Star Wars Episode 1 Racer Review

Alright So as promised another review.
I played this game on the N64 a lot as a kid, but it is better known to be an arcade game. I don't feel like a long introduction so lets just dive in.

Gameplay: Well it won't take a genius to figure out this is a racing game. There are 25 courses and none of them feel repetitive, although many are similar. I hope I don't need to explain the basic premise of a racing game, and it's the same thing here. What is great here is the upgrading. In each race you can win drugnuts, which is money. You can spend this money in he parts shop to upgrade your pod racer. This ends up being an awesome gimmick as upgrading one pod will upgrade all of the pods you've unlocked. There's plenty of unlockable pods and none of them feel the same, since they differ in stats and how easily they explode. Coupled with this is the games speed. In this game 300 is considered slow and while 500 will be the norm, it's not too hard to get above 1000. Also there is a huge difficulty gap in the game, which is annoying. The beginning of the game is easy and hardly takes any effort to beat, but then about halfway through the game it becomes mind-numbingly difficult. I wouldn't actually care about this if the game wasn't so hard that after 6 years I still haven't beaten all the courses. So there's no items alla Mario kart, which is a blessing and a tragedy. Without items the entire game boils down to skill, which lowers the multiplayer value since newcomers will never want to play. However, having a racing game that's all skill and no luck isn't that bad, especially after playing Mario Kart Wii. While you may lose, it' not cheep in any way other than that the computers are horribly over skilled in the latter courses. So it's a fantastic, fast, and difficult racer.

Music: So, only a few gripes so far right? Well if I gave individual scores for each category like some people do this would unfortunately score low. What's the problem? The music, or rather the lack thereof. There is the music for the title screen and on the final lap you get a great a great song from the movie, but it's always the same song. But that's not even a problem compared to the fact that otherwise there is absolutely no music. I can't understand why that is, but this means that the only thing you ever hear are the sound effects which can be annoying (if I have to hear Anakin Skywaker call me a slimo again I'll puke). So this is just sad, moving on.

Story: You kidding me? It's a racing game! I don't even know why I left the category here. The only time I will ever complain about story is in an adventure, action, or RPG game. This has no, and needs no story. Nough' said.

Replayality: I said something about multiplayer, but multiplayer's main problem isn't that it's not newcomer-friendly, but that you can only play with two players. I can see why they did this, as sometimes it's hard to see what's on the screen with one player, let alone when you only get half the screen. But without 4-player action the multiplayer really suffers, especially when Mario Kart 64 is sitting nearby with 4-player compatibility and a much more friendly approach to newcomers. Also once you beat a course there's no reason to go back in single player because you won't get money. So replayability is only found in the fact that you will have to play this game over and over again to beat the latter courses.

Graphics: Alright, this section just might get a perfect score. It seems that what the developers didn't put in music, they put in graphics. Compared to today I'm sure most would shun what I say, but this game will literally push an N64 to it's limits. With the high speeds and great graphics the N64 can barley keep up and when your getting to the really high speeds the frame rate really drops, something I've never seen, even with smash brothers.

So in summary the game is fun it's even got more depth than a regular racer. However it gets a little boring on the easy tracks, especially with no music, and frustrating on the latter tracks. This game will be fun, but not for very long unless, like me, you refuse to let the computer win. Well I'm going to try to give the game an unbiased score (which is hard with all the memories I have as kid trying to beat this), but the final verdict is; 7.2/10. I think people should play this even if they don't like racing games (which I really don't) also I think if there was a sequel they could easily fix the problems with this one.

As a little PS, I'm sorry I didn't get this out sooner, but I had to paint my Grandma's house. So...

I'm Out