Wipeout 2097
PlayStation favourite Wipeout is out on the Amiga - and it rocks.
2000-05-09
If you've ever seen a PlayStation there's a good chance you've seen Wipeout. Psygnosis' racing series (three so far - the fourth is under development for the PlayStation 2) has cult status on Sony's grey box and there's no surprise in that. Wipeout is basically your typical racing game. You race against 11 competitors on 6 different levels. You have to finish in top three to proceed. What sets the Wipeout games aside from other racing games is the pace. It's just furious. You are in control of a futuristic hover craft that slides and glides around the levels at an extremely high speed. The first times around you're destined to be left behind. Furthermore you can pickup speed ups and pick ups around the levels. There's a couple of nifty weapons that can be used to delay or even wipeout your enemies. Whenever you're hit by a weapon (or crashes into something - happens all the time) you lose some precious energy, which can only be restored at the end of each lap by taking a small detour. Beign the first PPC-only game for the Amiga you have to ask: how well does it run compared to the PlayStation or PC-version? Well, first off this version is ported from the PC-source. This means that it runs in a higher resolution than the PlayStation-one and supports some more cool graphic stuff like Mipmapping and trilinear filtering. It makes the game look better but it also slows it somewhat down. But playing on PPC 604e/200MHz with a CVision/PPC you don't really care. If playing in a 640x480 it generally runs smooth and nice. Ofcourse there are slowdowns but it isn't that much of a problem. Some more serious slowdowns do happen when the framerate drops to 1-2 FPS - this is extremely rare and is obviously a bug. The PlayStation games are blessed with superior techno music by The Prodigy, The Chemical Brothers and stuff like that. Unfortunately we don't get that. It's still techno music and it's decent. Just not great. Also the sound effects are a bit on the average side. It does support AHI though. Overall Wipeout 2097 is a very impressive game. The original was superb and the conversion is well done although a few problems exist. For instance there's a bug in the controller configuration that makes playing with mouse nearly impossible. You also lack any kind of documentation. Sure there's a guide explaining how to install the game (and Warp3D and WarpUp which is necessary) and improve the performance. But there's not a single word on how to play the game. It's also a bit sad, that the conversion isn't based on Wipeout 3 which have been out for some time on the PlayStation. And how about network-gaming? That would certainly have been great. If you own a PPC-equipped Amiga with a 3D graphics card you just have to buy Wipeout 2097. It's a landmark in Amiga gaming and there's simply nothing like it.
Rune J. Keller
Graphics
It just looks awesome. Fast and beautiful.
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9.0
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Sound
Good technotunes but it's not exactly Prodigy or Chemical Brothers.
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7.0
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Gameplay
Fast and very addictive gameplay. But it does lack deeper gameplay.
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8.0
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Overall
There's nothing like it on the Amiga. A musthave for racing fans.
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8.5
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Info
Title
Wipeout 2097
Official site
Wipeout 2097
Publisher
Blittersoft
Developer
Psygnosis
Genre
Racing
Release
99/12
No. of players
N/A
Supports
CVision PPC,
CVision/3D
Requires
PPC,
3D Graphics Card
Tested on
060 50MHz,
604e 200MHz,
CVisionPPC 8MB,
128MB Ram
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Pictures
It's Wipeout. It's on the Amiga. Need we say more?
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