I said a long time ago that I would hopefully never talk about The Phantom Menace ever again. However I had a single caveat to this. And that was The Phantom Menace pod racing video game for the Nintendo 64 and the PC.
There's a good reason for that. This game is absolutely fantastic and is easily the best thing to ever come out of the phantom menace movie.
And I find that kind of surprising given that the pod racing scene in The Phantom Menace is way too long* and really brings the entire film down. Despite the fact that it has some okay CGI** compared to other scenes within the Star Wars movie.
Anyways what makes this game so phenomenal in my eyes. speed. True and utter speed. It really sells you on the idea that you are accelerated at an exceptional velocity. And I'm not sure how they do it.
Some form of motion blur, the ability to artificially make your surroundings move quicker than they actually are. Maybe it's just the camera angle.
Whatever the trick it works on me. All the pod racers in the very beginning of the game are naturally quite quick and you can upgrade them to make them even quicker to such an extent that you can barely even control the darn things and the speed becomes more of a hindrance than a benefit.
I
'm sure I could have easily won this entire game without upgrading a single item on any of my vehicles but where's the fun in that. in fact that might be a problem for some people.
The other racers in the game are not a concern for you.
They can never keep up and they'll almost never overlap you with the exception of maybe two or three races where there's some tight Corners. Where if you screw up enough somebody might overtake you for a mere couple of seconds before you blast back into the lead with enhanced momentum.
There is one level in this game where if you fall off of a ledge flying a lower Road you'll actually end up behind a bunch of people. But given that it's only one level in a game of 50 it's not that big a deal.
Honestly it's more of a game where you're racing against the clock then players. You want to go as fast as humanly possible and overclocking your Racer the whole time.
It becomes less of race and more of an endurance test just to see if you can get through an entire track without exploding or damaging your vehicle to an exaggerated extend. Honestly there's not much else to say on the game.
Graphics were decent for the time and in my opinion they still hold up fairly well. You can tell what everything is***. The semi lacking detail at least from my point of view makes it more enjoyable as your brain kind of fills in the rest and you can imagine these Lush worlds that Star Wars always claims to have in their franchise but never really shows.
And the best part is you can get the game on GoG now. It's pretty darn cheap and it works really well. I wish there was a way to alter the screen a bit more so I can change the aspect ratio and you might have to fiddle around with the controls if you're using console controller but otherwise it's quite good.
This is the only time a Star Wars game has ever made me interested in its expanded World. Usually I like my Star Wars to be self-contained to the first few movies and deviate as little as possible. But in this case it's pretty fun.
It doesn't even feel like Star Wars all that much. Just kind of turned into generic sci-fi where every world you race on is run by some malevolent dictatorial greaseball. Which could be a stance on the Star Wars Universe in general indicating that everything is run by Warlords as opposed to some democratic system or fascist state, but that's diving into a whole bunch of crap doesn't even exist in the game.
Oh and Soboba sucks. He's the last character you unlock in the game and he supposed to be this great reward but he's stats are horrible.
* The actual pod racing scene in the Star Wars movie take something like 10 to 15 minutes to complete. Which is way too long for the film. The irony is that there is not a single race in the Star Wars game that takes 15 minutes to complete. Even the longest tracks towards the very end of the game take about 8 to 10 minutes at most. And if you know what you're doing you can cut that time down.
**So I actually looked at the pod racing scene from the Star Wars movie and maybe it's just the modern Clarity of televisions but CGI is not that great. It's livable and in the scenes were all the little carts are racing by at a hundred miles a minute it doesn't really matter but there's a few focus on shots with the aliens and Anakin himself that just don't look right. Like an offset claymation. I think Star Wars would have benefited if it was just claymation.
***Excluding one swamp level wear fog is way too close to your racer and there's too many tight corners. So you crash into something because you never had a chance to see it in the first place.
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