By Elliott Chin
Star Wars: Episode I looms before us like an impending hurricane, waiting to crash upon our shores and drench us in a media storm like nothing we've ever seen. But rather than bring disaster, this storm will bring a rain that we've all been anticipating for twenty years. At long last, the Star Wars drought will come to an end, and we will be bathed in a deluge of Star Wars: Episode I toys, books, comics, and the movie itself.
Oh, and let's not forget the games. To coincide with the release of the movie, LucasArts is releasing two Star Wars games, which GameSpot had the privilege of seeing a few months ago.
There are a few more Star Wars: Episode I games slated for the end of this year, but when the movie debuts in mid May, Lucas will have two Episode I games ready to go. One is an action-adventure game called Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace, which relives the entire movie,
from the scrolling opening text to the climactic lightsaber-dueling end. The other game, Star Wars: Episode I Racer, is taking the opposite approach. Rather than re-create the entire movie, Racer takes a 15-minute segment of it and extrapolates it into a full-feature game. As its name suggests, Racer is an arcade racing game.
Some LucasArts employees who know a little about the film say that the pod races, the segment that Racer is modeled on, is perhaps the movie's most thrilling sequence. The hope at LucasArts is that these races will make a thrilling game as well.
This scene should be familiar. It's the opening of the first trailer. The entire podrace sequence is the basis for the intense racing game, Star Wars: Episode I Racer.
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Let's look at the back story for this racing game. There is a tiny spoiler here, so skip to the next paragraph if you want to spare yourself a smidgen of the movie's plot. The basic premise of Racer is that the galaxy revels in a circuit of pod races, so named because all the pilots race in pod-like hovercraft. You play as slave-boy Anakin Skywalker (if you've never heard of him, then let me be the first to welcome you to our planet), and just as in the movie, you are trying to win your freedom from Jabba the Hutt by winning the pod race tournament. However, that might prove difficult because no human has ever shown the necessary skill, or the multiple limbs, required to race, let alone win, a pod race. But what no one but you and maybe the entire movie-watching population of the world knows is that you have a secret weapon: The Force.
Next: Pod Racing
