Hello everyone,
We’ve made it to day 3. Before I go too far with the post, there’s stuff in the news today about an explosion a bit down the road at Avonmouth. I live quite a distance away (didn’t notice a boom even) so I’m not affected.
What’s behind the door ?
I think that’s one of the desert dwellings on Tatooine and yes, I may well be continuing the theme of using something edible to stand the models on to get a decent angle for the camera with them.
The cookie did not survive.
Tatooine made me think of a pod racing link. (The other one would be something to do with wrong droids). I did enjoy the pod racing sequence in Episode 1, that was probably the highlight of the movie.
And one of the best of the Star Wars games was the Pod Racing game. What’s that ?
They’re basically two massive engines, a pilot pod running behind them and lots of luck to hold everything together. I suspect the image in George Lucas’s mind when he thought of this sequence was to try and pull off something like the Ben Hur chariot sequence.
It worked pretty well as a sequence in the movie and the game was incredible when it first came out. I’ve been having another look at it this evening …
I did get it running in the end, although the Steam version needed an extra file added in (for Google – Star Wars Pod Racer crash on start up solved by adding the Dinput.dll into the game folder). I didn’t manage to get it to recognise my two Hotas controllers (I have no idea where my Xbox pattern controller is !) but it was ok running with mouse and keyboard. It even ran at 1440p.
I tried looking back at this one before, with the copy on the cd (yep, cd !) and found issues with it not knowing where the save game was due to Windows changing how it organised files. Looks like that’s been solved this time.
I’d forgotten how fast it was … Let’s see :
The 462 is I believe, speed in km/h. And the pods go faster in an engine boost mode. I think the speed used to reach 1000+ …
I’d forgotten how much of a rush the game was. Lots of varied courses over multiple Star Wars locations. Places like the deserts of Tatooine, with occasional Sand People snipers. Lava planets … An ocean world where you race across platforms connected by undersea tunnels. And a space circuit with zero g sections.
It’s exciting. I was remembering why I was so addicted to it way back … As you see from the screenshots, the graphics are very simple. But you don’t really notice that as you’re zooming through the circuits.
However, if you’re looking to try it out again, DO NOT buy the Steam version. I’m hoping that the fan project to recreate the game comes to fruition. While the Directx suite should in theory allow older games like this to run, there are issues involved. The game itself came out just as Directx was taking off, so it was looking to use 3dfx Glide libraries to run better via proprietary non Directx hardware. I think that was leading to problems this evening …
I couldn’t get my controllers to work, although got round this by using keyboard controls.
And … I called a halt to play due to the game crashing on me, following steadily decreasing texture quality. I think this is why only 3 screenshots were successful out of the 11 attempts.
There is a saying “You can never go back”. It’s kinda true this time round, although while it was running, it was running very nicely. Everything was nicely presented on screen, even in a much higher resolution than the game would have expected. Of course, that means the low resolution textures look really, really bad in the screenies.
It did work as a game now much better than Jagged Alliance 2 did when I tried that again a while ago. (I’ll talk about that in a later post !)
Good game, hopefully something similarly ultra fast and great will come out at some point. I got the memories from it again of it being huge fun the first time … but with the state of the Steam edition, it’s one for the past.
That’s all for today ! Stay safe, be well. May compatibility with the force be with you.