Yeah, really. Don't get me wrong.. it's pretty, it's very pretty. but... it's still Pulse.

Hung out with TheFrostE and he showed it to me, and we did a lot of multiplayer... 30fps was a bit of a strain after seeing single player

admittedly I had a lot more fun with HD than Pulse... it may be because I was using a controller and not being forced to stare at such a tiny screen, but I did notice the handling was a little more responsive.. despite slight handling improvements over Pulse's garbage physics engine, though, I just cannot grasp the concept of how to maneuver around corners or on mag-strips, or why in god's name merely touching the wall STILL brings you to a dead stop... I mean, come on, I should NOT be doing 127kph in Phantom.

Ask travis, I wish I had a video of me playing... especially on a mag-strip.. Im lucky if I get halfway through a mag-strip area without fishtailing then careening left and right into each wall repeatedly. Not to mention I seemed to find every glitchy/quirky turn or drop-off or bad collission detection possible... I nearly got upside down multiple times, too (the upside-down thing being a staple of me playing ANY Wipeout after the tournament at Al's hahaha)

I don't know if I merely need more practice, or if XL, 64, and WO3 are truly my niche in the series.

I DO know that I won't own this game personally for at least two or three years because it's not enough to make me buy a PS3, and there's nothing else on the black monolith that interests me either (Super Stardust is cool, but I can live without it). It's a shame SL isn't third party... maybe HD would have seen an XBLA release, at which point I would at least be able to say I'd have bought it

On the plus side, at least HD is seeing a large audience... like Travis said, there are tons of people playing who have never touched a Wipeout game before... but that's both good and bad... they don't have anything to compare it to... they wouldn't understand why the weapon icons in the "2097" hud aren't the right colors. If they can enjoy it, that's what matters.

I saw a lot of names of people from the forums here on the fast times lists... but nobody here will see my name on the tables until the PS3 1) is less than 300 bucks, 2) has full backwards compatibility reinstated, and 3) has more than just Wipeout HD going for it in my eyes. I'm sticking with the old games, they just feel "right," you know? Maybe it's being able to wall scrape, maybe it's not slowing down to a crawl whenever your ship hits ANYthing whatsoever, maybe it's airbrakes that actually work, maybe it's having a sense of weight and momentum when you're barrelling down the track (or into someone)... Pure was tolerable, and at least had an awesome soundtrack... But I'll take Fusion over the latest 3 installments.

Also, why the hell is Auricom faster than Qirex? I asked the same damn thing when I first played Pure on the day it launched... it's almost as if both teams' stats are directly swapped.. Qirex is supposed to be the wicked fast heavyweight whose hard to control, and Auricom is supposed to be the more nimble one but a little slower.


And I unlocked the "Deadly Momentum" achievement for him while I was playing single player -_-

Time to go back to working on my last Wipeout XL video for youtube.