WipEout 2097: Accelerated Adrenaline Rush For Future PeopleNever dwell on past days. Leave those damp brown days alone.2097 was/will be a heck of a year. Not only will the next generation of WipErs be WiPing up a storm, but in the universe where Epic Games stayed Mega, giant anime-wannabe robots will be beating seven shades out of each other in the One Must Fall 2097 tournament.
Today, it's the year 2023, so compared to 1996 I'm definitely Future People. I found this game in a shop for £2.99 this month but they knocked 99p off because neither of us liked WipEout. True story.
I don't know whether or not I like WipEout to tell the truth. I've barely played it 'properly'. (Though, fun fact, I'm in the credits for Wipeout HD 'cause I was an intern at Sony, so disclosure or something. I wonder if the barrel-roll-off-the-track-then-respawn-incorrectly bug is still there.) The only times I've played WipEout in the past were probably maybe a dodgy copy a hundred years ago with no music and possibly even no sound effects, so the whole experience was a bizarre, quiet, mysterious cyber-shambles where occasionally I had weapons, occasionally I didn't and I didn't understand a thing that was going on. By complete coincidence, that's exactly how I ended the previous post about Them Sonic so this works out super neatly.
I never had one before, but this is
my copy of WipEout. My very first and my very own. I played this copy on the PS2 first, but then moved onto my brother's PSone because the PS2's CD laser wasn't up to streaming the CD track music without glitches, sadly. But the little bar-o'-soap PSone was a super trooper and everything was dandy.
WipEout 2097 is the second game in the series; Psygnosis decided to skip the intervening 2095 numbers and go straight from 1 to 2097. Except in America where this one's called WipEout XL which makes it sound like an expansion pack to the first game. The third game has a regular edition called Wip3out, which I'm sure retailers and suppliers loved, and a separate, later Europe-exclusive Special Edition which
was an expansion pack/replacement and included stuff from earlier games, and the PS2 games onward ditch the numbers. Except the Vita one which puts a year in again, setting it before this game, as if that matters.
After I prised open the well-worn box (an overnight stay in a bowl of Lidl's finest dish suds for you I think), I spent some time admiring the sticky, kid-used manual's gratuitous use of fluorescent orange and silver inks. And chuckling at the way the German manual gives slick translations for all of the sci-fi weapons, but the French version goes for 'Le Electro Bolt', 'Le Turbo Boost' and so on. There's some deep WipEout 2097 lore in the manual to get you in the mood.
Quote:
future word...
"A ball bounces. A pin drops. A man falls.
Gravity is the glue which binds us to our planet.
We are about to apply the solvent which will free our species forever."
Pierre Belmondo (Director of European AG Research) speaking at a demonstration of anti-gravity technology, Nevada, April 2035.
-
the year? 2097
No room for manoeuvre. The world is shrinking... like a raisin from a grape.
From East to West... from North to South... meeting your shadow and the echo of your mind before you even knew you'd left.
Landscapes curling through space, hewn from rock, cut from ice. Ships blur like the smears of hurled paint. Tracking the globe, soundtracking your dreams and your visions...
Never dwell on past days. Leave those damp brown days alone.
Our future has more colour. More speed. More noise. Our future has more...
From jungle to city to the recesses of your mind. Shake your head and free yourself.
Free yourself.
The menu is confusing and looks cheap but at least it has one, since WipEout had some static screens that looked chucked together at the last minute. The horizontal panels of the screen scrape apart and slam together and waitaminnit isn't that the same as Rollcage? (Which is also Psygnosis? (Published at least? (And on the back of the CD for 2097 there's a 'Psygnosis Racing' brand label, which doesn't appear in the game, so it was a 'thing' was it? (Or was it? I wonder!))))
The intro has some flashy but awkwardly animated ships flying about and then one explodes. There's no FMV pit girl telling you to fasten your seatbelt or slick sonofabitch telling you to prepare for the future regions of outrageous. You're on your own, and the menu gives you absolutely no clue what you're supposed to be doing (yes, racing, I know). The manual isn't that much help. There's Arcade mode and Time Trial and that's it. The manual says there's a championship mode with lives, but it's just not there. I guessed that you have to get a gold medal in each race win the WipEout and be crowned The Most WipEst, and that was correct!
