Hey there folks, and welcome at last to the inaugural instalment of An Hour With..., the new blog feature that I teased last month wherein I pick a game at random from my backlog, play it for sixty minutes, and then write about my experience with it. For a more thorough explanation of what this series is, I'd recommend checking out my last blog in which I introduced the premise.
For the first An Hour With..., I've delved into the archives and selected a launch title for the original PlayStation. Over the next sixty minutes, I'll be aiming to find out whether it holds up twenty-two years later. At the end of the hour, I'll be issuing it with a PLAY or a PASS verdict - a commitment to either play it through to the end, or strike it from my Pile of Shame forever.
The Game
WipEout is a futuristic racing game developed by Psygnosis and released in November 1995 as a launch title for the Sony PlayStation. Set in the mid-twenty-first century, it puts the player into the cockpit of a sleek anti-gravity racer and throws them around mind-bending tracks at blistering speeds, all while a pumping techno soundtrack drives the action inexorably on. Widely regarded as the PlayStation's killer app at launch (at least it was here in the UK), the game was praised for its pioneering use of 3D graphics and its thrilling sense of speed and atmosphere. It spawned a sequel and subsequently an entire franchise, the most recent instalment of which graced the PlayStation 4 earlier this year.
The History
My history with the WipEout franchise is pretty limited. The game I spent by far the most time with was WipEout Fusion on PlayStation 2, a game that I mainly remember for my ability to beat my sisters in multiplayer races using only one hand (I'd steer with my thumb and operate the face buttons with my middle and ring fingers, a technique that saw me round the track comfortably ahead of them even without access to the brakes on the shoulder buttons). As well as the sense of speed and incredible visual presentation, I remember really liking Fusion for its vehicle upgrade mechanics, giving the player access to various aesthetic overhauls and performance boosts which they could buy with currency earned from racing.
It was my enjoyment of Fusion that brought me retrospectively to the game that started it all, tempting me to part with a couple of quid for the PSOne Classics version on the PlayStation Store. Since that purchase I've launched the game a grand total of zero times, but with the launch of this blog feature, that changes today. While I also have the game downloaded to my PlayStation 3, I've decided to spend this hour with it on my trusty PSP - the WipEout games have always had that pick-up-and-play feel to them, and the fast-paced nature of races lends itself well to the on-the-go nature of a handheld console. I'm looking forward to checking it out and discovering exactly why this game was so beloved at the PS1's launch.
The Hour
This is the meat and potatoes of today's blog - a blow-by-blow account of the hour I spend with the game, detailing my actions, progress, and any thoughts or opinions that come to mind as I play. With WipEout freshly installed on my PSP, I launch it from the XMB menu and get settled into my favourite comfy gaming chair...
Five Minutes In...
One thing this feature is likely to highlight as it develops over the next few instalments is that the Options menu is usually my first port of call with any new title. I like to take a gander at the settings I'm able to change, and generally perform any quick quality-of-life improvements before I start to actually play the damn thing. In WipEout's case, the Options menu is pretty limited - the expected Save and Load functions, along with the options to adjust the volume for music and sound effects, and a handful of controller presets to choose from. Given the game maps its brakes to the L2 and R2 buttons by default, and these buttons are assigned to the PSP's diminutive analog nub, I quickly cycle through until I find a preset that maps them to L1 and R1 (the PSP's L and R buttons respectively). With that important change made, it's time to start playing proper.
Ten Minutes In...
I pass over the Two-Player Race menu given that I'm playing alone, although it is curious that WipEout doesn't support split-screen, instead demanding that two PlayStations be hooked together with a Link Cable to enable multiplayer (possibly because the developers couldn't replicate the game's sense of speed and technical pioneering twice over on the same screen at that early stage in the PS1's life cycle?). The One-Player Race menu offers up some expected choices - a Championship mode, a Single Race, and a Time Trial. Eager to get a feel for its full feature set, I choose the first option. I'm then given a choice of vehicles - unaware of any differences in handling between them, I choose the one I find most aesthetically pleasing (Anastasia Cherovoski's ship on the Auricom team, to be clear).
WipEout wastes no time in throwing me into the first race of the Championship, a three-lap run around a track situated in Canada. I quickly opt out of the first-person camera mode, finding the pitch of it a little too nauseating when I start crashing into the sides of the track (and I crash into the sides a lot in this first race). The physics are incredibly floaty and not very intuitive, demanding that I start to turn almost a full second before I might have to if my vehicle was on the ground rather than suspended several feet above it. Not only that, but almost all the weapon pick-ups feel ineffectual, with only a couple boasting useful lock-on targeting and there seeming to be very little difference in their overall functionality. In spite of the steep learning curve of the physics, though, I very quickly get sucked into the game's presentation. The bright colours and thumping electronic beats complement the fast pace of the action, and considering the game's status as one of the earliest full-3D home console games, it's technically very impressive. Sure, there's noticeable pop-in and draw distance issues as the game frantically tries to lay its track out in front of you before you reach the end of it, but that doesn't detract from the fact that it maintains a solid frame rate and commendable level of detail throughout.
