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Wipeout Disappointment would be a better title

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 2
Date: July 18, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I've been a huge fan of the wipeout series from day one (I even liked Wipeout 3, despite its many faults) and I must say that I am very disappointed with the performance of this game....Huge load times, bad menu interface, & weak AI. Graphics, of course, are much sharper on PS2 that previous versions but despite this the game seems much much more sluggish than any of the PS1 games...I just doesn't have any ummph at all. This was easily the least fun game I've ever played on PS2. Looks good and goes nowhere.

Wipeout Fusion

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 9
Date: May 31, 2002
Author: Amazon User

hi everyone,

Wipeout Fusion is here out in Europe, so I decided to give it a try... If your looking for the 'original' wipeout feel, like wipeout 2097, wipeout 3 or wipeout 64 DON'T buy this game. The only thing related between wipeout fusion and the wipeouts described above is you are flying a ship which can fire weapons.

Sensitivity has changed, weapons is not as good, music [is not good]!

Now don't get me wrong, I love wipeout 2097 & wipeout 3... I would rate them 5 stars...

Wipeout Fusion

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: May 31, 2002
Author: Amazon User

hi everyone,

Wipeout Fusion is here out in Europe, so I decided to give it a try... If your looking for the 'original' wipeout feel, like wipeout 2097, wipeout 3 or wipeout 64 DON'T buy this game. The only thing related between wipeout fusion and the wipeouts described above is you are flying a ship which can fire weapons.

Sensitivity has changed, weapons is not as good, music ain't great!

Now don't get me wrong, I love wipeout 2097 & wipeout 3... I would rate them 5 stars...

Mediocre rehash of a much beloved game series

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 8 / 8
Date: July 04, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Let's go back a few years. I bought a Playstation _so_I_could_play_ WipeOut XL. That's 360 bucks for one game. Wonderful graphics and tracks, a powerful soundtrack by incredible electronic artists. Still play it, love it, even though it's pre-analog controller and the graphics are early Playstation era. It's one of those games that makes you want to shoot fireballs out of your hands. Jump forward a bit. Wipeout 3. OH MY GOD. BOOM. Aural, god-like soundtrack, blistering speed, BETTER graphics than XL, and an interface design that destroys all that stand in its path. I haven't seen a game since that tops it for overall focus of intent and feeling. It is a work of art.

...So I HAD to get Wipeout Fusion. Atari-era soundtrack of bad techno. No energy in the music.

I think they may have actually de-evolved the game to produce this definite SEQUEL. Puerile ship designs and world treatments. Think cotton candy compared to XL's patinated steel or 3's crisp diamond edge. The prior game producers (original, XL and 3), Psygnosis, must be crying over this butchery. BAM! did an awful job with this game. Turning action is jumpy, there aren't movement cues where there should be, there are exagerated movement and visual cues where there REALLY shouldn't be. Ship and weapon noises take two steps back.

The menu interface is bad, and the visual atmosphere employed both in and out of the race just falls flat. The design of all elements is overly commercial, uninteresting, bland. The introduction of characters into the game is needless and gimmicky, and brings a feeling of GTA3 meatheadedness to what should be a hard, fast, and beautiful sci-fi racing game. I'm going to try playing again tomorrow, with the music off, and with a clear head, and see if I'm still as negatively focused on this game. For now however, I'm pronouncing that from this corner of the WipeOut fan crowd, the consensus of one is unanimous: this game BLOWS.

Bam....... Uh.... What happened?

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 3 / 7
Date: June 20, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Im a fan of the Wipeout series, not a big fan but just a fan. I do like the thrill the series gives with super fast hovercrafts and the blazing techno soundtrack that is accompanied in the game. But this one just doesn't do it for me. I mean all you will notice is improved graphics which isn't really impressive, better and bigger environments but that is about it. No replay value to it. Of course you can play with a friend head to head but that's not much fun after a while. You'll also notice that the controls are alot and I mean ALOT stiffer than the previous wipeout games. The controls can get a little frustrating at times especially when you get to the higher levels of speed.
I say give this one a rental. I don't think it's worthy of a buy for your PS2 collection in my opinion. Such a disappointment but oh well. Oh and one more thing. THe soundtrack for the game is a little old and outdated for me.