This game is sponsored by Red Bull! (This post is not. It is sponsored by our lynx overlords who will reclaim their planet in due course.) According to the loading screens, Red Bull increases your reaction time, but I doubt the medical authority of that statement. The first game didn't have Red Bull sponsorship, it had adverts for other Psygnosis games like Krazy Ivan and Tenka, which is really sweet and cool tbh. It makes total sense. And apparently WIPE OUT is a disaster movie in the WipEout universe?
Progression is clunky and awkward. You have to manually go into the menu and select the track and flick through all the pages to find what you want and what you need. When you get golds in each race, a prerendered text animation shows up and congratulates you for qualifying to race in the F5000 Phantom! Doesn't that sound swish? Because I'm a complete WipEout noob, I spent a couple of minutes perplexed in the ship select menu trying to find the F5000 Phantom so I could race in it before my cat mind worked out that the F5000 Phantom is the name of the racing league we're participating in.
The progression is:
- Six tracks are available. Play each of them in Arcade individually and get 1st to get a gold medal on the track select screen.
- Challenge I is available. Play through all six tracks back to back with three lives and get 1st to advance. Non-podium finishes or destructions lose a life.
- Eight tracks are available. Play each of them in Arcade individually and get 1st to get a gold medal on the track select screen.
- Challenge II is available. Play through all eight tracks back to back with three lives and get 1st to advance. Non-podium finishes or destructions lose a life.
- You get the secret ship. It's a secret because the manual says there are rumours of a prototype super ship, but there's no information available - except on the front of the game case where the hidden fifth team is shown along with the others. Oh well. The back of the case gives away that there are supposed to be eight tracks too, but you will never ever get to see them unless you're a racing GOD. Or you buy OPSM and get the cheats.
When you first get into gameplay in 2097 your mind will be obliterated with purest unadulterated 'Holy Shit! This Is Fast! This Game Is Rad! But it's a HOME CONSOLE GAME! I can OWN THIS and HAVE THIS IN MY HOUSE!'.
WipEout 2097 is some
clever shit. By modern retrospective standards maybe it doesn't look like it will blow your mind (say, the draw distance is a bit obvious sometimes), but when you're in motion this game is the absolute business. WipEout 2097 shows up to the gaming year of 1996 throwing five aces on the table and holding a knife to your throat.
Received wisdom says that Golden Grahams are too tasty for geeks and Yorkie bars are not for girls. WipEout 2097 is not for humans. There's no map, except on the track select screen, which is annoying. No rally copilot or warning symbols. Not that you'd have time to look at anything like that since everything is whooshing so fast even on moderate difficulty that your face is planed flat by the power of the game. There's sudden corners that I have no idea how you'd navigate, and some of these are in pitch black darkness or over ledges.
You have to learn the tracks. You have to go
beyond learning the tracks. You have to become the tracks. You can't trust what your eyes see because what the game shows you isn't useful enough. By the fifth race I was on the edge of my chair peering forward at the middle twenty percent of the screen flying by pretending my ship was twenty meters further ahead than it was so that by the time I reached that position I'd be turning sufficiently to make the turns. On the last race I had repeated it enough that I became a being of pure energy and won it by a marathon. Which is a far cry from the
multiple times that I'd gotten into second and gotten tangled up with what I thought was the first place guy only to find that he was the
twelvth place guy (no HUD position markers) and after passing him and the first place guy I end up crashing into the
eleventh place guy and dropping back into second and then third. Oh how I laughed.
This game is from 1996 and it doesn't support analogue sticks, and there's no mention of it supporting steering wheels on the back of the case. You're stuck with the regular original gamester - the PS1 controller's digital pad. And MAN it hurts your thumb after a while. That thing is stiff. One race is all it takes for you to get a serious case of the Nintendo Thumb - numbness and painness and flatness all over. Kiss your nerves goodbye.
It does support the Namco NeGcon (that's the controller that looks like a SNES pad but the two halves twist like you're wringing a flannel dry to let you turn in racing games) if you have one. Which I don't, and I don't know anyone who does. I wonder if those things still work after thirty years. I'd be worried I'd shear the thing in half within minutes of getting my hands on it.
I don't know if I like the controls in WipEout 2097. I've not gotten used to them at all, and I can't really say I've gotten any good at the game. The accelerator doesn't feel like it applies acceleration, it instead temporarily sets your throttle to a higher value. If you release it after applying some, you'll accelerate a little more (either that or -every single time I tested- I was on a slope) afterwards. Turning feels like the awful acceleration-applied aiming that console FPSes FOOLISHLY love to attempt in these 2010-years where the turning becomes more severe the more you hold the control down. I say foolishly because the control in question on a modern console would be ANALOGUE ANYWAY. I get there's no other way to do analogue turning with a D-pad so OKAY just give me goddamn digital turning; I'll feather the button if I want something less than full intensity for two seconds if I hold Right for two seconds. Let me input what I mean, dammit.
