YMMV / Star Wars Episode I: Racer

• Best Level Ever:
  • The climatic race of both games, the Boonta Eve Classic. Long, fast, with the right number of obstacles... It's drop-dead awesome.
  • The Oovo IV racetracks. Long, twisting, fast, with an epic zero-gravity pipe that can crank your speed over 1000 mph, and it's set to "Duel of the Fates" in the PC/Dreamcast versions.
• Breather Level:
  • The Inferno, ironically the very last course in the first game, is far easier than the preceding levels in the Invitation course, especially The Abyss.
  • All of the Aquilaris and especially Mon Gazza courses in the original tend to be relatively easy. Aquilaris courses contain many twists and turns but are very light on environmental hazards, whereas Mon Gazza tracks are distinguished by many long, wide-open straightaways that make it very easy to gain momentum and keep far ahead of the pack. No accident that those are the two planets completely dispensed with by the end of the second circuit — it's a much harder slog to get from there to the end of the game.
  • Revenge has a couple more specific examples: The Badlands makes for a needed refreshment after the one-two punch of Watchtower Run and the Brightlands, while Serres Serrano comes at a welcome point after the difficult Ruins of Carnuss Gorguul and serves as your last breather before the much harder last four tracks.
• Catharsis Factor: For those who watched the movie and felt attached to some racers that lost or died (like Mars Guo or Ratts Tyerell), this game lets the player win the 'Boonta Classic' as any of them.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Neva Kee has earned a lot of fans thanks to his unique podracer and surprisingly cute voice and appearance (at least in the in-game model).
  • Ben Quadinaros Took a Level in Badass compared to his joke character status in the movie, with him being the final reward and champion of the final track, and his four engines prove their worth with the highest Top Speed of the whole roster.
  • Mars Guo is another popular racer, thanks to his brief but memorable moment in the movie, and for having badass looking pod that also performs very well in-game.
• Even Better Sequel: While not as remembered as the original game, Revenge took an already excellent licensed game and substantially refined the gameplay, physics and speed mechanics—it helps that it was also produced by the same folks behind ATV Offroad Fury. The most persistent complaint is simply that there wasn't more of it: with fewer pilots, half as many tracks, and only five distinct planets to the original's eight, the overall feel is greatly scaled-down. (Plus, the number of contestants per race is reduced from twelve to eight, although you'll certainly engage with them much more than in the original; meanwhile, the tracks are usually shorter, but they also recycle material less than the previous array of tracks.)
• Game-Breaker: With three pit droids and the basic racer gear, players can make oodles of Truguts early in their racer career by buying worn down parts, having their droids repair them after races, and then selling them back in pristine condition for a profit. It's possible to max out on upgrades very early in the game as a result, allowing you to buy even the most expensive gear as soon as it comes out.
• Good Bad Bugs: In The Gauntlet course, if by chance you decide to race backwards from the ending tunnel back to midway through the course, a racer will be stunned to find that more than half of the course has vanished (but is largely playable, aside from the heightened danger of falling off)! Fortunately, going as far back to the start as possible will allow the vanished course to reload.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The sound a podracer makes when it triggers a boost. FWO-WOOOOOOOOOOSH!!!!!
  • Every time you hit a lap in a new track. "It's a new lap record!"
• No Problem with Licensed Games: The game was a critical and commercial hit for a reason; this game actually shows care and interest with a wide selection of drivers and creative track designs. The upgrade system also isn't a slapdash concept. You can even play the game two-fisted with a Nintendo 64 controller in each hand to mimic the twin-engine controls of the pod racers in the movie. Revenge was also very well received.
• Polished Port: The Sega Dreamcast port of the first game; while the graphics are almost identical to the Nintendo 64 version, the framerate is much smoother and the textures are much crisper and slick looking, and the sound design and music quality is no longer hampered by compression issues. Mini CGI cutscenes are also included in the start of each race. The only trade off to the port is the addition of loading times. The Switch/PS4 re-release is also based on this version, but with much smaller load times thanks to newer hardware, and bumps the framerate to 60 (the disc versions locked at 30, while the N64 aimed for 30 but often struggled to hit that, especially without an Expansion Pak), making a legendarily fast game feel even faster.
