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WipEout Pulse: Anti-grav addon for your PSP
TeeMan
BrainSpoonRegistered User regular
BrainSpoonRegistered User regular
What is it?
Are you serious?D: WipEout Pulse is the lastest in a long line of futuristic anti-gravity racing series that encompasses a unique control scheme with offensive and defensive weapons to aid you against its' great AI. With loads of different speed, difficulty and ship classes, it's easy to find your favourite setup to race in if you're a fan of the series.
What's new about it?
Well if you've played WipEout Pure to death, all you'll find here is a refining of the same mechanics; not a massive departure. Here's a short rundown of new things you can expect:
- 12 all-new tracks
- 12 racing teams including 2 new teams; EG-X and Mirage
- In addition to the Pure game modes (Single Race, Zone, Tournament, Time Trial and Free Run) comes Speed Lap and Eliminator
- "Mag-Strip" feature makes your craft stick to the tracks for some mind-bending track designs
- 2 all-new weapons in Eliminator mode: Repulsor and Shurikens
- All-new ship skin customisation tool lets you create skins on your PC, load them up to your PSP and skin out your ship of choice! Think Forza 2
- Tired of the same tournaments? Problem solved with the new RaceBox function that allows you to set up and save any combination of races. These can also be uploaded online.
- Scalible difficulty means you can still fly all the fastest anti-grav craft in the game and not go up against herculian AI. Conversly if you want to make the slower craft more interesting, max out that difficulty!
- The new photo mode will allow you to pause and take shots of your craft at any time to save on your memory stick.
Sure, those are all good reasons. But why would I want to buy this over Pure?
WipEout Pure today still stands in my books as the greatest exploiter of downloadable content for the PSP in terms of vehicles, themes, tracks and music. This sequel will build on this expectation from day 1 of the release.
But these really pale in comparison to the two greatest new features.
Wireless multiplayer via AdHoc and Infastructure mode up to 8 players! And my personal favourite... FINALLY you can play the MP3s on your SD card IN-GAME!! Even though I'm expecting the packaged music to be amazing as usual, I'm very excited to see how different genres of music from my own collection will sound.
What official music tracks are packaged with the game?
Aphex Twin - Fenix Funk 5 (Wipeout Mix)
Booka Shade - Steady Rush
B-Phreak - Break Ya Self (Wipeout Remix)
DJ Fresh - X-Project (100% Pure Mix)
Dopamine - Flat-Out
Ed Rush, Optical & Matrix - Frontline
Kraftwerk - Aero Dynamik
Loco Dice - City Lights
Mason - Exceeder (Special Mix)
Mist - Smart Systems
Move Ya! & Steve Lavers - Chemical
Noisia- Seven Stitches
Rennie Pilgrem & Blim - Slingshot
Shlomi Aber & Guy Gerber - Sea of Sound (Wipeout Mix)
Stanton Warriors - Tokyo
Booka Shade - Steady Rush
B-Phreak - Break Ya Self (Wipeout Remix)
DJ Fresh - X-Project (100% Pure Mix)
Dopamine - Flat-Out
Ed Rush, Optical & Matrix - Frontline
Kraftwerk - Aero Dynamik
Loco Dice - City Lights
Mason - Exceeder (Special Mix)
Mist - Smart Systems
Move Ya! & Steve Lavers - Chemical
Noisia- Seven Stitches
Rennie Pilgrem & Blim - Slingshot
Shlomi Aber & Guy Gerber - Sea of Sound (Wipeout Mix)
Stanton Warriors - Tokyo
Enough talk, show me some pics!
Ohhh boy you aren't going to be disappointed...
When's this game getting released?
Europe: 14/12/07 (I've seen it on ebay already however)
Australia: 14/12/07
America & Japan: Uhh...
Links and Reviews
WipEout Pulse Homepage
IGN AU Review: 9.0
Well thats enough from me. This is a definite first day purchase for me and hope to see some of you PA guys n gals online
This is also my first OP, hope you like it
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That said, someone really needs to make a thread about BEATS. I don't want to derail this thread, but man, that game is nice.
