Now this is Podracing! Taylor and Stephen tackle the Nintendo 64 classic Star Wars Racer, join us as we celebrate a better era, and complete this Star Wars staple.
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Star Wars Episode I: Racer is a 1999 racing video game based on the podracing sequence in the film Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace. The game features all of the racers and race course on Tatooine from The Phantom Menace. It adds several new courses, on Tatooine and various planets. It has several single-player modes, including a tournament mode. The format of multiplayer mode varies by platform. Jake Lloyd and Lewis MacLeod, who portrayed Anakin Skywalker and Sebulba in The Phantom Menace, reprise their film roles in the game.
Episode I: Racer received generally positive reviews from critics. Several major media outlets listed it as one of the top Star Wars video games. As of 2011, the game holds the Guinness record as the best-selling sci-fi racing game, with worldwide sales of 3.12 million units, followed by series like Wipeout and F-Zero. Two podracing games were released later. Star Wars: Racer Arcade, an arcade game featuring many similar tracks and characters, was released in 2000. A sequel, Star Wars Racer Revenge was released in 2002 for the PlayStation 2.
Twenty years after the release of the game, it received an HD re-release for Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4. It was later released on Xbox One on October 27, 2020.
Star Wars Episode I: Racer features a variety of tracks spanning several different planets. It includes all of the racers in the film, plus exclusive competitors. The player character's podracer is equipped with an afterburner that the player can engage for a boost of speed. While engaged, the engine's temperature will rise and if pushed for too long, shall suffer an engine fire and explode, destroying the podracer and costing the player several seconds to respawn and continue racing. The podracer will also be destroyed if one or both engines sustain severe damage from colliding into too many walls or obstacles, requiring the player to steer carefully to avoid falling behind. The player can also actively repair the podracer while competing but doing so slows the podracer until repairs are either complete or stopped.
Three single-player game modes are available. In Tournament mode, the player character competes in a championship. Completing races awards money, with higher-ranked finishes resulting in higher payouts. This can buy parts or repair droids, unlock new tracks, and unlock new racers. Free Race mode allows the player to practice any previously unlocked courses using any unlocked racer. The player character cannot earn money or unlock tracks and racers, but can set the difficulty of the opponents. Time Attack pits the player character against the clock, racing along to try to achieve the fastest time on the given course. This mode is absent from the PC version. Instead, the Free Play mode allows the player to set the number of computer opponents to 0.
Multiplayer mode differs between the PC and console versions. The Nintendo 64 and Dreamcast versions feature a two-player split-screen mode, and the Windows and Macintosh versions allow play over a local area network (LAN). This Windows version uses the deprecated IPX protocol to accomplish this, and the Macintosh version uses TCP/IP. The multiplayer mode can support up to eight players.
Star Wars Episode I: Racer was developed and published by LucasArts for Windows in May 1999. Development took approximately two years. Upon completing Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire, two of its project leads began initial development. Tools included 3D Studio Max, Alias Wavefront, and Autodesk Softimage. Multiple graphical application programming interfaces (APIs) were tested, including 3dfx Glide, OpenGL, and Direct3D. Ultimately the game shipped with only Direct3D support because according to project lead Brett Tosti, when testing Glide and OpenGL the developers "didn't see any performance increases so didn't add support". The team had to develop a physics simulation from only a few short film clips given to them. According to Tosti, their approximations ended up very close to the film: "We really didn't get to see how good our estimates were until the very end." Project lead John Knoles emphasized that the team's goal was for a strong sense of speed. He stated they wanted to make it "feel like an eyeball-peeling racing game, where you're going so fast, you're just nervous".
19 апр 2024
