Web Design
While the bulk of the gameplay in WipEout Pulse is exactly like the hectic racing action found in past iterations, the real advancement occurs not on your PSP but on your PC. See, WipEout Pulse comes equipped with a jazzy website with a ton of cool features (although, at present, only a few are accessible). You can download wallpapers now, but Sony has said that you will be able to download everything from new ship designs to new race tracks... but that stuff isn't even the best part. WipEout Pulse will enable you to repaint any hovercraft to your own specifications, giving you complete control over the look of your speed-machine. We're total suckers for cool customization, so this added layer to the classic Wipeout formula is exactly the kind of thing that gets us excited.
The Adobe Shockwave-based design app that powers the website's customization features is extremely impressive. It offers a full host of editing tools that you can use to completely redesign the paint job on your hovercraft or just swap out color palettes. You can paint right on the hovercraft model if you want, but designers with a more precise eye may want to go in and edit the underlying texture graphics. Either way, Sony has provided players with everything they need to add their own personal touches to their racers. Honestly, we've probably spent more time coloring our African Assegai Developments racing vehicle than we've spent actually racing the thing.
We always roll with Assegai Developments as our racing team.
Nuts and Bolts
One thing that we noticed while screaming down the neon-drenched raceways of WipEout Pulse was that there seemed to be fewer of them available than in the previous games. Though we haven't spent much time with the game so far, we've only seen about four different tracks, but part of that could be due to the way WipEout Pulse's track progression is set up (while another part of it could be that Sony has more downloadable tracks on the way). Rather than simply choose a track to race, you enter a Grid, which is basically just a fancy word for "bunch of races."
These races come in a few different varieties and we have to admit that we're still trying to figure out how the new Zone race works. Mostly, you'll race around the track with a pack of other hover-jockeys blasting away at you and each other, but you can also race time trials in which the game saves the ghost of your first lap and displays its misty after-image during subsequent laps. You can turn the ghost off in the options if you don't want it, but we found that it made the time trial races a bit more urgent and engaging and really helped us pull off better times with each successive lap.
As we said before, Zone races are a bit confusing because they seem almost exactly like time trials except that your ship gets a little speed promotion at set intervals of ten seconds. The basic idea seems to be to survive to reach a certain speed class (broken down from slowest to fastest into Venom, Flash, Rapier and Phantom), but we're still not sure exactly how this race type is scored even though we seem to do consistently well at it.
Apart from the freaky Zone race type and the superlative customization and web support, WipEout Pulse seems fairly identical in theme to past games in the series. We even picked out veteran soundtrack moguls Apex Twin and Kraftwerk (Kraftwerk!) while racing, so you can be positive that the classic techno tunes are up to par. Everything that we have come to expect from a Wipeout game seems to be in WipEout Pulse, so maybe we won't viciously savage the dorky capital E in the title until the game's actual release in February.
