It's been a busy week but I've managed to carve out some gaming time. For starters I got the hankering to get back to Rage 2, which I liked quite a lot but wanted to take more time exploring. Then I admitted to myself that I never beat the original Rage, and I really probably should, so I've been working through that for the past couple weeks. To be honest, it's a bit of a chore and I'm already feeling like I'll need to force myself to get through it. I've restarted Rage numerous times but never finished it, and now I can remember why. I'm not experiencing any technical issues this time--apparently Id and Valve finally optimized the Steam version--but the whole experience still feels like a very drawn out tech demo. The action is solid and frenetic but also painfully repetitive, and not in the good Doom or Quake kind of way. Rage is a slower, more methodical game that locks you into arenas and throws dozens of enemies at you, but without the mobility and creative mayhem that made Doom 2016 so addictive. The quest structure is also pretty tedious and everything about Rage's open world is depressingly static. Id's insistence on using Megatexture in 2011 means everything is hideously smeary and low-res up close. And yet...from a distance, Rage is one of the most starkly beautiful games I've ever seen. The vistas and setpieces impart a sense of aching desolation, a bleached, weary loneliness right out of a pre-Star Wars 70s sci-fi dystopia. I swear I'm going to run into Charlton Heston out in Rage's wasteland. It's just a shame that when you examine Rage up close, the illusion dissipates and it collapses into competent but generic tedium. I'll probably have more detailed thoughts in a longer post but for now Rage is a frustrating experience, the premature embryo of what Doom would accomplish six years later. It's just a shame Id had to sacrifice that intimidating, shattered beauty to give Doom the focus that it needed.

 

On a whim I dropped $15 on the Switch port of Star Wars Episode 1: Racer, and wow it's just as much fun as I remember. I played this game to death back on the N64 in 1999, back when I was an undiscerning 13-year-old and, despite a vague, nagging sense of disappointment, I actually  thought The Phantom Menace was a good film. I cringe at the thought now, and the Podracing scene feels like it lasts approximately 400 minutes when I force myself through the movie these days. But credit where it's due, LucasArts turned that sequence into a damn fine racing game. Every racer feels distinct enough that you can define your own play style, and the management system, although shallow, adds another element to upgrading your slick racing machine and budgeting your winnings. Most important was the sense of sheer speed that Racer hits you with--that rush still persists all these years later and makes for a pretty white knuckle experience. While the graphics were blocky even in '99 to facilitate smooth frame rates, they have a crisp, charming cleanness when rezzed up to 1080p, as do most games of that era when properly optimized. In any case simplicity matters when the scenery is flashing past at 600mph. Episode 1 Racer feels like all the best virtues of late 90s arcade games--flashy, challenging, timely, fast--distilled down into one Star Wars flavored, 151 proof shot. So yeah, the Star Wars prequels kind of sucked. The Disney-Wars sequels really suck. But the lion's share of those old Star Wars games still have a lot of fun and heart to offer.

 

I'm traveling this week (don't worry, I'm being super Covid-responsible). I brought my Switch with me, thinking that it would be my gaming travel companion, but surprisingly I haven't even turned it on once. Instead I've been playing Stadia the entire time.