WipEout's Championship mode demands that I earn a top-three finish to advance to the next race in the competition. On my first attempt I finish the race in seventh place. On my second try I wind up in fifth. Perhaps I need to go back to the drawing board with my approach.
Twenty Minutes In...
Backing out to the menu I choose a different racer (Daniel Chang with the AG Systems team) and restart the Championship from the beginning. This time I fare much better, finishing in second place and qualifying for the next race of the tournament. In all honestly I don't know how much of this progress is down to the change in craft and how much is down to practice - the new vehicle feels a little more responsive in the turns, but it may just be that I'm starting to get used to the game's weird floaty physics. Whatever the reason, Canada gets left behind and the action relocates to Japan for the second race in the Championship. This next track feels suitably different from the first, with a palette swap from wintry grey to lush green. The corners are a little more demanding and a couple of them require use of the shoulder-button brakes to tackle them effectively. All in all it feels like a fair ramping up of the challenge, and one I'll try to rise to.
Forty Minutes In...
My time in the F3600 Anti Gravity Racing League is over. Although I win the Japanese heat first time, I'm unable to secure a podium finish in the next race, situated in Germany. It's a definite step up from the previous two tracks in terms of difficulty, combining blind corners with fiendishly challenging slalom-style chicanes and culminating in a fuck-you, straight-out-of-nowhere sharp turn onto the final straight. Try as I might, I can't keep up with my opponents and the best position I'm able to secure is fifth. As a side note, it's pretty impressive how embellished this game's lore is - the near-future setting clearly gave the writers an opportunity to have some fun trying to second-guess the geopolitical climate, although they got it pretty darn wrong in Europe's case.
Not wanting to repeat the races I've already been through to get back to this point, I decide to back out of Championship mode and take to the Single Race option, to sample some of the other tracks available in the game...
One Hour In...
...and it's here that WipEout loses me. It turns out that the game boasts a painfully meagre roster of tracks to race on. In addition to the three I've already seen (Canada, Japan and Germany), there are only four other race locations in the game - Russia, the United States, Greenland (which I guess has annexed itself from the US in this alternative future?) and a hidden track on Mars which apparently only unlocks after completing Championship mode on the higher Rapier difficulty. Even by 1995's standards, that seems like incredibly slim pickings as far as track variety goes.
What this ultimately means for my hour with WipEout is that I spend the last twenty minutes doing Single Races on the three tracks that I haven't raced on yet. As you might expect, they continue to ratchet up the difficulty from course to course, with the Greenland track in particular boasting corners so mind-bendingly tight that I don't think I ever want to experience it again. In turn, what this means for my overall experience with WipEout is that in just one single hour of play, I feel like I've seen all it has to offer. There's no hook, no conceit to the gameplay that could get its hooks into me and keep me coming back for more. It doesn't have the incremental progression that gripped me in the case of its descendant Fusion. It doesn't have a wide variety of tracks to race on, because in sixty minutes of play I've seen all but one of them. All it has is the offer to reward my patience and repeated playtime with better positions and lap times. In 1995 that might have been enough, but in the real twenty-first century, it sadly isn't. Satisfied, I power off the PSP and put it down.
The Verdict
I don't want people to come away from this thinking I didn't like WipEout. Considering it's over two decades old, I think it still plays remarkably well. There's a purity and simplicity to it, and when you're not battling the physics, the ebb and flow of piloting an anti-gravity racer makes it rewarding to pull off clean laps with no interruptions. Judged as a product of its time, there's no denying that it's a complete technical marvel, and its visuals and presentation impressed me on multiple occasions throughout the sixty minutes I spent with it. It's easy to see why it was the game that sold so many PlayStations at launch here in the UK.
Unfortunately there's just no escaping the fact that in terms of included content, WipEout is a woefully barren experience, especially by modern standards. Six tracks just doesn't cut it in my opinion, especially without any changes in their configuration. It severely limits replayability and throttles the potential of the Championship mode to be something more than a series of half a dozen incrementally harder races. The hour I spent with WipEout was fun, but I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything by not playing more of it. For that reason, it's going to receive the first PASS verdict of this blog series.
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That's going to do it for this initial edition of An Hour With.... It's been a fun blog to write and I'm really happy with the format, although I may need to tweak a couple of things before the next instalment. Speaking of which, next time I'll be donating an hour of my time to a first-person shooter from the PlayStation 3's back catalogue. What is it, and how will it fare in its sixty minutes in the spotlight? Be sure to return to find out. Until next time, thanks very much for taking the time to read this blog. Take care, and I'll see you around.
Daniel
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Currently playing - WipEout (PS1C)
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