Star Wars: Episode I - Racer

Probably the only good game to come from the Episode 1 movie license. I was always disappointed it never came out on the PS1. The wait between wipeout 2097 and Wip3out was a long one and this game would have done nicely. I had to play it on the pc at and joypad with multiple buttons felt more like a kludge at the time. This is a highly underrated racer. Its fast as hell later in the game with plenty of hairpin turns and obstacles to challenge any seasoned wipeout player.

So here is the N64 version. The game starts out pretty easy but doesn't take long to ramp up. I play through all the tournaments as Anakin and show off a couple of other ships at the end on the special unlocked tracks. The game doesn't really pay out all that much after winning races and its a bit of a struggle to buy upgrades I want. Even more annoying is that they break down after sometime. There is the junk shop for cheaper parts, but I cant be doing with that. The later tracks can be quite annoying especially on the sky tracks as if you fall off, the lower tracks loop round back to the start making it impossible to catch up.

The aspect of the game that I like is the turbo function. It makes such a satisfying sound when used. This also adds to another gameplay element of overheating your engines and damaging your pod parts. You can fix it while flying but this does slow you down as well. I play in chase view for the most part while flipping to cockpit view for the third lap. just to show both aspects on each track.

The Game uses the Expansion pack for a higher internal resolution close to 340x480 and is hardware aspect corrected to 640x480. The framerate is quite low, but that maybe an emulation issue to correct the audio sync in mupen64. I have included the unlocked alternate intro at the end of the game. This only seems to play with the expansion pack enabled, but due to emulation issues no sound is played. I recorded the initial intro with the pak disabled to record it with sound.