Wipeout Pulse

» Written on December 27, 2007 at 9:28 PM «

Wipeout PulseIs Sony’s latest attempt to bring some of the juice back into the Wipeout franchise, starting with the excellent Wipeout Pure that they released back when the PSP was in its early stages of infancy, no doubt one of the saving graces of the PSP back when the Nintendo DS was still kicking its ass in every sense of the word.

Pulse was released in the EU regions on December 12th, and I’ve finally managed to get my hands on it after an extended wait. After Pure, which was my first foray into the Wipeout family, I was curious to see in which direction SCE would continue to nudge the franchise, as Pure for a PSP racer was, in my opinion, about as good as they get.

So, is Pulse worthy of claiming its title as the new and improved sequel to Pure? I’m not sure about others, but my answer is a goddamn resounding reply in the affirmative.

wp1For those of you who have never even heard of the Wipeout phenomenon, here’s the basics: it’s the future, you have fancy cars that are called ships, there are different teams and manufacturers making these various ships, and most importantly: these ships are undertaken in what we primitive beings call races. You know, to determine who’s the manliest among us drivers and stuff.

It’s not unlike our current racing industry, in case you were wondering. Except maybe with a little less booze.

Anyway, Pulse plays a lot like its predecessor Pure did, so fans of the earlier title will feel right at home with Pulse. If you don’t know what this means, the Wipeout series focuses on racing your beautifully designed ship along tracks specifically crafted to tug at your eyeballs while blasting techno music throughout your high-speed hallucination. In addition to the already insane speeds, Wipeout involves plenty of dirty, nasty maneuvers that you (and your opponents) can pimp off in order to slow your compatriots down and shave valuable seconds off your lap times.

For starters, Pulse allows you to obtain power-ups when you pass specially marked sections on the track; these power-ups can range from speed boosts to missles to goddamn friggin’ earthquakes when you use them, allowing you to infuriate your opponents to no end. Unless, of course, they’re CPU opponents, in which case you’d better stop laughing and keep your hand on that accelerate button.

wp2Pulse also has other track sections which will boost your speed when you hit them, a la Sonic the Hedgehog platformers of old. While this may not seem like much, such sections are usually placed right next to power-up areas, so it becomes a split-second decision or an unlucky maneuver which decides whether or not you choose to get a power-up or a speed boost or perhaps even nothing at all.

This may not seem like very much, and at first glance Pulse would appear to be similar to the other plethora of racers out available for a whole multitude of platforms. What sets Pulse, and the Wipeout series in general apart from the rest of the crowd, though, is its unparalleled integration of design and gameplay that serves to act as a major selling point long after the initial novelty has worn of, not to mention the amount of extra content that comes after the actual release date.
Also, it’s goddamned fun.

The Wipeout series has always been renowned for its excellent design, both in terms of graphics and visual style, incorporating a techno, futuristic theme without looking like an abuse of Photoshop. Pure already had a stellar user interface; Pulse raises the bar again with its new theme, favouring a darker, more industrial theme than Pure’s default minimalistic Apple-white influences and clean lines. Old timers will be pleasantly surprised to note that the old teams such as Assegai and Feisar have updated ships to match the new visual style.

wp3Track selection also works slightly differently in Pulse; instead of choosing your speed class (which essentially is analogous to difficulty) and then choosing a theme and then choosing a track, Pulse simplifies the process by introducing a Grid System, which is essentially, as the name implies, a nice-looking grid that shows the currently available events that you are allowed to compete in, be it normal races, time trials in which you progressively try to get your best time as possible, zones in which you see just how fast and far you can race before crashing your ship on the track and speed laps, in which you try to beat a predetermined time for a track. Instead of going through a hierarchy of menus before being allowed to even race, Pulse lets you select the grid you want to compete in, the track you want, and that’s it, you’re in. No other bullshit required. As such, it earns a gold star for streamlining the UI experience.

