Wipeout Pulse

I've been playing lots of New Super Mario Bros. DS, but over the last couple days I finally pulled the wrapping off of Wipeout Pulse & dug into the game, which I got from The Source for $9.97 a while ago. Score.

It's fun... I'm a big fan of Wipeout Pure; I still think it's one of the best PSP games in the library. Unfortunately, every system seems to have an overabundance of 1 genre of games; For the original Xbox it was FPS games, for the Wii it's obviously minigame collections. And for the PSP, it's racing games.

But in my opinion, Wipeout Pure is one of the best of the genre. And Wipeout Pulse lives up to the high standards set by Wipeout Pure. It's a great game, but it does feel like more of the same. They haven't changed much at all... which is both good & bad.

If you're ravenous for more Wipeout PSP gaming, Wipeout Pulse would be the obvious choice. But even if you're new to the franchise, either one would probably do.... there's no story, it's just basically racing. I'm only early into it, but I find Wipeout Pulse has more time trials & "beat a certain time" events, and less actual races against AI opponents. I'd rather have more races... so that's one of my quibbles about it.

It also seems like the speed pads are placed just so you'll miss them unless you're really experienced with the tracks. I found the placement more natural in Wipeout Pure.

A nice feature with Wipeout Pulse is that you can import some mp3 tracks into the game. You create a folder named WIPEOUT in the MUSIC folder, and you can put up to 30 tracks into the game. I always wish that more games would take advantage of this feature, as the PSP is a multimedia device, so it seems like a natural. It is so freakin' awesome to be barreling down these futuristic tracks while listening to The Who's Baba O'Reily....

Wipeout Pure also supports gamesharing-- another great PSP feature that should be used more often by game developers. With 1 copy of the game, you can download a small portion of it to another PSP without the game. You can also do multiplayer with another PSP with only 1 copy... the content is limited of course, but it's a nice feature to have.




later
don