This game would make my blood boil, but I'm afraid that my blood stubbornly refuses to do so.
After some wrangling, I finally got Wipeout 3: Special Edition to run in my emulator. I'm beginning to wish that I hadn't, though - every single expectation that I had of it was either missed or fulfilled badly enough to make me regret hoping in the first place. I'm not angry (I don't care enough about this for it to have that effect on me), but I am disappointed.
Why did they have to butcher the "classic" tracks? They're either out-of-proportion (Gare d'Europa, whose highs and lows are all flattened out) or plagued with cheating physics (Altima VII, whose iconic drop has an awful, awful effect reminiscent of the Mag-Strip in Metropia); it would have been better for the developers to have left them out.
The two extra prototype courses are terrible. The first one feels like something out of F-ZERO X and is completely inappropriate for inclusion in a Wipeout game (to say nothing of its worthless collision detection), and the second is preposterously short - my first lap went by in less than ten seconds, and I didn't even know what I was doing! On top of that, they ditch the cell-shaded aesthetic of the original prototype courses in favor of nightmarishly recycled assets from other tracks and replace actual vehicle choices with a bizarre, Zone-like ship design (which looks like a mutant Icaras).
This is a minor issue, but it's distracting enough that I feel compelled to point it out anyway: what's up with the tunnels in Sampa Run? They're all strange and glowy, and they look awful in comparison to the tunnels in the original version. Half of that course's greatness is in its dark, Blade Runner-like atmosphere; the new tunnels mitigate that considerably.
Finally, there just isn't enough improvement to the original game. I see a few extra graphical effects like vapor trails and a crash sequence that's marginally less miserable than the original game's (although those are canceled out somewhat by the aforementioned glowing tunnels), and the physics model is way more forgiving (I mention that as an improvement because I'm sure that other people would think of it in that way, even though I feel that it works to the game's detriment), but that's not enough. Why not fix the worthless opponents, which were the only thing holding the original game back from absolute perfection? How is it "racing" if I can consistently place first before completing even one lap? The weapons are still as unbalanced as ever - quakes appear far too frequently, and the plasma still ignores the basic rules of collision detection. And I had expected a few new songs in the soundtrack to go with the rest of the game's overhaul - surely they could have gotten Sasha or (gasp!) CoLD SToRAGE to record some if they didn't want to bother with licensing?
Honestly, this makes me sad. I had imagined Wipeout 3: Special Edition to be a game that expanded on Wipeout 3's already strong foundation and rectified its errors (few as they were) while adding beautiful, enhanced versions of courses from the previous games. With such negligible advances in the former and such stupendously botched execution in the latter, though, it ended up being nothing but a sprawling, over-hyped disappointment.
I don't even care about it being UK-exclusive any more.
