Wipeout Pulse

It’s all techno beats and fast hovercars – that’s how David Hollingworth rolls.

We at Atomic have been Wipeout addicts across multiple consoles and spellings of the franchise. It’s what made us buy a Playstation back in the day, and was a nostalgia-laced delight in the days of the PS2. Taking the game mobile with the preceding Pure seemed, at first, a gamble, but it’s one that continues to pay off. Within minutes of loading the game’s UMD into our PSP, we had assumed the Wipeout ‘position’ – relaxed, on the lounge, kinda slouched, and rocking back and forth to every nuance of the track.

On the surface, it’s a pretty classic Wipeout – capital ‘e’ be-damned! – release. You pick your team (old school Feisar, in our case), pick a difficulty and race away in campaign races that track your progression through a series of ‘grids’, which is really just another name for a season of racing and tracks. There’s also single race modes to get lost in. If you’ve played any of the previous game’s, from the breakthrough 2097 through to Fusion, you know the breathtaking sense of speed the game generates.

Pulse is no different, but it does bring a couple of new elements, the most notable of which are actually independent of the game itself. First up, and possibly the best addition to a Wipeout game since Prodigy’s Firestarter (we dare any veteran not to feel the controls under their fingers when they hear that track), is the ability to log onto the official Wipeout website and design your own racing colours and textures, which you can then download into the game. It may not seem like much, but the Shockwave-based designer is almost as addictive as the game itself, and you can either paint directly on to the craft of your choice, or get down and dirty with the textures themselves.

The site also allows you to see how clumsy and ham-fisted your attempts at gracefully managing each track really are, by letting you track the fastest times of some of the shut-ins who obsess over these kind of rankings. Because, really, if all that counts in your life is beating 24 seconds to lap a track, fine, go ahead WASTE YOUR LIFE!

Not that we’re bitter (or desperately trying to skill up to get our own name on the site).

Ahem, anyway... there’s also wallpapers, tracks and music to download.

As to the racing itself, it’s pretty much the tried and true stuff fans have come to expect. The tracks are twisting combinations of claustrophobic tunnels and airy concourses, with dips and jumps to complicate procedures; the Mag-strip is a new feature that lets the track twist into some radically different directions at some remarkably sharp angles. The music is top notch, and familiar names, like Aphex Twin, are in full effect, while any fan of electronica will doubtless find new bands to adore from the track listing.

Wipeout Pulse is a wonderful example of how to bring out a new game in a series without compromising the old formula that made the franchise so popular in the first place. That said, as good as the experience is on the PSP, it’s really only a placekeeper until the release of the next ‘proper’ title on the PS3, which is rumoured to be using the MotorStorm engine. Oh, that’ll be so pretty... and maybe even a reason, for a lot of people, to finally buy a PS3.