Do Not Buy This Game

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 3 / 5
Date: July 02, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I'm a HUGE fan of the Wipeout series, the original Wipeout was the one reason I bought a playstation. Wipeout XL came out and blew me away, it is still my favorite PSX game, wipeout 3 came along and was very good, made great use of the analog controllers and introduced more style to the game. Wipeout Fusion however is nothing but a burden to the series. It doesn't look like a 128 bit game, it looks more like a cart racing game for N64. After playing Fusion for a couple hours when I first got it, I had to stop playing, and play some XL just to make sure that I wasn't having a bad dream. This game is definitely not worth $[money], probably not even $[money]. Go buy Wipeout XL, or 3 if you want a good racing game, or buy Gran Tourismo 3 for PS2 if you don't feel like getting an old school 32 bit game, whatever you do, DO NOT BUY THIS GAME.

Ultimately unsatisfying.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 0 / 2
Date: January 24, 2003
Author: Amazon User

If i wanted to play a PS1 game, I would have bought a PS1 game. The graphics of this game are aweful compared to the capabilities of the PS2. If my quest to find a F-zero successor I was surely disappointed. The gameplay and track design are actually solid but there are some nagging issues that I can't seem to get over. (I really tried hard and wanted to like this game) One issue that got the better of me was the fact that there was no count down at the beginning of each race.

After 2 weeks I had to trade-it in for Extreme 3G (an awesome game), avoid wasting ur money on Wipeout Fusion and be certain to rent this title first.

I suggest that you also give Extreme 3G a whirl, u will not be disappointed.

sigh, what a shame...

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 14 / 19
Date: July 03, 2002
Author: Amazon User

There have been so many PS/2 games that weren't quite what they should've been. I don't care so much about light sourcing or smoke effects in the games I play; I want games that are well-polished and fun to play. Too many PS/2 games are relying on good graphics to carry the day.

Unfortunately, the Wipeout Fusion designers seem to have focused more on the dust and smoke and less on the game itself.

The graphics are OK. The resolution is noticeably better than in the PSone (of course), but there are noticeable popup effects and framerate problems as well. (In bad cases I've seen the framerate slow to what appears to be less than 5 frames a second. Wip3out at its worst was better than this.)

The gameplay itself also has significant problems. The first noticable issue is that it's tough to compare the different ships--unlike the first two games, each ship is on a separate screen and the various statistics aren't directly comparable. Not a huge problem, but it struck me right away as something easily fixable but quite annoying... especially as some of the more advanced ship descriptions are less than helpful.

There are also some big clipping problems. I've gotten my ship blown through walls, mountains, rocks, you name it. The game recovers cleanly, and sometimes it's even an advantage (depending on where you can be placed back onto the track) but again, it's annoying. I can't recall this sort of problem ever happenign in Wipeout XL/3... Maybe the designers considered this to be a feature, but I haven't found it so, especially as the ship often ends up in very strange places and can even get trapped.

Some of the new weapons exacerbate the clipping issues. One of them (gravity bomb) gives your ship a high acceleration before stopping it dead, and the high acceleration causes a lot of the clipping issues. (It also has a very large area of effect, which I can't say is a feature either.)

Another annoying feature is that the CPU ships have access to all the weapons, including the ones that they weren't allowed to use in Wipeout XL/Wip3out. I've lost many races because five or six trailing enemy ships decided to release Quake at the same time, and there's no defence; you lose. Ditto with Gravity Bomb or some of the other area-effect weapons. The enemy ships also have eyes in the back of their heads, as they're amazingly skilled at blocking your ship.

None of this would matter so much except for the structure of the league races, where losing one race can make all the difference between earning an overall first place finish and not--and you have to come in first to advance. I'm also not that thrilled with the whole credit system for upgrading ships, as it just requires playing the league series over and over and over and over...blah.

Finally...it just doesn't feel anything like the originals. The physics are strikingly different; it's almost a totally different game than the first two. I also miss the Designers Republic influence on the game, and I'm totally missing the point about the big heads (er, sorry,pilots), as there's no real personality behind them. And why would anyone find looking at preliminary sketches of the artwork interesting? That's a pretty crummy extra.

In short: it feels about 3/4 finished. I hate to judge it against the first two, because of course it's allowed to be its own game, but I'd give it about 50% for the effort. They should've called it something other than Wipeout, and really finished the game before releasing it.

The naked truth about Wipeout Fusion

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: July 08, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Unfortunately I am one of those Wipeout `fans' who have played and completed all of the various incarnations. Only very recently did I get my hands on a PS2 and a copy of wipeout fusion. To be honest, I thought it was a bit strange that the game moved forward so much in certain areas but lost so many of the features that define the wipeout experience.

