Often cited as one of the best AG racing games of all time. Prettier, faster and now with thirty percent more run-on sentences! A Psygnosis (and PlayStation) legend.
One detail that I love about this game is that there are tons of options to how to handle corners. We all know about the air-brakes, but you can also smoothed out the ride by pitching the nose up or cut harder into corners by pitching down. Notice how in the video footage the craft smacks down into the court when there is a row of small jumps, bumps or zigzags? if you press backward on the stick you pitch the nose upwards, giving you more airtime and slower decent, sidestepping the speed loss. In a revers of that you can pitch the nose down to cut much more aggressive into a corner or over a incline to skip the speed you loose from excessive airtime. Man this game was great. And a wonderful video on it as well, both this one and the first game. A video on Wip3out would be appreciated. It was the last of the series I truly enjoyed sadly.
Excellent review of my all-time favorite Wipeout game! I love the visceral weapon set, the robotic male disembodied voice, and the gritty, dystopian mood of the Wipeout XL. I also will always appreciate the devs adding 2P system link support for all 3 of these PS1 Wipeout games. Glad I found your channel. Love the content. Thank you.
Yay! A new video! Btw, the Mac port has the option to play at 60 fps in the launcher settings, but it's a dud, because it also doubles the game speed, making it even harder. I played the osx version. Maybe on native classic it does run at 60 with the correct game speed. Cheers!
I'm impressed. This is a great channel with great reviews and analysis. No bs talk, lots of info and I can feel how passionate you are. Your channel deserves a lot more viewers for sure!
Stumbled upon your channel yesterday via the WipEout 1 review. Loving this series so far! WipEout 1/2 were some of my absolute favorite games of the era. Adding the light trails behind the vehicles in WOXL/2097 was such a brilliant decision. Not only did it look cool but it very clearly identified the opponents and greatly reduces your chance of slamming into them from behind. The muddier/less colorful graphics and lack of light trail in WipEout 1 make it super easy to smash into other ships, that combined with the harsh speed penalty for doing so was one of the biggest problems with it. Incredible they cranked WOXL out in 7 months, had no idea until today, the amount of quality of life fixes and gameplay evolution between the first and second title is astounding, especially in light of the fact they had such a short dev cycle.
2097 was originally only supposed to be a track expansion pack for the first game - hence the XL name in the US (originally XS, as in:"excess"; This was changed due to connotations of "extra small"). The scope increased, but the release date stayed the same. Also, the way the narration says "Herculean" makes it sound like it means Poirot instead of Hercules lol
Great video, both this one and the one you did on the original! Really enjoyed the deep dive on all the options, and you're making me want to play these again! Surprised you didn't mention the secret minigun option in this version though!
I played 2097 a couple years ago and I absolutely love it. The controls feel sooo good to get good at and feel suprisingly good on a d-pad, I love jamming to the ost (especially Atombomb) and I love the challenge. It's the first one i've played and I really need to play more. Hopefully Wipeout 3 and Wipeout HD fury will arrive in the mail next week :)
WipEout 2097 is the one that revolutionized the racing games forever. Unlocking the Piranha Prototype Aircraft in WipEout 2097 also is absolutely satisfying.
I was looking forward to this. This one I have a special nostalgia for, I first played it on PC through a demo and later got it gifted from my mother on PlayStation. It is the text-book example of simply the best sequel possible, and you did great justice to it in your video. All my praise are belong to you!
I wil always remember playing 2097 at 4am on a stormy Sunday morning in 1999, ripping through Odessa Keys, in a Qirex, with CoLD STorAGE's "Canada" playing while I raced - amazing experience.
Woar wip3out coming 😃 these games back then probably made me a life long gamer. 2097, wip3out, colony wars and the bandicoot series are basically the games that got me on the hook. And wipeout shaped a great deal of my musical taste in general. Really cool that you are reviewing them. Despite their fame back in the days, they really get forgotten today. Is there maybe any possibility for an Colony wars (1) review in the future? This game is almost completely forgotten.
Superbomb and Electrobolt are actually called Thunder bomb and Plasma or Plasma Bolt, atleast you got the Quake Disruptor 50% correctly. Also the autopilot could slow your speed when activating it at high speed, but accelerates back to high speed Edit: corrected the Quake Disruptors name and added some more info about the autopilot
Found your review on the first wipeout ,as I am of an age that van remember having my mind blown by wipeout 2.... On the PlayStation,so I was glad to have utube suggest this video ,both great reviews!new sub here, Real surprised that you didn't have more views and subs as your standard was as good as anyones with large numbers, sometimes it's the content that invokes interest but you just need a bit of luck and that one video, stick at it, the most popular seem to be more current games but I love nostalgic reviews because of my age if you can find a epic series 2 review that has been going for long enough that a new game review/ nostalgic look back from the origins (ie:Tekken? ,Gran Turismo? etc...) may be able to grab a wider audience? Who knows but I'll be watching.