This, unknowingly, solves a simple problem that presented itself in Pure, I remember that I would only participate in actual races, and totally ignored the other events that were available. This, I feel, merely served to hurt my experience with the game in the end as I ended up burning out on it rather quickly. Being quasi-forced to participate in the other race types in Pulse at least manages to keep the gameplay from becoming hideously repetitive after an hour or so, and I found I could actually race better after racing alone a few times, due to learning how to cope with the more difficult aspects of handling my ship without having to worry about the imminent missile inevitably kissing my engines.

wp4Pure had its downfalls though, even though it wasn’t really considered a full-fledged racing title (due to its lower price). For instance, there was the issue of the fact that there was no Game Sharing feature, which meant that if you wanted to go head-to-head with another friend, both of you would need the UMD in your PSPs. Since I’m pretty sure most people, like me, don’t exactly carry their entire PSP collection wherever they go, this could be a problem. Additionally, Pure had no Infrastructure support, meaning that you wouldn’t be able to race with each other across the globe without the help of tunneling software such as Xlink kai. While understandable (servers cost money to maintain), this feature, or rather, the lack thereof, was often lamented about by owners of the original Pure.

Pulse has both Game Sharing and Infrastructure interfaces now. The latter does require a Playstation Network account, but the registration, while not entirely as painless as I would have preferred, is indeed functional.

The graphics in Pulse seem to be an actual improvement over Pure, if such a feat was actually possible. While both games appear to run on the same engine, Pulse definitely has reaped the benefits of tweaking; it runs flawlessly even when the action gets really, really intense. Pure would sometimes choke on graphics-intensive scenes, but Pulse runs as smooth as butter anytime. Of course, this might have to do with the fact that I ran Pure back then at a lower CPU clock speed, but hey, give me a break.

Honestly, though, Pulse just seems a lot more gorgeous than Pure ever did, especially with the redesigned HUD. wp5I had always felt that the weakest point of Pure’s design was its HUD, which just didn’t seem to fit in with the rest of the excellent artwork. Pulse’s new hexagonal approach to everything though really just streams with the flow.

I have no idea what that even meant but I’m pretty sure my point got across, though.

Speaking of graphics, Pulse also adds something new to the table, something which many PSP owners would probably kill to have: the ability to actually take screenshots, which is fittingly called the Photo mode in-game. How this works is that you can take a screenshot anytime during, and even after a race is over simply by hitting select. You have the option to rotate the camera around in full 360 when doing this, and you can even choose to hide the HUD when doing so. Screenshots are saved at the PSP’s resolution (480 x 272 pixels) in the JPEG container format when you hit Circle. No proprietary format, no loss in quality, not even a dip in performance. This is how it’s done.

Fun fact of the day: half the screenshots in this review were taken with said function. Honestly, it’s not every day you see a PSP game, or even a handheld title for that matter allow you the ability to capture such moments without requiring some magical intervention of some sort. Pulse, in allowing gamers this ability, essentially tells us to enjoy our memories of the game, and ostensibly allows itself to be promoted virally of sorts through such chicanery.

Pulse’s soundtrack will be immediately familiar to anyone who’s even vaguely familiar with techno; the soundtrack is essentially a blend of synthesized digital-ism and catchy motifs that may not have you banging your head to them, but will definitely have your hands sweating like waterfalls as you strugglwp6e to get ahead of that one competing ship in front of you. Best of all: it’s not the kind of techno that has horrible synthesized voices blaring away at you, sounding like your mom when she’s incensed or in some similar mood. Everyone has different taste in music, of course, but Pulse’s soundtrack fits. For those who breathe Wipeout, Pulse’s playlist tends to focus a little more on the darker side of techno to fit the new industrial theme it’s gotten, so don’t say you weren’t forewarned if you were expecting something from Beautiful Katamari.

The audio experience in Pulse, while certainly not worthy of an Emmy or anything like that, is decent enough: ships collide with enough shrieks when their paintjobs scrape, missiles go boom with satisfying visual and aural effects, and earthquakes kick up the bass a notch. Fans of the femme digitale voice that has been a staple of the Wipeout franchise will be happy to know that Pulse continues this tradition; the announcer voice still remains as such, though of course it is not a mere carbon copy of Pure’s sound files.

In conclusion? Pulse is one of those games in which you think you’ve seen it all before, but then you realize that it’s just so crazy awesome with so much new content that you miss it, and then you go take out Pure again and try to wean yourself off the urge to buy the new sequel, but then you can’t resist and end up going to the store anyway. My advice? Just skip the earlier step and head right to the store.

Following the proud tradition of downloadable content, Wipeout Pulse features additional content that will be made available soon. In addition, there is a tool available for users to create their own custom textures for their ships. More information can be found at the official website.

   

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