The Level 601: I Hope Nothing Terrible Happens

Dennis is raising his hand to volunteer.

I

realized Jala has been gone the longest, so...

No, I was here last week.

Yeah.

oh my god you work on the longest that's yeah okay cool i played something that just came out today yay do it okay oh is it star wars yes it is cool yeah galactic racer uh came out uh the day of recording um and oh my god so uh let's travel back um you know 30 years into the past and young dennis um coerced his parents into buying a graphics card for their computer not a new graphics card not a better graphics card just a graphics card for their own computer so I could play episode one racer and my life was forever changed I didn't even own it it was at the library and I got the PC version out from the library so that we could play it and then the you know whatever it was however long the rental was or the borrow was I got poison ivy The week was out and wound up putting like big dishwashing gloves on my hands so that I could still play the game.

So when I tell you that that this it's not it's not a reboot, it's not a remake.

It's like it is just another Star Wars racing game that

happens to have some pod racing in it.

Well, I'm told I actually only just got to a pod race just before recording.

So, yeah, the first several hours are very pod-free, which we'll get into.

But anyway, this is deeply ingrained in my gaming history.

And I was so excited to see it coming out and just completely forgot about it until... um saw that it was about to release and dropped into my lap uh honestly like i have an embarrassment of riches right now between z-com and and this uh just these star wars games that i i'm sure i saw an ad for at some point dropped out of memory and then are suddenly in my lap i i'm just um yeah i'm i'm living high on the hog right now uh high on the pod racing hog um

I don't know what pigs are called or what the pig equivalent is called in Star Wars.

Gundarks, maybe? Someone will be very mad at that answer.

I guarantee you I knew at one point as a child.

Yeah, so this is about as arcadey a racing game as you can get.

It is technically the studio's first game, but the people at the studio have the burnout pedigree behind them.

So these are people who know how to make a very fun and chaotic arcade racing game.

That said, if you're wondering where this is on the range, the tutorial gives you the accelerate button, the boost button, and the drift button.

And nary does a break come into it.

Yeah.

So it is full throttle all the time.

It does the cool burnout, like when you crash someone or when you crash yourself, everything goes slow-mo and you get a cinematic angle of the crash before zipping back in to your racer's POV.

So this is really a racing game that is all about the feel rather than any kind of simulation.