Amazingly Fun - Highly Recommended
Wipeout Pure is the Pod Racer game for the Sony PSP. Coming from a 10 year line of Wipeout racing games, the transition to PSP is almost flawless.
In essence you are one of 8 hovercraft racing ships that compete on looped tracks in a variety of arena styles. Your tracks take you through rural landscapes, through busy cities, in underwater tunnels and in high off-the-ground jumps. Whether you're used to this genre from the wipeout series or from the pod racing games, you know how full of adrenaline and fun this can be.
You get the traditional power-ups as you go around the loops, picking up speed boosts, mines, guns, laser blasts, shields and more. Much of the challenge here is to really memorize a track, so that you can whip around its courses with intuitive ease, sliding gently to grab that extra boost to go past your enemy.
The PSP screen might be small, but the graphics are so detailed in this game that you really don't notice. You get roaring...
Worthy successor in classic series.
It's hard to believe that the first Wipeout was released 10 years ago on the original Sony Playstation (One). Since then, there was one excellent sequel on the PSOne (Wipeout XL, known as Wipeout 2097 in the UK and on the Macintosh), a decent later sequel (Wipeout 3), a capable Nintendo 64 version (Wipeout 64), and a fun but dated Playstation 2 edition (Wipeout Fusion).
The newest game, Wipeout Pure, combines the best elements of all of these games. Like all of them, the action is fast, the framerate is smooth, the difficulty is high, and a pulsing techno soundtrack follows you wherever you go. You get the usual single race series, tournament series, time attacks, and practice laps, all of which open up more tracks and speeds as you finish first in races.
This version adds a bunch of extra ship classes, as well as a terrific Zone option right from the start without needing to unlock anything. In Zone mode, you just go faster and faster until you crash -- a...
Great game!
Awesome laucnh title - love it!! The look and feel of the Wipeout series has been perfectly captured on the new platform. Difficulty ramps up nicely after you mosey around the tracks on the starter levels and unlock the faster levels. Free-practice lets you learn a track inside and out until you're ready to take on a real race.
And once you're sick of playing against the AI it's dead-simple to challenge your mates head-on or merge their best lap-times with yours to beat on the tube.
There is however a gripe: you have to go through about 6 screens before you get to the main menu.. so switching from listening to music to playing Wipeout Pure takes quite a while. There should be a 'quick-launch' option - straight into the main menu with your save game auto-loaded.
[EDIT - 2005.06.13]
Having played the game for a while now, I've come across situations where the title will crash from time to time. This happens mostly shortly after resuming from standby...
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