Definately spent way to much time with this game back in the old PS1 days. Time Trials was my go to, with a few friends all vying for best laptimes. We even used to system link two consoles and race head to head. I still actually have my PS1, gamedisk, and memory cards with my saved games. Even still have a folder with every ship, track, class best laptimes all documented. Might have to dust it off and try to beat some of my old times .......
Superb review! I lived and breathed this game; I think I missed a number of Uni classes around 2000 due to grinding my 2nd-hand PS1 copy of it through the night. - And then Wip3Out came along...
What a game, Wipe0ut is in my top 10 of all time games, the PlayStation killed it, Wipe0ut, FFVII, CastleVania SOTN, MGS, Crash Bandicoot, Time Crisis, Tekken, Resident Evil, Oddworld, the list goes on & on
Good video, and a fantastic game. Back in the day, other than playing the one track demo disk on PSX, I owned the Saturn version and it was pretty good. The framerate, whilst clearly slower in side by side comparisons, is very consistent on Saturn so you do adjust. At the time, 16-year old me didn't even notice. To me it looked 'identical' to PSX, bar the red bull branding and soundtrack. I played in the cockpit cam, and the Saturn had far less polygon warping, plus the Saturn has sightly better draw distance I believe. No doubt the PSX version, was better, but the Saturn was no slouch. The next one I played was Wipeout 64 however, and after that comparatively smooth framerate, admittedly, I struggled to go back to the Saturn.
Great video. Verrry much looking forward to a review of Wipeout 64, I really dug that game but the ships's handling was so much different in it-more akin to a motorbike than the speedboat-like handling of what came before. Nevertheless, there were many futuristic racers on the Nintendo 64, but I think Wipeout 64 was the pinnacle. Yeah, come at me, Extreme-G fans.
The PAL Saturn release sorta runs at 17 frames per second, which as you can guess is even worse (and it's how I played the game before finally getting a PS1 in 1999). But I've measured the frame rate of the PAL version. It runs in a weird frame timing, it technically runs at 25 FPS (as the onscreen HUD elements update every frame within 25fps) but the game pauses for one frame every two or so frames with a strange flow, it can go - 2 frames / pause / 2 frames / pause / 1 frame / pause / 2 frames / pause / 3 frames / pause / 2 frames / pause - then repeats in a similar pattern. From looking at others recorded footage, it appears the NTSC version does something similar with a faux 20fps running on top of 30fps, leading to the 'heavier' feeling of craft responsiveness and weird 'sluggish' flow of the games visuals. By comparison, the Saturn does have games that actually runs at a real 20fps/16.667fps such as Daytona USA. When activating the wireframe cheat, the game then runs in actual 30/25fps. I have no idea why the Saturn version appears to be locked in this strange way as the frame timing appears to have nothing to do with whats happening on screen (such as when a quake is used or on a visually simple part of the track with no competitors) and it's purely a software encoded choice as even when I emulate the game I get the exact same weird frame timing I don't see in other games on the platform.
I'd love to do the entire series in time, but I wanted to focus on the first generation of game series like Ace/Air Combat, Ridge Racer, Wipeout and the like. Then the next generation and so on.
3:07 YOU HAVE ANGERED THE WIPEOUT GODS!!!!!!!! Plasma, not Electro Bolt. The Electro Bolt is a reflavored version of the Shockwave from the first game.
SONY should just bite the bullet and release Alpha Collection already, even if it is just the original games in a collection (and even if the collection version of 2097 only has the Tim Wright track list version [SEGA Saturn, PC, Mac, etc] instead of original PS1 track list). We don't need bells or whistles or anything extra, we'd be happy with just the first three in a simple package to load onto PS4/PS5 even (though I would like to see it include Pure and Pulse too...maybe Fusion if it's been a good boy and not set any fires recently). It's not like SONY is without the means to do so and the effort to put these games onto a package would probably cost far less than even the Omega collection did.
I got a ps1 and a hdmi converter recently to play this again but sadly it looks awful. These days an emulator like duckstation is debatably the best option. Definitely one of my favourite games ever and the gameplay still holds up
Protip: Play the PAL version, Wipeout 2097. Why? It has an exlusive and far superior soundtrack featuring Prodigy, Chemical Brothers, and more. It's also optimised for PAL, being full-screen (and therefore higher resolution), and speed-corrected. It is 25fps, but that's the only downgrade.
Interesting review, but I disagree with your comments about the Saturn port being poor. Yes, it runs slower, but not the point that it affects gameplay. It's far from unplayable like you mention in your review. And its much better than the port of the original Wipeout. 2097 is one of the best games of all time no matter how you play it.
I agree. Even all reviews of the times too. WipEout XL is a better port than WipEout on Saturn. Thought it was common knowledge so I was really surprised when he said in the previous video that the first one was the better port.
