Wipeout (the real wipeout) on my lowly PSP!

Oh joy! Today I've played my first games of Wipeout on my PSP. Not the "Wipeout Pure" crap (well, crap is to be taken only relatively to Wipeout, actually it's a fine game) with flashy graphics and boring gameplay, but the real thing!

Wipeout was the first game I've ever owned for the PS1 (together with Ridge Racer, which was no match for Wipeout), and, together with Nethack and maybe Civilization, the game that I spent most time with. Far too much time, actually...

What's so special about Wipeout? Other than the later, toned down versions of the game, Wipeout offers cool physics, perfect track layout, and unforgiving collision handling:

• cool physics: Other than a car, an AG ship hovers over the track. This means that its mass and current velocity will pull it into its current direction quite a lot. In the original Wipeout this effect was modelled quite nicely: you actually had to turn before you entered the turn in order to not hit the wall and accelerate perfectly out of the turn. This made it quite a challenge just to pass through the track without hitting a wall. Later versions have toned down the physics a lot, making the vehicles handle more like cars.
• perfect track layout: There are, as far as I remember, only two turns in the whole game that require air brakes (in Rapier class in the last track). The rest can be driven at full speed. You just have to take turns earlier than you think, and experiment with the racing line.
  
• unforgiving collision handling: you hit a wall means you hit a wall. You'll nearly stop.

These three facts make it hard to get into the game, but the feeling of achievement when you take this tricky turn perfectly for the first time, the trance-like feeling of gliding through tricky twists and turns, and the enjoyment of your first perfect lap make it worth continuing :-)

And now I can play the game on my PSP. And boy do I suck after nearly 10 years of not playing Wipeout.

Shockingly, I had to pay another 5 Euros to download this game from the Playstation Store (in addition to the 50 it cost me for the PS1 back then), but no money is too much for the lovely Wipeut :-).

Actually you can now also play Wipeout on the PS3, but, honestly, after I quit out of Oblivion running in HD, the good old 320x200 of Wipeout with bleached-looking textures and massive draw-in looked so bad that I immediately gave up.

On the PSP it looks like Wipeout always looked, it sounds like Wipeout always sounded, and (except for NegCon support) it plays like Wipeout has always played. Fantastic! Get it, now, but be aware of the game being very frustrating for a few days...