Unlike the extremely daft Ridge Racer, Wipeout Pure is a blessing, an amazing game that is somewhat marred by a lack of content.
I will admit that, being a PC owner, I only ever got to play the PC release of the original Wipeout; Wipeout 2097 refused to run, and Wipeout Fusion never made it past the PS2. However, the Wipeout 2097 soundtrack, won with a subscription to Hyper magazine, turned my life around - it gave me a love and appreciation of Electronic Music and alerted me to the existence of The Designers' Republic, an act that derailed my computer programming ways for a few years to pursue design.
So despite the fact that I never really played it much at all, Wipeout was a huge influence on my life, and when I purchased my PSP, I saw fit to trek all over California looking for a store who still had it on stock.
Loading the game is a somewhat tedious process of skipping over intro movies and 'press[ing] start to continue', but once you're in, you stay in - a variety of play modes, and a rather steep difficulty curve keep things interesting, though after coming from some of the bigger racing games, it does feel a little flat only having two unlockable ships and a handful of one-way tracks.
The racing itself is like Formula 1 Ballet - elegant and insanely fast. Success comes from smooth control and knowing the perfect racing line through corners and over the many boosts. Though (and I may be wrong) the game appears to cheat a little - on your first lap, the AI-controlled ships seem to have supercharged engines and all rapidly overtake you, forcing you to spend the rest of the race catching up.
Control with the D-pad works well, and although some users swear by the analogue controls, I found the nub useless for performing small course alterations on account of large amount of initial force required to overcome its static friction.
One small departure from most 'good' racing games comes from the speed of your ships and the massive acceleration and decceleration involved - you rarely get into furious neck and neck contests with other craft - more often than not, one of you is flying past the other at a rate of knots. It's not really a problem though, and helps conserve the flowing pace of the game.
Highly recommended.
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