POWER OUTAGE

Jeff Gerstmann (0:20)

Hey, what's happening, everybody? Welcome to the program. The program being The Jeff Gerstmann Show. It's a podcast, it's about video games. I'm your host for this week's edition of the show. My name is Jeff Gerstmann, and hello. Welcome to the video, anything is possible in the world of video games. I've spent much of the last week playing and or thinking about Star Wars Galactic Racer. It's a game that just keeps getting better the more I play of it, and having the fun kind of, I guess, I don't know, it was a cool moment in the game, and then having it take off into a life of its own, and having the character of Bitty Blaze, who's a crocodile man, who's some kind of crocodile alien, take off and become, what's the word? He went viral on the internet, on socials. He went viral on the socials. Everyone is talking about Bitty Blaze, and he wants you to scribe Dune. Get a pen. Galactic Racer is a wonderful, wonderful video game. The multiplayer is so well crafted and exciting, and low stakes when you want it to be. You can jump into the middle of a five-race series, and it'll give you some boosts so you're not left behind. So it's a very friendly way to just get in there and duke it out with other players. It's been a while since we've had a good racing game that just had good, smart, smooth online play.

And that's been really, really wonderful because, again, so many racing games have so much downtime and set up and everything else, and just to be able to just go, yeah, I just want to get in here and crash into dudes, and you can just do it. It's so much fun. It's kind of an overlooked aspect of the game, I'm finding, as more people talk about it, but the online is very cool and it's got a leveling system. It reminds me of stuff like Blur a little bit. Some people are comparing it to MotorStorm, just overall, not just the online or anything. But the kind of game that it is, you see people referencing MotorStorm, and of course, Burnout comes up quite a bit, which I think is earned because of the way that game looks when you are making other racers crash is directly out of Burnout. Obviously, there's some lineage on the development side as well, where some of those folks go back to that game, into a variety of racing games, honestly. In a world where we don't get a lot of racing games that are not of a simulation variety and what have you, just like this is a real breath of fresh air. It's just been so much fun to play. I've been messing with the steam machine. I've been playing it on my other PC. I've just been playing a lot of that game and really digging it, and that's been just fantastic. The application of the run-based rogue-lite framework to a single-player racing game, I think is... We talked about this a little bit last week, but it is just such a smart way to approach the single-player in this game. It also gives them opportunities to put random character events in there, which then gives you more opportunities to interact with some of these oddball. It gives you more time to see Bitty Blaze from time to time and hear what he has to say. Bitty Blaze, the voice actor, Richard... Oh, I don't know his... I don't know his shoot name. But he wrestles. He's a wrestler under the name Charles Crowley. I saw some TikToks from him saying, thanks for all the support and everything, and doing the voice a little bit and saying, I would love to go to Comic-Cons if you want. Go tell the Comic-Cons that you would like to have me there. So, I don't know, good on him for... What I'm saying is, if he doesn't get booked on television as a result of this, then it will all have been a failure. But also, if you're seeing him, if he is wrestling anytime soon, and people are not bringing signs to the show that say, Scribdune on them, then I don't know what the fuck is happening. If I don't see a Botchamania clip of someone holding up a sign at a wrestling show what says Scribdune on it, then this whole thing has been for naught. Whether he's on the card or not, I don't care anymore. Richard, yes, Pat, thank you. Richard Summers Calvert is his government and yeah, just a very fun character in a very, like there's just a series of like ridiculous pieces of writing in that game that are just so much fun and give the game way more depth than the average racing game, you know? Having these other characters that are kind of coming in and out of the universe as you work your way through the different planets and different races and all of that has just been so much fun. And it's just, it's smart. More than anything, that game is just, like you just look at most of the decisions they made. And there's some stuff around custom races and just having a better ability to play games with just your friends that there are, it sounds like they're adding to the game. In the relatively near future. And I don't know what their further plans are for that. But just like at every turn, you look at it and just go like, damn man, they had some ideas here. And they put those into practice in really, really, really exciting ways. It's just wonderful. I hope that they, if they didn't already have plans to expand upon the game with more, like more meaningful stuff than custom races or whatever. Like I hope that this kind of puts them into a place where they can support the game with new tracks or whatever else. Cause the track design is really fucking fascinating. Like a lot of racing games, they do short and long versions of the tracks, depending on the event that you're in. You might be doing nine laps on the short version or two laps on the large and whatever else. There's such a verticality to some of those tracks where you just go bombing off this waterfall and you're in the air for like three seconds landing. Like it's, in a lot of ways, that aspect of the game is what you remember San Francisco Rush to be. We just ranked San Francisco Rush for the N64, and obviously not the ideal version of the game. But going back and playing some Rush and realizing that that game maybe didn't age super well, especially on the N64. But the good parts about some of the later Rush games, 2049 and what have you, is that kind of weird like, I'm just in the fucking air, dude.