28 Years Later, Hero Mods Give "Wipeout" PC Port the Fabulous Sparkle It Deserves

General
28 Years Later, Hero Mods Give "Wipeout" PC Port the Fabulous Sparkle It Deserves

Over the last few years, Sony has surprisingly woken up to the fact that you can make a lot of money by releasing a decent version of a game on the PC. The core of the business has always been the PlayStation platform, so we have to deal with waiting a few years (or in the case of "Bloodborne" forever), but the mood music has completely changed and PlayStation is making a lot of top class games! which is a great thing. [Interestingly, this is also a throwback to the early days of PlayStation. Sony has been very protective of its exclusives since the original PlayStation, and has allowed PC versions of many of the console's most iconic exclusives to be released. One of these was the now-defunct Psygnosis' "Wipeout" ...... However, the PC version was a bit terrible (see YouTube video of it running on an emulator here).

A quick note: I looked this up and Wipeout is often spelled WipEout or WipeOut, but apparently it is more correctly spelled wipeE′out″. If Sony's 1995 marketing team thinks I do, they can fucK'off."

Now the anonymous heroes are back to right the wrongs of the past. Wipeout: Wipeout: Phantom Edition is a PC-sourced port of the original Wipeout. It uses game data from the PlayStation version and is closer to the PlayStation version than the official PC port."

Clearly there are people who loved Wipeout and wanted to play it in its full glory on modern hardware, but didn't want to lose their jobs to do so. They are heroes.

Improvements in the Phantom Edition include uncapped frame rates, high-resolution rendering for greatly improved textures, fade effects on distant objects, increased viewing distances, improved ship lighting, "PSX-accurate rasterization and blending" are included. Keyboard and mouse support, a new options menu, a new music and sound effects system, configurable aspect ratios, widescreen support, and the ability to use custom music tracks have been added.

Finally, the Phantom Edition also features three "collision response" options, essentially the collision mechanics of the original game, BallisticNG (a beloved Wipeout copy-slash title) collision mechanics, and Wipeout 2097's collision mechanics.

Players will need the game data files from the original Wipeout NTSC PlayStation CD, so they can either put it on eBay or put it out for parts we cannot mention. This rather illustrates the comical state of things. This is one of the most iconic games in PlayStation history, and what we have here is truly amazing and re-presented with a host of modern features. In a better world, Sony would give this hero a check and upload it to Steam for everyone to enjoy.

Categories