WipEout HD

It's been a long wait, but is Sony Liverpool's futuristic HD outing any good, and what does it mean for PSN?

	Version PlayStation 3	Developer Sony Liverpool	Publisher SCE	Genre Racing

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Last but certainly not least is Pure's white-knuckle Zone mode, which puts you at the helm of a constantly accelerating ship and challenges you to evade destruction for as long as you can. If we were feeling philosophical, we'd call this an exquisite statement on the futility of the post-modern rat race. But then you lot would denounce us for a bunch of simpering eggheads, so perhaps it's best to leave that particular morale swimming in the gutter. "Elegantly minimalist" is probably incitement enough as it is.

One bolt-on worthy of extended mention is "flight assist," an optional aid which corrects your flight path if you go slightly astray. Despair not, ye purists - flight assist is designed to help "intermediate" players hone their performances rather than coddle the irredeemably hopeless. It won't save you if you have a habit of playing chicken with trackside buildings, but should you oversteer by a fraction during a perilous turn the game will quietly intervene, nudging you back onto the straight and narrow. Rather a throwaway addition on the whole, we suppose, but it should keep the modestly talented from losing patience early on.

If WipEout HD's timeless mechanical allure is the cause of some chin-scratching, the visuals at least are above reproof. Tiresome as Sony's much-parroted PR mantra sixty-frames-per-second-1080p-resolution has become, they've done themselves proud: we simply cannot stress how good this game looks in motion. The lighting is breathtaking, the textures works of neo-industrial art and the ships lovingly plastered with shaders, real time shadows and miniscule animating components. The option to take photos mid-race (complete with adjustable focus, colour saturation and special effects such as motion blur) and save them to your hard drive in full 1920x1080 splendour is no more than appropriate, given the riches on offer. Most developers would cheerfully crawl over broken glass to recreate a tenth of the finish lavished on WipEout HD's track surfaces, let alone the whirlwinds of technological extravagance that corkscrew above them.

Nor does the soundscape go unadorned. In addition to a medley of foot-tapping trance and electronica hits (borrowed, again, from the PSP games) the designers have stirred in some neat acoustic tricks: the backing music grows tinny when you grab some air, and acquires an underwater ambience when you activate a shield power-up. Sound and vision come together in Zone mode: the environments are stripped of textures and the track itself becomes one long, winding graphic equalizer, pulsing along in time with the music as you hurtle towards eventual oblivion. If techno isn't your thing you can always rupture the ice-cool aesthetic by importing your own tunes - nothing like a bit of Van Morrison when you're piloting a gazillion polygons of sculpted chic.

Sony has taken an unforgivably long time restoring WipEout to our living rooms, so it's just as well the results hold up under scrutiny - and then some. The slick (if slightly unadventurous) multiplayer options - eight player online racing, two player split-screen - seal the deal. With titles like this on the PS Store, all that jazz about the death of retail doesn't seem quite so depressing after all.

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