GAME CLEAR No. 190 -- WipEout HD

WipEout HD (2008, PS3)

Part of Compilation: WipEout Omega Collection (2017, PS4)
Compilation Developer: XDev, Clever Beans, Creative Vault Studios
Compilation Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment
Original Developer: Studio Liverpool
Original Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
Clear Version: PS4
Clear Platform: PS4, PS5
Clear Date: 9/8/24

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Why should I care?
Tightly designed and aesthetically beautiful, WipEout HD surely delivers the goods for a certain type of racing fan, even if that may not be me.

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This is a part of Liverpool they returned me to

Well, it finally happened. I finally finished a WipEout title. I’ve given this series a couple tries, but I’ve never quite loved it. I still don’t.

And I don’t really think that’s WipEout’s fault. It’s a gorgeous and well-crafted futuristic hovercraft racer. That sounds a lot like F-Zero, one of my favorite series of all time! But it just doesn’t quite hit the same.

I think at least part of that is the presentation. WipEout HD — which by the way is not an HD remake of the original PS1 game, as its name may lead you to believe, but instead a mashup of tracks from PSP titles WipEout Pure and WipEout Pulse — has a rather substantial single-player mode, but it feels very sterile and soulless. You progress through a series of hexagonal grids, each of which represents a racing event. Medal that event, and it will fill in that space on the grid and unlock any locked adjacent cells. Earn enough medal points, and you’ll unlock the next grid. Fine.

That’s a functional way to organize things, but there’s something very unfulfilling about it. There’s no real fanfare when you succeed. Tournament modes don’t have a cute little podium presentation when you win. The various teams you can race for aren’t characterized at all except by the livery painted on each of their vehicles. In this way, it contrasts strongly with F-Zero, which does have those nice little bits of making you feel like the races you’re participating in matter at all. Later titles in the series have story modes to flesh out its silly little characters too. It’s nice! It makes me care more about what’s going on.

The good news, I suppose, is that it at least made it possible for me to beat this over the course of seven years. I could drop it for as long as I wanted without feeling like I was losing even the slightest bit of context. And to be clear, part of what kept me coming back to it (apart from backlog guilt) is that the races genuinely are fun. While I prefer the controls of F-Zero, I will grant that that’s mostly personal preference. WipEout controls very tightly in its own way, and mastering different tracks and ships is satisfying. I enjoyed returning to it once again to finally get the last couple dozen gold medals I needed to clear this game. What I don’t know is how inspired I am to take on WipeEout Fury, included on the same compilation, which is a set of a million more challenges across a host of all-new tracks. Maybe now that I have a PSVR, which the Omega Collection supports, that’ll be more compelling. We’ll see.

I’m maybe more inclined to check out one of the original PS1 games to see what they were cooking on much more limited hardware. Maybe the offline nature of the games makes the single-player experience more rewarding, as I do have a hunch that WipEout HD was perhaps an online-multiplayer-forward game. Maybe if I’d been around when the servers were populated, I’d have enjoyed that too (I certainly have gotten plenty of mileage out of F-Zero 99 and will continue to).

I’m probably not quite done with WipEout just yet, but I’m certainly not ready to give it the Nixon dot Computer endorsement yet either. We’ll see what future GAMEs CLEAR bring, though.