improvise and recreate any setting of a movie/novel/etc. So more experiments will follow ;)


Also some Sci-Fi Movies I'd like to review:
Blade Runner
2001 A Space Odyssey
History of the World: Part 1
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
Dune


I'm going to be watching some of those movies for the first time, others I've already seen, but I think it's gonna be fun to re-watch. Tell me if you have any more ideas that would fit the general theme. 

Annie Hall: Annie Hall

Annie Hall is one of those movies that are a bit difficult to describe to anyone. It's a typical movie for its period and it captures perfectly the style and emotionality of New York at the time. It's an ode to the most uncertain of ages, when Gods fell and skyscrapers rose, and relationships, well relationships were still pretty much the same. 


Woody Allen is one of my favourite actors and directors. In this movie he portrays a rogue comedian, by the name of Alvy Singer, who falls in and out and generally struggles with coming to terms with what could very well be the love of his life. The film moves frantically between the different settings of periodic trends, the cafes, the movie theatres, the bars and clubs. For a city that doesn't sleep Woody Allen's New York is an insomniac, starved for rest, constantly on the verge of a nervous collapse.

Diane Keaton stars as the movies' namesake Annie Hall, a leading role she won an Oscar for, and although I'm not a believer in Oscars, she very much deserved this one. Hers is a brilliant impersonation of a woman, left barren and un-excitable, by the sexual revolution, by the expectations of a higher love that never came, a revolution that came and went.

Their story is a strange one to say the least but not as strange or as unbelievable as anyone else's, it's much like anyone else's life, with its highs and lows, dreams and aspirations, although you had to be there to truly experience it and that's what Allen gives us. The feeling that we were there in those particular years of a very human, despite an inherently chaotic, history of a city, that never sleeps, where in the pauses between the heaths of nausea weakness and distraught, people may still even if for a short while love each other.

Weather you want to believe that the phobias and insecurities of Allen's character are namely his own, how much of what you see is autobiographical or not, it's an enticing and mesmerizing story. Allen himself has claimed in his latter years that the neurotic and damn near agoraphobic character he created was just that, a character. 

50/50: Why an 8/10 rating on IMDB means less than an Academy Award

The characters
A neat looking guy, his psycho looking girlfriend, his dopey looking friend, a very old race-dog. A cute young doctor, two random slut-ish chicks, the neat guy's parents.


The 'plot'
Guy lives an ordinary life, he's got deadlines, a girlfriend who's into art, stuff like that. Then one day he finds out he has cancer. His girlfriend promptly proceeds to cheat on him, but he meets a cute psych-doctor girl, who's fresh out of doctor school at 24. Meanwhile his dad is a bit senile, his mom is too controlling, his best friend is a bit insensitive, and he just shaved his head, got high for the first time and now he's in a hospital bed, dieing or something. Having jogged through the completely unremarkable first three quarters of this monstrosity let's just skip to:

The last 15 minutes of this movie

It's the day of his surgery, his mom looks stereotypically worried, and his best friend is talking about something with psych-doctor girl. There have been unforeseen complications. They had to remove part of his hip, etc etc, but he's gonna live. His mom is now hugging his best friend. They're talking about going on vacation. Later cute-psych doctor enters his recovery room as he's still kinda doped on the morphine, she'd been working late, so she thought she might stop by. He's saying he's gonna make her pancakes or something, and she thinks that's really nice.

Gentle music starts to play and she sits by his bedside, and he says 'I'm peeing right now.' and then cut off to a close-up of his huge scar several months later. His hair has grown back on, sort of. His friend is re-bandaging the wound and they're talking about a date with cute-doctor-chick who rings the doorbell and she's there and she looks pretty and she's brought pizza, which is about as good as any relationship can get.

They're talking about random stuff and he looks a bit shaken up, and rock-ish music starts playing and they're looking at each other and then fade to black! Oh, and it's based on a true story.