While Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace was no Empire Strikes Back, even the most jaded Star Wars fan had to be impressed by the movie’s Pod racer scene. LucasArts’ first game based on the film (and its first major Mac game in years) is Star Wars: Episode I Racer, an extended re-creation of the racer sequence. Before you ask — yes, you get to race on Tatooine; yes, you get to kick Sebulba’s butt; and yes, it feels exactly like the movie. Hands down, Racer is the best film-to-game translation ever done.
You begin the game by choosing from several pod racers and pilots. Each racer has different specs such as turning, acceleration, and top speed. Pick the racer that best suits your style and hit the tracks. If you beat the racer favored to win, you win that pod racer. You also earn truguts, which you can spend upgrading a racer’s components in Watto’s shop. You can transfer components between racers, so if you start with Ody Mandrel’s ship and switch to Abe Endicot’s racer, you keep all the parts you’ve purchased.
There are racecourses on eight unique worlds. One world is underwater. Another world is an icy Hoth-like planet with twisty caverns and frozen tundra straightaways. There are essentially three circuits: novice, intermediate, and pro. If you beat a circuit (a set of eight races), you race in an invitational circuit at the same player level. The novice circuit is laughably easy, but your competition races considerably faster on all the other circuits. The courses themselves are very well designed, with lots of hairpin turns, branching pathways, and secret paths that can shave several seconds off your time. Single Player Free Play mode is for pilots who just want to familiarize themselves with tracks. The multiplayer mode allows you to race over a local network, but not over the Internet.
Graphically, the game is stunning, but the sound is absolutely mind-blowing. Each racer has a distinct engine sound, and both Anakin and Sebulba’s racers are dead-on. You don’t have a complete sense of spatial sound positioning, but the stereo is very well done — when you brush past another racer’s pod, you can hear the Doppler effect as you blow by.
The one major downside to Racer is that it is incompatible with pretty much all 3dfx hardware. The developers at LucasArts wrote the game to look for ATI’s OpenGL implementation. It won’t run at all if it finds Voodoo2 or Voodoo3 OpenGL extensions. There are a few workarounds, but no good ones. If you don’t have an ATI accelerator, don’t buy this game unless LucasArts comes out with a patch.
Even if the Star Wars: Episode I movie didn’t impress you, you’ll like Racer. Fast racing, lots of customizing options, and excellent visual and sound design make LucasArts’ return to the Mac an impressive one.
Sanchez, Rick. (April 2000). Star Wars: Episode I Racer. MacAddict. (pg. 56).