There's no brakes. No wait, there is brakes. I got all the way to the final race without using them. The brakes are split into a left and right brake. Both at once slows you right the heck down, one at a time turns your ship into megasoap and hurls you into the outside wall. Strange how using the brakes makes you more hovercraft-ish than just driving.
The walls in WipEout 2097 are clingy sticky velcro nightmares and the collision regions are gigantic cuboids despite the ships being all pointy darts. If you touch a wall once in this game you might as well sell your console. If you're incredibly,
incredibly lucky, your contact might be interpreted as a scrape and you'll get some sparks and be permitted to go on your way. Otherwise, be prepared to say hello to the last three places you passed. Some guides suggest that pitching the ship nose up will help (is that what the pitch controls are for??), but my poor hand is worked hard enough already by this game.
Reviews comparing WipEout 1 to this game said that Psygnosis had vastly improved the wall collisions so they're not as sticky. To which I say
what. I can only imagine that touching a wall in WipEout 1 scrapes your ship into polygon fragments instantly and causes your hometown to fall into a crevasse.
Despite this, the insta-slow barriers appear to be very shallow in height. Too many of the games generous boost pads are directly before ninety degree turns, often on ramps, so unless you crush the shoulder buttons to brake you'll be shot into the sky through walls and off the track.
Except for one specific wall, the front hoarding of the Potempkin building, which is a fucking joke. You WILL hit this building, no matter how prepare you are. And if you DON'T hit the front, you'll hit the INSIDE as your ship hits the ground, bounces up into the air and then smashes against the interior ceiling.
Speaking of which, there's some large jumps in the game which send your craft into an uncontrollable self-destructive tantrum where the craft's nose slams repeatedly into the ground and losing tons of speed. Even in longplays of people winning the Challenge modes they scratch the walls sometimes and go into the ground slamming tantrum. So.
Despite the game letting you/forcing you to fly off the track into the jagged polygon laden darkness, there's no shortcuts in WipEout with the exception of one probably unintentional one in the penultimate level. Whether that's good or bad depends on whether you like shortcuts. I like it when racing games' physics are coherent and predictable enough and the rules are lenient enough that I can pop outside the track for some milk and rejoin it later if it looks like I can plausibly get away with it. Like Grid. Need For Speed Most Wanted -doesn't- do this since its rollercoaster-spiderweb world is a series of very strict wide tunnels for you to race around in. Forza Horizon on the other hand lets you carve Scotland in two with a single handbrake turn if you choose. Anyway Grid is cooler than WipEout 2097 is what I'm saying.
The game is old enough to have password saves but also memory card saves. It has the nifty old-fashioned spinning 3d models of a controller/memory card in the options, which is always welcome. (EDIT - WAIT, NO, SHIT that's WipEout 1!) The passwords are the PS shapes but you enter them on up-down reels rather than typing them in, which is just nonsense.
The intro is okay but not great. The best thing about it is there's a cat. It has the stupid awful horrible unbelieveable probably deliberate but stupid error of having a decrementing checkpoint timer (like the game does) but the deciseconds place goes up rather than down... 4.7 4.8 4.9 3.0 3.1 3.2... it looks sloppy, is what it does. I saw an AI upscaling and upframerating of it that was pretty clever.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sRsXfpnQFEThe opponents are a Pain In The Arse. They're the type that has a set speed and route and nothing will make them deviate from it. Never ever expect them to make a mistake. I don't think they can. They work on completely different physics from the player, if they run on physics at all, taking turns you can't and accelerating in ways you can't. They have a lower top speed than you so you can catch them if you're an absolute master at the tracks. But being an absolute master probably means you're doing crazy things like braking for turns and so on, and you're gonna be upset that they don't have to do the same since they'll just magically glide through you and shove you aside while you're in the middle of playing the game properly.
Shooting the opponents is risky too since you can only shoot opponents that are in front of you of course, and stunned opponents that are in front of you tend to
slow down in front of you and get tangled up with you thanks to the huge collision boxes and then you're both slowed. Except then they can accelerate back to their magic Scalextric speed while you're stuck in 12th.
