Mini-rant aside, WipEout HD is just the kind of thing that we should be getting as downloads. It’s relatively slim on content with only a few tracks from the PSP versions, but it’s 60fps at 1080p (almost), tight and addictive to play, and it’s only £11.99. I defended the pricing of Braid when I posted about it, and while I appreciate that WipEout is less of a commercial risk than a self-funded indie project, this does kind of make it look bad.

WipEout’s been something of a fringe series for a while now, having only two PSP games and a poorly received PS2 iteration since the series’ glory days on the PS1, with most fans still considering WipEout 2097 – the American title, WipEout XL, sounds too much like washing powder for me – to be the high point. It’s a shame because it was one of the titles largely credited with being responsible for the establishment of the PlayStation, and, quite remarkably, it’s managed to remain both cool and futuristic over a decade later. The design work on show here was so far ahead of its time that real life hasn’t managed to catch up yet. That’s pretty much this series and Blade Runner that can boast that.

Of course, the design has always had a penchant for the eye-melting, and the fact that it’s running so smoothly and is one of the few games to actually run in native 1080p gets a big thumbs up from me. This game benefits hugely from looking so pin sharp, and the frame rate is almost essential to making sense of the carnage when racing in the higher speed classes with weapons zipping about the place.

Like I said, it’s a bit thin on the ground in terms of the amount of content, which is something you’ll quickly realise after starting to repeat tracks within an hour of joining a good online game, and undoubtedly the low entry price will start to look a bit steeper when there’s a DLC pack that adds another couple for a fiver, but that doesn’t change the fact that this is a new, high-def WipEout game, as tight and playable as ever, for £11.99. Speaking of playing online, finding a good game without lag is as easy as it should be, which isn’t something I’ve been able to take for granted with my PSN games. I saw no lag or connection errors whatsoever in my time with it.

If you’ve played a WipEout game before you’ll find it’s like riding a bike, and if you haven’t… well, it’ll become like riding a bike. WipEout Pure is, sadly, the only other game in this series that I’ve played for a serious amount of time – hey, I was a Nintendo fanboy in the PS1 days and the PS2 version didn’t get the greatest reception – but it didn’t take me long to get myself comfortable with the higher speed classes and even start to be competitive in the online leaderboards. This was on the first day, which is the only time it’s actually possible to be competitive in online leaderboards, of course.

But nonetheless, as has become something of a mantra for downloadable games and their unique pricing structure you absolutely can’t go wrong at this price. It’s £11.99, and even if, as expected, we get a lot of content packs to drive the price up – it’s worth noting, however, just how much free content WipEout Pure received, although that was a full-price game on a system with no digital distribution at the time – it’s £11.99. Stop dallying and buy the thing.

(All screenshots in this post are taken from this NeoGAF thread. Copyright their respective owners.)

Off-road racers, though, are a slightly more difficult beast. Even if it contains such vile language as ‘gear ratio’ and tries to make me consider the state of my virtual vehicle’s suspension, thrashing around in the mud is undeniably fun – we’ve all known this since the first time it rained in our back gardens – and the fact that there are very few serious off-road racers gives it a hit ratio with me that’s far above straight racing games. How much fun could a game where your rider breaks his back on a ten-foot fall really be, anyway? If I’m racing along a mountain, I bloody well want to be jumping off it.

Having played last year’s underrated Sega Rally as much as I care to, though, and with two potentially great off-roaders due imminently – both, conveniently, with demos out – I’m a bit torn between Pure and MotorStorm: Pacific Rift as this year’s counterweight to all the blood-and-guts shooters and post-apocalyptic wastelands that I’ll obviously be rooting around in. I know I only recently complained about how many games were coming out, but one can only play as so many bald space marines.

MotorStorm fixes the issues of its predecessor – it has more than one colour and several tracks, in other words – while Pure is entirely new, but was developed by the team responsible for the MotoGP games, which I enjoyed. (I’m aware that MotoGP doesn’t exactly fit my anti-realism preference, but no one can fail to have fun on that first corner of Mugello in a multiplayer game… if you know what I mean.)

Anyway, I was quite excited to receive a key for an early demo of MotorStorm, and I felt much the same as I did about the first one: it’s extremely pretty and great fun to play, but I feel like I’ve seen most of what I’d get from it with the demo. Like Fight Night Round 3 back when the 360 came out, I kept the MotorStorm demo around just because it was immediately impressive and a good quick blast to show people, but I couldn’t see it being worth the cash. MotorStorm 2 looks to have more content than the lightweight first game and I’d be keen to play the lava levels and such, but it’s something that I’ll pick up when it goes Platinum.

Pure is slightly harder to characterise, coming, as it does, with some of the dreaded vehicle tweaking but also taking an approach more like SSX: massive mountains and outlandish stunts. Do stunts and you earn boost to go faster, or make a beeline for the finish line and hope that your driving ability will carry you. What sense does this make? Absolutely none, but at least it’s more understandable than imploring you to murder the public in the mangled wreckage of their own cars for boost like Burnout does.