• Porting Disaster: The Aspyr port on the PS4, Switch, and Xbox One features terrible sound-mixing, a poorly-designed hud with a stylistically-clashing font that has numbers overlapping and an unscaled/low-res speedometer, and most glaringly of all (on the PS4, at least), all podracer engines now have black exhausts (in the style of 'this texture failed to load' rather than a stylistic change) instead of the correct yellowish-white. After several months of release, the only patches that were brought out relate to motion controls.
• Self-Imposed Challenge:
  • Beating the original game without upgrading your podracer at all. While it's definitely possible, it makes the game a lot more difficult, especially in the Invitation Circuit courses. It's also possible to combine this with a "No boosting" challenge, but only to a fault—and the game's difficulty will really start pushing your skills to their limits from "Scrappers Run" and on, where even one foul up can cost you an entire race, and the Invitation Circuit races become downright unwinnable—the opponent racers just become too fast and relentless to keep up with by then.
  • One of the most common self-imposed challenges is the Gasgano challenge, as Gasgano's podracer with no upgrades has slippery handling and a boost system that overheats instantly while taking way too long to cooldown.
  • Revenge has the optional side challenge of crashing your rival racers so you can earn extra truguts for Watto's junk shop. Demolishing one or two of them isn't particularly tough, but trying to destroy all of them in each three lap race in the game, even in the easier courses, will really push your skills to their limits.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The part damage/repair outside of level concept of the first game. During races, taking damage or crashes actually effects the podracers performance stats in real time, which really undermines the part purchasing concept in a game where its ridiculously easy to crash or suffer collision damage. While you can buy pit droids to fix your pod inbetween races, it takes time for their work to take effect, and only four parts of a pod can be fixed at any time. The sequel thankfully eschewed this mechanic, by allowing you to keep your pod upgrades permanently upon purchase.
  • The trugut awards after each race: you only get an award the first time you place, and you don't get another award if you replay the race and place higher. So if you set the award to "Winner takes all" and you place 2nd? Tough, you're never getting that money now. Really bungling this up can make the game unwinnable, because you NEED to upgrade your parts to stay competitive in the latter half of the game.
  • On the flip side, you can side step both of these by buying high-level but damaged parts from Watto's junkyard at a fraction of the price you'd normally pay for them (and possibly earlier than you'd normally get them, too). Then, if you get through the race unscratched (or you have invincibility turned on), your Pit Droids will have fixed the junkyard parts up to their full potential. You can then either keep the parts or trade them in for a profit and repeat the process.
• The Scrappy: Bozzie Baranta is very much detested among fans thanks to his role as the champion of the infamous Abyss track, with how often players will have to face him to even dare unlock him, even down to hearing his petty voice every time he runs past you. Made worse for him to turn out a Low-Tier Letdown in terms of handling or speed, making his reward very useless by the time you've unlocked him.
• That One Level:
  • The Abyss, easily the hardest course in the first game. While the bulk of it isn't that hard on its own, the one part that makes it so frustrating is that if you don't stick to the top path of the course (which is very hard to do without falling off), you have to take a much longer path back to the main track, and this will set you so far back behind the other racers, that it's nearly impossible to even make it to second to last place if none of the other racers fell to the lower track (which is very unlikely to happen without player involvement).
  • In the sequel, the Nightlands of Ryloth is often held up as the equivalent, with many players online having bemoaned the fact that it's harder to beat than the Boonta Eve Classic which follows it. However, from the perspective of knockout completists, Gamorr's Watchtower Run has reached consensus status as That One Level. It's such a short track that you're under enormous pressure to rack up the seven knockouts in time, with the final attack on Aldar Beedo usually coming down to the very last stretch of the track. Accomplishing this with a non-secret character is a mark of true Podracer-brawling skill.
  • Grabvine Gateway; it's not a difficult level by any means, but it has some really tricky turns and cluttered pathways, particularly the swamp area late in it, where it's almost impossible to avoid crashing when you're racing at full speed.
  • Fire Mountain Rally, which reuses some level elements of Gateway in reverse, also has many hairpin turns, not helped that it's one of the longer races in the game.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Despite their full models and their podracers showing up in the promotional art, Cy Yunga and Jinn Reeso are stuck as cheat code characters (replacing Navior and Mars Guo), meaning they get no track favorite courses or unique voice acting. Their absence in the Dreamcast version only adds salt to the wound.