There are weapons in this game and they all suck. They're impossible to aim and impossible to use. You'll just use what you're given when you have it and do your best. Or turn off powerups entirely if you get sick of the constant threat detection voice telling you you're about to be shot and there being nothing you can do about it. Not that the AI uses the weapons all that much - they never use quake or plasma or boost and they act as if they're on autopilot all the time anyway. That doesn't stop them from driving over the panels milliseconds before you do and deactivating them, giving them the advantage. (Assuming (unwisely) they play by those rules too.)
The weapon icons don't have names and they're hard to decipher (doubly so when the threat voice is reading out the name of different weapons). I never knew what was going on when I played a dodgy copy a hundred thousand years ago and I barely do now. Pop quiz: out of the Rocket and Missile, which one is the lock-on one and which is the triple-shot one?
The shield powerup lasts too long, doesn't help you against wall collisions, and prevents you from using other, more useful things like the boost and autopilot when it's active.
The quake one says in the manual to just try it and you'll laugh your arse off. The effect is pretty cool - it sends a ripple down the track like a wafted carpet distorting the geometry and throwing the enemy about. The wave is so tall and slow that it blinds you for a moment, so, uh, don't.
The powerups do seem to have a handicap weighting: the autopilot that doubles your top speed and takes all the turns for you appears a lot when you're ninth or below. So... that's good? But the autopilot also tends to disengage automatically when you're about to encounter a turn that you really needed a year or two to prepare for but the autopilot didn't because it's a cheating robot. So... that's bad.
The five tiers of car feel very difficult to drive to each other, which is not something all games manage. Every time you get used to how 'whoosh' your current preferred car is, the next one down is always 'waaaaaogh!!'. The final secret reward car for completing the entire game is hyper zoomy and very hard to race with. You need to be a hyper-evolved next level humanoid to even try.
I had to manipulate the options and try every car to find combinations that worked for me to win golds. The fastest car is too fast to turn and has worse turn stats. The slowest car is too slow to race in. Haven't got the hang of drifting properly. All I can tell you is that I know how to do it in other games pretty well, but these flying darts ain't cars no matter how often I refer to them as cars.
I don't think I ever got better at the game as I went through it. I got six golds and my congratulatory cutscene and then the game asked me to get 1st place on six races consecutively with no breaks, no saving, no reselecting the ship between, and no chance to even view the map beforehand. I decided I'd won enough and stopped. Because I'm not getting much better over time it feels like just luck. Well, not just luck. I am amazing, but I'm not on the level of amazing that WipEout 2097 requires.
There's not a lot of 'content' in this game, as the kids say, I think. Four cars and a secret one, six tracks and two extra tracks nobody's ever going to see, and nobody who's seen them will ever complete them, and nobody who's ever completed them will still exist in time or space as we know it. There's also no mirror mode, which is a strange omission: it's the most arcade/playstation gimmick ever.
The game reminds me of a quote I saw in at least two places in Amiga Power (possibly referring to the Space Crusade expansion disk, or more likely Cannon Fodder 2, or even more likely now that I think about it the Timekeepers expansion disk) where the reviewer said the sequel was meaner than the original which is 'as it should be'. I think both this and WipEout are probably equally mean...
The races are mercifully quite short and have fast restarts with no loading. No loading. NO LOADING.
If your racing game has long loading times before restarts, you're getting docked 20%. I don't care fancy your pulsing neon panels are or how goofy it is to see the player racer dancing in a Santa suit. I'm already in the race. Just do what you already did!
And, man, whatever Burnout Paradise did? I forget. I hated it. Just get out.
The graphics are cool and you go to a jungle place and a snowy place and an industrial place and a city. It feels like a realistic future, but that's probably because of the constant advertising billboards. There's a big maneki neko in the intro which I was looking out for through the entire game, and he appears in the last level, so that's fine. (The flashing alternating backgrounds in the intro however can go in the bin.)
Don't expect sweeping vistas - like I said, these tracks are confusing bendy nightmares, mostly to hide the draw distance (mostly successfully except the poor 'you're outside, ooops no you're inside' cave in the jungle. The last two secret tracks are literal nightmares that take everything I hate about 2097's tracks way too far, mostly pitch black with deadly drops obscuring ninety degree turns onto detached track segments underneath that you have to just learn are there by recognising the fragments of billboards and signs that lead up to some of them. I'm sure WipEout gods love it.
