When June comes, I will change the background of this page. It will display one of the team colours from Wipeout HD/Fury one of the games I'm intending on hastily snatching off of Sony like a vindictive three year old when the time finally comes. My selection from the list broke down when Infamous left me with one choice and I had no idea if Dead Nation was any good. I was willed- almost presumptuously (having played the demo)- choose Wipeout out of a potent nostalgia.
When I was a wee lad, I spent a lot of time at my grandmother's house and she owned a rare and great beast to stop me going outside where the area teamed with dangerous chavs- a Sega Saturn. Fun as one or two of them were I had never heard of any of the games apart fro one Wip3out. Yes someone did it before Driv3r: Wip3out. I adored that game and I've been trying to consider why in terms of what I now know about making video games which for the record amounts to more than gmod. Just. I came to realise that it's nothing to do with the gameplay at all and ergo little to do with the piece of vidya in and of itself. In fact, there's a game called High Octane with the exact same concept stretched across more tracks, better controls and shitty, shitty graphics-go see what you can find out about it. High Octane was very much the same damned game as Wip3out. So what I liked about the later was that it looked really Akira. Honestly it did look really Neotokyo but there were only two city-based levels. Every ship, every menu and most importantly every unique team directed a slew of Domokun-Plushie worthy futuristic kawaii. Bright colours, serif symbols and iconic team colours as well as the ship designs straight form the imagination of a ten year old boy. It was everything you saw before going into the game and back then it was a novel way of making you excited. Depth of design is everything to the vidya now though.
Take a look at the Wipeout website-they have a main one that incorporates all the games and in turn the entire canon for every one of the twelve enigmatically inclined teams. Government elbowing, environmental extremism, super-state collaborations of dangerous political bird-flipping and shady corporations comprise the teams' raison d'être-much less the reasons behind the mindfuck that are the lethal hyper-advanced ships. Sounds like the design document for a game based on a Philip K Dick novel-y'know, when you make it all future like but then there's the ships. This isn't one of old Phil's Herion comedown inventions, it's lovingly crafted by hand by one of the few British developers out there-Sony liverpool. Consider if you will that only people working in a shittip like Liverpool, could imagine cityscapes like this and that only people being oppressed by the shittip that is Sony at the moment, could think of such neo-noir urbanoic shadowy forces behind the teams. That's why I like Goteki 45, they're back after a hiatus, a ready and re-tutored team about to do what they always did best-an old dog with new tricks.
Like Wipeout they're futureproof.
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