Click image for my huge backlog
That said, this looks shiny.
Pure and Fusion both got it wrong in different ways, and it's vital to me.
I'll be able to tellya this weekend.
I really like Pure, though I don't know if I'm enough of a fan to justify picking up the sequel when I've barely done half of the original. The online multi and custom soundtrack support is killer, though.
Fair trade in my books, Wipeout FTW.
This thing called Pulse
I hear it's pretty good
A short review or read it with screenshots here:
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.
More screenshots!
T-shirts | Last.fm | Flickr | dA
That said, I long for a console iteration of this series.
That being said, I will totally be snagging this. I loved Pure, and I'm looking forward to Pulse/HD/PS3 versions a lot.
Fucking shit.
Maybe they didn't want to get involved in the holiday rush. The problem is with the 4000000000 other games that are also coming out around that time for the same reason.
2 days after Super Smash Bros Brawl? It fails. :P
This is referencing the US launch BTW. I've tried various PSPs and copies of the game, though I haven't tried a Slim or a Greatest Hits copy, but I doubt they help (despite my earlier reports, Sony had nothing about it in their support database when I called back well after the GH release).
You couldn't put the PSP to sleep and then wake it back up and play another race if you had any downloaded content on your Memory Stick. This was critical for the tournaments that lumped in all your downloaded tracks with every basic and unlocked track! Also, this game took a particularly long time to get started if you had to do a real shut-down every time your quit playing.
Import. PSP = Region Free
Sweet. Hello Ebay!
I'm still bitter about Canada getting fucked on the Rock Band release, so I tend to go up in flames lately when dealing with non-worldwide release dates.
And not wanting to release it now because of all the other games is a pretty shitty reason. If its a good game, it will sell. If not, well, stop making shitty, forgettable games.
My only conern is that it might not play well with your US/CAN compadres and it might be using a distant laggy European server when you go online. Oh, and the download content did differ between regions for WipEout PurE.
You know, because crashing your PSP is so fun.
Yea the game took a while to load up if you had custom content though, that's not entirely unreasonable to expect but without those packs it really loads super fast though. What I did was to have one pack of tracks on at a time, and I didn't bother installing the silly custom ships they offered.
T-shirts | Last.fm | Flickr | dA
How quaint.
edit: of course i love wipeout and this is still a great game but nothing revolutionary being brought to the series (although i do like the new ui)
Eliminator Mode.
I don't think this sort of game type is right for this kind of racing. I've played it a whole heap of times and I'm still a little unsure about how to approach it. Do you purposely lag behind everyone to chip away at them, get right in the thick of things with lots of explosions or charge out to a large lead and drop defensive weapons? A mix of the first and second methods seem to work best for me, but it just isn't fun.
More often than not I just find myself cruising around slowly and absorbing any weapons that arent leach, repulsor or quake.
But its a minor gripe compared to the rest of the game, which I'm really enjoying!
Favourite PSP game of 2007 by a mile
Edit: Oops, Puzzle Quest is my PSP GotY, but Pulse is a close second haha.
T-shirts | Last.fm | Flickr | dA
Chalk and cheese, in other words.
For those who like WipEout, a week long playthrough has re-enforced me with the opinion that this is the best in the series since XL/2097 - and actually the better of the two. Racebox is a lovely structure for this type of game, it reminds me a little of DiRT in the sense there are different themed challenges in each box. The repetition of each track early on means you learn them quickly and effectively, making for sweet demonstrations of racing prowess on the tougher ones.
eg Speed boost over ramp + barrel roll + boost from said barrel roll into sweeping left hand turn OHSHITTURNRIGHT aiiiiirbraaaakkess .... GET!
....
Ahem.
I'm slightly happy with it. 8-)
But why do you have to wait 45seconds after the race has ended?? ~3min races with a 45sec break inbetween them feels like an eternity.