Firstly I would like to say that I find both the graphics and the track design (there are a couple of minor exceptions outlined below) absolutely excellent. The attraction of the Wipeout series for myself and the majority of the fan-base was really the sense of speed, the `coolness' factor and also the sheer satisfaction of linking up a couple of good corners by mastering the authentic feeling aircraft model. It was these things that kept you playing.

The speed issue is hard to understand. Wipeout fusion is just really slow compared with the upper leagues of the previous games. In addition to a new aircraft model that feels somehow synthetic and not really based on physics (sometime when cornering with the airbrake there is a conspicuous lack of momentum or something) the lack of speed puts an end to that heart-in-the-mouth feeling you got in fast sections in the other games. It is also probably the case that the sudden deceleration from hitting the side of the track in the earlier games was part of the addictiveness and thrill of getting it right and going fast. Additionally, there is no longer that drag sound as you air-brake which reinforces the sense of current speed and momentum and also deceleration - which removes a fraction of your immersion.

The aircraft model no longer lets you take a tight corner from a bad angle, slowly. In XL/ 2097 if you messed up your approach you could still airbrake like mad and avoid colliding with the side of the track - the penalty some speed, but not as significant as hitting the side of the track. Which is the other strange thing, given you cannot make corners at absurd angles anymore, you tend to hit the side of the track very often which doesn't really do much to slow you down. The penalty is shield energy which is not really the most attractive aspect of Fusion.

The weapons are bizarrely over-powerful and now you can race a perfect race and still come last due to luck alone. The most irritating are those that stop the player's craft entirely. The previous games would certainly not have put weapons over speed. The leagues are now a matter of trial and error and you get the impression that skill had a smaller part to play than probability. You are no longer awarded for you ability to fly the craft. A minor gripe is that pitting (which you have to do no matter how good you are) takes too long since you are forced to slow down.

The lack of the coolness factor is a bit inexplicable. The underground techno music of the previous games that lends a dark and industrial feel is gone and replaced with somewhat tacky trance music which is a bit weak. The menu music is optimistic like that of a football game instead of dark and gritty - a cue to get wired. The Designer's Republic did good work on the other games and the Fusion interface seems shallow and sterile by comparison. The 3d character designs look infantile next to the 2d anime-chic of the first game.

The other problem is that the speed/difficulty issue is gone. Leagues are not noticeably faster and even when they actually are, the effect of speed in determining difficulty is masked by the heavy bias of weapons and shields and pitting etc. Other minor issues are annoying `open' areas that have you lost in a cave unable to see due to over-opaque particle effects. There is also an odd tendency for the aircraft model to change when you are exiting one of the open areas in such a way that you feel pulled toward the exit - or quite often a wall demarking the exit. The problem is, that the faults tend not to feel deliberate since there are clearly undesirable faults such as fairly bad slow-down. Also, I cannot be the first to mention the difference in handling of the craft between regular and widescreen display settings.

The overall impression is that the game has not been tested thoroughly and/or it has paid little notice of the fundamentals that made previous incarnations so great. I still load up the other games for a blast - just single arcade races around one of my favourite tracks - despite the improved graphics and tracks, I have no desire to do so with fusion which is a great pity. Nevertheless I pray that the series will find its feet and continue.

A hugely disappointed wipeout fanatic and software developer.

Slightly above average racer

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: July 17, 2003
Author: Amazon User

This game is pretty decent. It starts off slow but as you upgrade the ships the game speed picks up. Each ship from the different teams acts and reacts differently to certain situations so you will have to adjust. The techno music in the game is not for everyone but you can skip tracks you don't like or cut all of them out all together. The graphics are good but not great. Having S-video hookup makes the graphics look great. My biggest complaint has to come with the load times. Can get a bit long winded and eventually becomes a pain. Also time trial should be opened at the beginning of the game. Things become frustrating when you run a course in tourny mode for the first time and you have absolutely no clue to where your going. On another note thats not always a bad thing because getting lost helps find secret short cuts. The AI gets tough as the game progress, no big suprise there. All the other extras in the game are double edged because as you open super weapons you and the AI can use them. The AI is a good shot considering the speed and the constant cornering throughout the game.

Wipeout is fun to play but it has its flaws. Another game becoming rare but the price has not gone down since its release. It is worth buying but not at full retail pricing. If you can get it used or at discount pricing go for it. I was lucky to find it cheap and for what I paid I'm happy.

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