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...

The key difference between PS3 and XBOX 360 is...

Yes! Time to join the system bashing wars :-).

Unbelievable, I actually did it and bought the Playstation 3 on launch day. Like a 17-year old :-). There were plenty of them available at 5 pm, so the high price tag (600 Euros, that's about 750 US Dollar) really causes a lot of reluctance. With the PS3 I got me Motorstorm (which is supposed to be great), Resistance: Fall of Man (supposedly the best launch title) and, of course, Ridge Racer 7 (I don't know... I have bought every Ridge Racer, I simply like the mindless drifting and the cheap japanese pop music). In addition to that I needed a component video cable to connect the PS3 to my LCD tv. Then I was ready to go...

Or rather: ready to wait... Game consoles are not what they used to be. After I had configured the PS3 to connect to my WLAN, it told me that there is an OS update. Happily, I clicked "download". About an hour later my lowly 500 kBit/s Internet connection had transferred all the data, and some more minutes later I actually could play my first game. The rest (Dolby Digital, HD TV mode selection) works very straightforward and easily.

So how does the PS3 compare to other systems I own (i.e. the PS2, the XBOX, the XBOX 360)?

A) The PS3 vs. PS2 / XBOX

Yes, there is a point in comparing these systems :-). The whole point of the PS3 is delivering huge graphics power on a HD TV. On a normal TV, I couldn't see major differences of graphical beauty between the PS3 and particularly the XBOX. Titles like Burnout 3 on the XBOX or God of War for the PS2 look as good, if not better than Ridge Racer 7 or Motorstorm on the PS3. Sure, the polygon count is lower, but PS2 and XBOX games have been optimized for the normal TV screen while the PS3 images are scaled down. So if you do not own a Plasma/LCD TV, my suggestion would be to skip the PS3 (or the XBOX 360) and go for the much cheaper XBOX or PS2 with their huge library of also typically much cheaper games.

B) The PS3 vs. the XBOX 360

If you do own a HD TV, though, the level of detail, the richness of what you see, the precise lines, ... that the PS3 and the X360 offer, is worth the investment of a next gen console.

But which of the two is better?

To some extent it boils down to what you want. If you need WLAN (as I do) and want to watch HD DVDs, you get either a PS3 or an X360 with some add-ons for roughly the same price. If you just want a good gaming experience, the X360 is cheaper. If you want online competition, the free service of the PS3 will in the long run make it cheaper than the costly XBOX live service.

The capabilities of both consoles are, as of today, equal. Both deliver really stunning HD graphics, both deliver Dolby Digital sound, both can pull of the best gaming experience that you can think of. This is a bit like the competition of a Ferrari and a Porsche - it's far less the car that makes the difference than it is the driver. So, programmed properly, both consoles can give you incredible games. The difference here is not technical capabilities but support for developers (the Sega Saturn had 2 independent CPUs which - according to developer interviews - made it more difficult to program it. The PS3 has seven), company politics, and so on.

To me, the key difference is a very different one. The XBOX 360 makes a hell of a noise, the PS3 doesn't. Here's my personal experience:

• XBOX 360:
  
• there's a constant, loud hum, which also irritatingly varies in frequency (like going aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaoooaoooaaaaaaaaaaaaaa)
• there's also a high whirring noise, higher than 10 kHz
  
• and there's a low-frequency scraping noise from the disk drive (or HD?)
  
• PS3:
• there's a constant, low level noise of the fan.
• nothing else.

Maybe that sounds like the most irrelevant of all differences to you now, but to me it makes a huge difference. After a long, hectic working day in a typical IT office I just don't want the same noise level at home. The PS3 gives me that kind of relaxed gaming, the X360 doesn't. And this is why I was never happy with my XBOX 360, but I'm incredibly happy with my PS3.