Lower expectations because this isn’t a AAA first-party title? Similar limitations to MotorStorm? Possibly, and I doubt that Pure will get the same post-release support that the first of that series did – although, to be fair, charging for it all when there was so little in the £50 game to begin with did take the piss – but I just had more fun with the Pure demo than I did MotorStorm 2′s. I’m not the only one either, from the looks of it.

Plus, you know, when I’m already spending silly amounts on games for the next few months, I’m going for the £30 option, thanks.

Despite these reviews, I have to admit that I wasn’t blown away with GRID’s demo a couple of weeks ago. On the positive side it ran like butter and was good fun online, but on the negative side I likened the handling to a slot car race, the muted colours and bloom lighting was like every next-gen graphical cliché in one place, and it wasn’t particularly fun to get wiped out on the first bend so that you have to sit out the entire race. Oh, and EBAY the EBAY product EBAY placement EBAY was EBAY a EBAY bit EBAY prominent.

Now that I’ve played with the full game, though, I have to admit that the game’s better than I gave it credit for. This is what you’d get if Michael Bay made a racing game – a fast, fun, loud, slick, very pretty pure racing game. With the product placement down, it might even be made under a pseudonym.

Demolition derbies, Le Mans 24 Hours (done in 24 minutes, with a full day/night cycle), street racing, drift racing, touge battles, stock car racing. Disciplines that have had whole games dedicated to them are found as single races here, and they’re all great fun. Despite the highly realistic damage model, thankfully tempered somewhat in single-player with Sands of Time-style ‘Flashbacks’, it’s the kind of arcade racing that I like.

I hate anything that wants me to tweak gear ratios and punishes me for cutting a corner or driving aggressively, which is why I’ve always put the likes of PGR4 ahead of Gran Turismo and Forza, and this game is firmly in that camp. It’s about drifting perfectly around a corner on the inside of someone just as much as it is about hitting a wall at 150mph, spilling debris across the track, or having to race with the car veering wildly because its front wheel is hanging off. It’s fun, which sims aren’t.

With self-important adventure games taking the headlines at the moment, here’s something to play when you don’t want to be thinking about the morality of war or the most effective way to decapitate a ninja. It’s a great way to spend an evening, online or not.

Even if it’s a bit HAL 9000 when it speaks your name…

I had a great time with it even without being a big racing fan.

I spent today up at Sega’s headquarters in London at a bloggers’ event to check out the new Sega Rally (aka Sega Rally Revo) which is due next month. Free stuff and the opportunity to play a new game is the only thing that will get me up in time to catch the 6:56am train.

However, when the last time that Sega attempted to bring a classic series into the next generation with its original title we got that Sonic abomination, so you could be forgiven for approaching this one with trepidation. Particularly so when Sega Rally had already had its equivalent of Sonic Adventure 2 – the warning that all was not well, if you will – but now that I’ve stretched that metaphor as far as it will go I can safely say that this won’t be another disaster. Far from it, in my opinion.

Since graphics are often the most salient feature in this generation, I’ll touch on those first. Sega Rally looks good, if only verging on great. The framerate could have done with some tweaking (bear in mind that the build wasn’t final and it was running on the PS3) and overall I didn’t feel like it had all the graphical bells and whistles of DiRT, the most obvious comparison to make. Even so, it certainly didn’t look unimpressive and importantly looked like Sega Rally, complete with the vivid primary colours and flamboyant touches that typified the old Sega arcade racers. Speedboats in the trackside water, gliders and helicopters popping up as you pass, etc. Alas no suicidal spectators like in Sega Rally 2, but you can’t have everything.

The USP here is terrain deformation which, as they took great pains to point out to us, is the real thing here. Motorstorm’s wasn’t persistent, apparently, and other games don’t have it modelled in such intricate detail and with such great impact on the gameplay. It was definitely striking to watch cars carving grooves and divots into the track which were still there on the final lap, affecting racing lines and sending vehicles bouncing around as they negotiated turns and in turn affecting the lines taken by the AI, which in this relatively unbalanced build was monstrously hard. We played with the seriously impressive (and equally expensive) Logitech G25 wheel which went a long way towards completing the effect.

Most importantly, though, it still plays like Sega Rally. Despite the effort poured into the realistic track physics, it has no pretensions of being a sim which I find highly appealing. Racing against other cars rather than the clock, arcadey handling that realises that sliding around in the mud is fun and not something to be punished if you can’t do it perfectly, and proper online multiplayer (I’m looking at you, DiRT). Incidentally we were playing network games over the Internet with no discernible lag.

So for me Sega Rally has gone from a game that was barely on the radar – there’s some other 360 game out in late September, remember? – to a very probable purchase. I feel like I need something different in a Q4 that’s overflowing with shooters and a blast from the past like this could be just the thing.

Oh, and I can’t let this go without bringing up the little competition that they put on for us to compete for a huge trophy and a Sega racing jacket. They say a picture speaks a thousand words; this one speaks six. Out of a possible six :D

And they also may or may not have accidentally let slip what everyone knows but Sony won’t confirm: that a Sixaxis with force feedback is on the way. Someone mentioned supporting it in the PS3 version, at least.