After briefly skimming through my thoughts on the previous two Wipeout/wipEout/wipE'out" titles the 1001 list insisted we played, I have to conclude that the series can come across as a bit of a mixed bag. The games are a phenomenal blend of techno and action, set against the most stylish graphic design languages gaming has ever seen. Probably. But they can be a right pain in the arse to play sometimes, even when you call yourself a fan.
I do call myself a fan, but I must admit that, like the 1001 list, I kind of ignored the series in its middle. I can't actually remember if I ever owned the seventh entry - blimey, seventh? - the PlayStation Portable's second Wipeout, Wipeout Pulse. wipEout pulse. Whatever.
If I do still own it, I was a clever enough sod to leave it a few hundred miles away in the safety of a garage, which is a tad unfortunate, but there are ways and means to play video games, aren't there. And I'm not talking about the PS2 port of this, either...
Fun Times
Since we last saw the series, it has briefly gone to the Nintendo 64, presumably to compete with F-Zero, and then to the PS2, and I know for sure I didn't have Wipeout Fusion. After that, the developers showed off their skills on the PlayStation Portable with Wipeout Pure, and two years later, this here Wipeout Pulse.
It feels like I would have had at least one of these two PSP titles, but I may be confusing them with my memory of Wipeout 2048 on the PlayStation Vita. To get to the point, though, Wipeout was often, delightfully, a title that appeared early in a consoles life cycle to show off what the hardware could do, and rarely did it disappoint in that regard.
The campaign mode of Pulse takes the form of event grids where each ranked result you get unlocks at least one other event for you to take part in, and there are a few different types. The better your results in a grid, the more points you'll get towards unlocking the next grid, and there are 16 of these grids to work your way through as an employee of Feisar, the only correct team choice in the game.
Your first attempt at a race will show you how rusty you are with the controls, so it might be wise to find a time trial or sprint event to get familiar with the way these rollercoasters of a circuit flow and test your air-braking skills.
The controls couldn't be simpler - it is a racing game, after all. X to accelerate, the analogue nub or the D-pad to steer and even pitch your craft if you're feeling confident, and the shoulder buttons to open up the air brakes to allow for tighter turns around these futuristic circuits.
They look incredible. All of these screenshots are from the same track, yet they go through tight industrial tunnels and emerge into the cloudy skies of the Welsh countryside, where in the future, for reasons known only to the developers, there is a 5.2-kilometre-long anti-gravity race track through a secret energy park.
Once again, these screenshots only tell half of the story. They can look fabulous, yes, but to see them all strung together in motion, at over 500km/h, through all the twists and turns and stomach-churning loops is to see the PlayStation Portable shout "Come at me, bro! Think the DS can do this?"
Seeing this all in motion is as much of a work of art as the track, ship, and graphic design is themselves. Before I even get to the final word, I'm making it clear that you ought to see this in person.
In this mode, the track is replaced by a virtual reality interpretation that has a better colour palette than some entire games have. It's a look designed to get you into the zone, helped of course by the music, for in this mode, the only thing you need to worry about is steering and air-braking. Everything else is stripped away as your craft gets faster and faster and faster lap by lap by lap.
Once you've got yourself up to speed, it's time for a race. Here, alongside speed pads to get you out in front are weapon pads to reign someone back in, with the familiar set of weapons from the series. Machine guns, rockets, missiles, and mines, a short auto-pilot or shield, or a ruddy great big track deforming earthquake wave slowing down everything it manages to catch.
While there very much is a strategy of when and where to use a weapon, including whether to absorb its energy to refill your health bar instead of actually using it for its intended purpose, the pace is often so quick that a weapon is fired within seconds of you picking it up - just in time for you to hopefully drive over the next active weapon pad to fire something else off.
Frustrations
That is assuming you don't drive around the weapon pads, or even the boost pads, which I appear to have the uncanny ability to avoid.
It is next to vital - especially in the eliminator mode - to drive precisely, and pick up a weapon to unleash a brief burst of hellfire upon an unfortunate target. If you pick up a weapon, the pad blanks out for a few seconds, potentially meaning the pilot right behind you misses out on a chance to pick up a weapon themselves.
This is nothing new to the Wipeout gameplay, but it still incredibly annoying when you get stuck in a run of missing pads for one reason or another. Often it's your own fault. These ships aren't glued to the track, they require definitive inputs to get anywhere that isn't into the nearest wall.
Sometimes, though, it's not your fault at all. The AI in Pulse comes in a variety of difficulty levels, and right from the first, seemingly easiest grid of events, you can find yourself struggling for the top spots.
One solid hit is all it takes to see you screech to a halt and watch three opponents fly past you, and then over the weapon pad that you desperately needed to even the odds.
If you're not irked by the other craft, you might grumble about the whole nature of the grid system in the first place. You always have events to choose from, but sometimes you'll feel like you want more. I got into the second grid hoping for at least a new track to see from the first event, which I suppose I technically did get, but it was a mirror of one I'd already driven multiple events on.
While mirrored tracks do offer some changes to how a circuit is driven, I'm already moaning about the repetitive nature of Pulse and I'm less than 10 events into it. There are 12 tracks in this game, each mirrored, and that wouldn't be a bad number for many games. Here, though, the way there's no real way for you to choose what you want to do in the campaign, you're just left wanting more.
Final Word
There are online multiplayer modes for you to set up the track and event type you want, and the loyalty system for sticking with a team rewards you with new ship skins to parade around in, and I'm even lead to believe there was a website where you could create your own designs, which seems cool.
There's plenty to do in this neat little package, and it's easy enough to fall into the zone and just keep chipping away at it, one event at a time, to see what's under the next locked hexagon. Will it finally be a new track or your favourite event?
While there isn't a way of knowing what will appear, you know that when it loads in you will be shown a graphical powerhouse of a racing game that amazes to this day. I don't know what the PS2 port looks like, but I have to wonder whether it could match was the PSP was putting out. It seems like Pulse was tuned to perfection to run on this handheld.
It may be repetitive - what is a racing game if not repetitive? - but when you've got Aphex Twin, Kraftwerk, and many, many more names I'm sure mean something to fans of electronic music genres blaring in your ears, and you start to find yourself heading into that zone where the world around you falls away, your only focus the screen and the action taking place therein, who cares how much of a grind it may be?
I'll probably play some more Pulse, mostly because I'm impressed at how well the PSP can deal with it. I'll definitely be listening to this soundtrack for the rest of the afternoon.
Wipeout continues to impress, and I know for a fact it'll only get better than this - and this is awesome.
Fun Facts
You could listen to your own tracks saved on the PSP and imported into the game. Why you would though is anyone's guess. It was all the rage in the day. I remember important football chants into Pro Evo, of all things...
Wipeout Pulse, developed by SCE Studio Liverpool, first released in 2007.
Version played: PlayStation Portable, 2007, via emulation.