yawnstretch
6th December 2008, 09:39 AM
This is a little thread about how happy I am with wipEout HD.
Since the glory days of wipEout and wipEout 2097 ended back in the 90s I thought I'd never experience the old thrills again.
I searched. I have played so many games since the first Playstation blew me away with a demo in a Game shop when I was a school boy. That shop has long since closed. Consoles have come and gone. New generations of school boys have grown up and the 21st century brought technological surprises no one anticipated.
Computer games represent a fundamental cultural medium today. The internet has delivered the promise of rich intercultural exchange and the democratization of mass communication. The definition of electronic entertainment has stretched so wide that it seemed to me that the purity and awe I experienced that day would never really be repeated.
It is almost 2010. I wondered about such dates when I was a boy. "Who will I be?" and "what will the world be like?" I asked myself. I tried to imagine what I would look like as an adult living in a different place and in new surroundings. Fortunately God has blessed me and the idyllic life I tried to picture in my mind decades ago has since come to fruition.
I sit surrounded by wondrous gadgets in a bright comfortable environment and I am healthy with a successful career.
But what of the experience that was bottled for me in the mid 90s with wipEout? My imagination was magnetized by this creation. It gave me direction. It was like a miniature black hole with light distorting vortexes attracting my attention.
I gave hours and days and months to these two games. I gave their successors multiple opportunities and they brought me some entertainment but the gravity was not powerful enough. The black hole had collapsed - visible only in its early stages in my memory and long since dispelled by the every increasing complexity of newer digital creations.
I have criticized the newer generations who have tried to rebottle that idea. I have poked and prodded and offered my theories as to why the genie could not be recaptured but last weekend the genie returned.
Playstation, Playstation 2, Playstation Portable (a glimmer of light), Playstation 3 (a console badly beaten) and many other games devices - purchased in search of the dream. I have awoken. The spirit of that day is alive again.
I don't want to go into the details of the individual (fantastic) aspects of the new game. I just want to say the feeling; that mysterious ecstatic thing is once more present in my life. Well done Studio Liverpool.
Since the glory days of wipEout and wipEout 2097 ended back in the 90s I thought I'd never experience the old thrills again.
I searched. I have played so many games since the first Playstation blew me away with a demo in a Game shop when I was a school boy. That shop has long since closed. Consoles have come and gone. New generations of school boys have grown up and the 21st century brought technological surprises no one anticipated.
Computer games represent a fundamental cultural medium today. The internet has delivered the promise of rich intercultural exchange and the democratization of mass communication. The definition of electronic entertainment has stretched so wide that it seemed to me that the purity and awe I experienced that day would never really be repeated.
It is almost 2010. I wondered about such dates when I was a boy. "Who will I be?" and "what will the world be like?" I asked myself. I tried to imagine what I would look like as an adult living in a different place and in new surroundings. Fortunately God has blessed me and the idyllic life I tried to picture in my mind decades ago has since come to fruition.
I sit surrounded by wondrous gadgets in a bright comfortable environment and I am healthy with a successful career.
But what of the experience that was bottled for me in the mid 90s with wipEout? My imagination was magnetized by this creation. It gave me direction. It was like a miniature black hole with light distorting vortexes attracting my attention.
I gave hours and days and months to these two games. I gave their successors multiple opportunities and they brought me some entertainment but the gravity was not powerful enough. The black hole had collapsed - visible only in its early stages in my memory and long since dispelled by the every increasing complexity of newer digital creations.
I have criticized the newer generations who have tried to rebottle that idea. I have poked and prodded and offered my theories as to why the genie could not be recaptured but last weekend the genie returned.
Playstation, Playstation 2, Playstation Portable (a glimmer of light), Playstation 3 (a console badly beaten) and many other games devices - purchased in search of the dream. I have awoken. The spirit of that day is alive again.
I don't want to go into the details of the individual (fantastic) aspects of the new game. I just want to say the feeling; that mysterious ecstatic thing is once more present in my life. Well done Studio Liverpool.