In every game mode there's an arcade-like checkpoint system where you lose if you run out of time. It's completely pointless, except to punish newbies who are having trouble getting to grips with the controls. You can run out of time in Challenge II, but if you do then you're in sixth or seventh place anyway and you'd lose a life regardless.
I -do- really hate it in games where the player has to qualify or beat a time or perform some other feat in order to be allowed to continue but the computer players aren't subject to the same rules. If I have to come in third or higher, then so must they! I want the computer players to be able to lose!
I didn't try time trial mode. There's apparently ghosts. Spooky.
I looked up a longplay of the game and DANG the game looks swish to watch. Watching someone who is good at WipEout play WipEout is a special experience. But I don't think I'll ever bother with gambling with my time on the Challenge modes - at thirty minutes an attempt and back to the start if I fail? I'm fine, thanks. I wish the game had the end credits after the first six golds and then escalated things beyond 100% with an invitation to the 'Insane' league, then the 'Impossible' league, so regular mortal players could be satisfied they'd 'won', and insane or impossible players could continue on their quest to eliminate all the feeling in their thumbs. The most interesting about the Challenge mode is that the lives indicator when you lose lets you see your racer's face! It's a very Amiga-ish sprite.
One thing that's confusing and nonsense is that the game has four speed classes that dictate the crafts' maximum speed and number of laps, and each class has two courses associated with it. In the Arcade mode, you can play the two Easy tracks on Easy only, the two Normal tracks on Normal only and so on. But around the point you get the Challenge, the game silently lets you play any track on any class. When you go into the best times records screen, you can
see that you can play every course as every class, but the game sneakily prevents you from picking 'wrong' combinations until that point. I do not know why they do this.
WipEout 2097 has a two player mode! But it's link cable only! Grrr... that's a shame. If you're releasing a kick-butt super 32-bit 3D console with arcade quality gameplay and TWO CONTROLLER PORTS ON THE FRONT, then make the game split-screen, Sony!!! (I did have to check if in 1996 Psygnosis was fully Sony, and yes they were in 1993.) You even need two copies of the game, unlike Ridge Racer's fancy shenanigans. It would've been lovely if more games, both handheld and console, did the Game Boy Advance multiboot thing.
According to the manual, the computer voice was played by 'AMIGA 1200'. Which is exactly the idea I had for Gravity Beam! (Because I was reminded of Thunderbirds - which was also the reason why Starfox has puppets on it.) So the Gravity Beam count-in and the WipEout 2097 count-in are identical! (Except I used punctuation and post editing on 'one' to get a different inflection. And they're a little bit different.)
I chuckled when I was reading through the guides on GameFAQS and the one by Matthew Sephton says 'What a game! WO2 is easily on par with Motor Toon Grand Prix 2 as the best game on the Sony PlayStation.' I gotta agree. Motor Toon Grand Prix 2 was the very first Playstation game I ever played even before I knew what one was! And I thought it was pretty cool. I remember winning it for my cousin.
I still want to get the rest of the WipEouts though. There's another catue in Wip3out, so I gotta get it.
The music, the legendary music! It's... music. It's what it is. But because it's 1996 this is the first time people would be able to hear stuff like this coming from a game with this fidelity. Unless they had a Sega CD (but all Sega CD is supposed to sound like J-pop or a midi played through a Roland Sound Canvas by law) or a 3DO. It's got the instrumental of Firestarter, though given the bonkers difficulty of Wipeout 2097 maybe Breathe would've been more appropriate ("Don't play my game, I'll test ya.").
There's bios of all the artists from the soundtrack in the back of the manual. It's funny to me how all the
dangerous,
edgy underground menaces are all described as 'bill lives in a bin in London with his two cats. his destructive brand of music continues to devastate london. none will survive' with a picture of a bald bloke in sunglasses. Also, also, finally, on the subject of sunglasses. It blew my mind, really really blew my mind, when I discovered one day that The Bitmap Brothers weren't actually brothers. I mean, what's the fucking point. But in this manual, I had an even more devastating revelation - The Chemical (née Dust) Brothers aren't brothers either! What in the everlasting fuck!
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Also WTF! Ridge Racer: Unbounded... NFS: Unbound...??
Also at the time of writing Sonic With Planes In is on sale for £3.xx digitally. I re-read my post and remembered it was vitally important to continue to not buy it.