It’s a good time to be a Star Wars fan. Heck, the last five years have been a good time to be a Star Wars fan. It’s an even better time to be both a fan and a gamer. Last year’s Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order was a rousing success. The upcoming Star Wars: Squadrons has all sorts of potential. Even Battlefront 2 is alive and well.
Now gamers get to climb into the cockpit (or whatever it’s called in this case) of a pod racer as the remastered edition of 1999’s Star Wars Episode 1: Racer. They didn’t release any sort of trailer for this remaster, so check out this original trailer from 1999. Just imagine it looking a million times better and you should have some idea of what to expect.
I don’t need to tell anyone that Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace was not well received. Even after a good twenty years of cooling down and reevaluating the heavily-maligned Star Wars prequel movies, The Phantom Menace is still very painful to watch. It’s not an exaggeration to say that this game is one of the best things to come out of it.
While the original reviews weren’t glowing, they certainly weren’t bad, with more than a few outlets ranking it up in the 8s. The Phantom Menace was chock full of poorly-executed cool ideas, and pod racing was one of them, so it made an excellent premise for a game.
The remaster was originally scheduled to release on May 12. However, due to the ongoing pandemic forcing everyone to work from home, the developers weren’t able to meet the original date. It’s pretty impressive that the delay only lasted a little over a month. It’s no surprise, though, seeing as how Aspyr Media has been in the remaster game for over two decades. They’re the same developers that recently brought both Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy and Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast to the Switch and Playstation 4.
The game won’t just be a faithful recreation, either. Just like they did with the Jedi Academy games, Aspyr has adapted the game to work well with new consoles, including making sure the control scheme works comfortably with modern day controllers, even the individual Joy-Con controllers for Switch.
Oh, and for those of you wondering how your memory could betray you in such a manner, the game was originally called Star Wars: Podracer. You’re not imagining things. When it was discovered that another game company had trademarked games with the word “pod” in the title, LucasArts made the name change.