StarWars Episode I Racer

So, I must admit to some nostalgia-gaming. And yeah, I’ve been at it a while now (gaming that is) so the nostalgia is actually real.

And I remember back in the day….. We played PodRacer(1). We played it on PC. As this was 1999, we played it on…

You know, I gotta think about that, forgive me the digression. I’m pretty sure that would have been BomshelterII years – right on Bronson Ave in Ottawa. 1999 was the halcyon years of PC Building. It wasn’t so expensive as to be somewhat senseless, and everything (and I mean everything) was overclockable. A lot. The biggest investment we made was graphics cards. And it was plural. Not like today, where you can get most of what you need with one card, and SLI is for the hardcore. No, no. In 1999, we were running serious bleeding edge power. In early winter, Grumblefish and I (we were roommates at the time) decided our machines needed more power. We’d both run varied combinations of 2D and 3D cards for a while – heavy on the MATROX, as I was running a Mystique, and Grumblefish had a Millenium. They were OK, and could handle 1997’s Quake2 with no issues in OpenGL. But we needed more frames for new games.

Which led to research, mostly of the magazine kind, it was 1999, afterall. By February or so, it was obvious that what we wanted was they then six month old Voodoo2 3dfx cards, in SLI. There was a shop (now defunct) that had four of them, two each, and if I remember correctly, they were $179.99CDN each at the time. We were both, for some stupid reason, ready to spend $400 on video cards. So we did.

Getting them installed was the typical deal – plug ’em into the last PCI slots, move other stuff out of the way to make room for ’em.

What were they, though? Well, the 3DFX Voodoo2 cards were dedicated 3D cards. So, you needed a 2D card for desktop work. I kept my Matrox Mystique, it was really good at that stuff. So, yes, I had three video cards in my computer. So what? Why two? Well, the limitations of the card at the time were that a single would be ultra-fast, and smooth (with that typical softened-look of OpenGL/3dfx) but was limited to 800×600 gameplay. Adding the second card bumped that to a ridiculous 1024×768. That was next level shit at the time. And it was fast. Fast like – Episode I Racer ran at up to 60FPS, which you needed.

Hilariously, I don’t remember many of the games that these cards specifically made better. Quake2, for sure – we played massive LAN games, and running fast at 1024×768 was awesome in Q2.

The second I really remember was Star Wars Racer (aka Pod Racer). It was smooth as butter with the Voodoo2 SLI set-up, and remarkably fun. It was racy without being just for race-game people, but not so video-game-y that it was just “ride the guard rails”.

There was some real variation in the tracks (which were mostly well thought out and fun) and they were FAST tracks – ostensibly, these were “1000mph on boost” pod racers, right? The speed of the game matched well between “not so fast as to be uncontrollable” and “not so slow as to break the feeling of speed”. Given that this was a spin-off game from a massively popular movie, it was remarkably good. Mostly, those kind of games are “give us the quick buck” games, but this one was actually well thought out, and executed.

And, it’s back! It’s on STEAM for $12 CDN. That video is from the re-release! If a bunch of people said they were gonna buy it and we’d race online, I’d pay the twelve bucks. Otherwise, I’m gonna hope it hits the Christmas steam sale, and everyone buys it because it’s five bucks or something. Anything under ten is probably a huge deal for this one.

So, that said, anyone wanna race Pods? Cuz… Yeah, I’d be up for it…

(1)apparently, not the actual name. Hunh. I could have sworn it was.