Ballistic NG - Wipeout fan project

[shotfan]

Finally, I managed to launch BallisticNG... I do not know how to express myself, really. How it is...?
Incredible?
Mindblowing?
Astonishing?
...yes. So much yes.
I am amazed to the utmost degree. A game with completely faithful recreation of a PS1 Wipeout gameplay, and with many more extras onboard. I never dreamed I will be able to play an updated Wip3out of sorts on my PC.
The physics are PERFECT. The bounciness, the floatiness, the drifting crafts (this achieved thanks in part to the "on-the-rails" camera), the grinding/scraping, the gentle way the crafts flow through the air on jumps, it is all there, just like I remember it!
Faithful, yet refreshed graphics. Quite a good, original (!) soundtrack (my favourite is Aquila: it would fit right in Sasha's selection for Wip3out, and I am a sucker for such melanchonic trance... it is trance, right? ) Quirky and balanced teams (this is more in vein of W2097 actually, since I remember that W3 had some just plain obsolete teams; but this is fine, I do not like an idea of making hard hierarchies of the teams). Zone mode analogue. And THAT speed... I am enjoying every second of this game to the fullest.
Seems that nostalgia had not lied to me - the fun in Wipeout was not a illusion borne out of pleasant memories, but really was a special quality that can be replicated with enough dedication. Wipeout lives again (in all but name)!
Thank you to all who made this game (still uncompleted!). I applaud you!

Now, this pseudo-review could came off as rather rambling I apologize for that, as I cannot order my thoughts well enough after the joy I experienced with BNG. However, I would like to comment upon some things. Only a couple of them now, since I do not want to turn this post into a wall of text
- Performance report: I launched this on Pentium 4, 2.4 GHz, 1 GB RAM, GeForce 7600 GS (I changed my ordered GPU in the meantime). Yes, it may be a bit unbelievable, but I can play the game with such an old configuration! (good thing for me then that you decided to go the retro route for graphics, bigsnake! ). However, this comes at a great cost: I am practically limited to the single contender modes (Time Trial, Practice, Survival). Whatever the reason, I cannot race with AI contenders, since my FPS drop from ~45 average to stable 3 if they are present. Hard luck. I am still immensely grateful that I can play some of the modes fine enough!
- Why there is no Turbo per lap in Time Trial? Because of the Afterburner?
- What happened to the Silverstream remake? Or to that Gare d' Europa, shown in v0.1 trailer?
- Might I propose a Duel mode? A simple one-on-one race. I want to have such a mode, since as I said, my rig cannot handle 8 ships simultaneously any good enough.
- Time Trial default targets could be added?
- I cannot access Stats in the main menu. Is there anything?
- Of what use is the Afterburner in Survival? Should it not be simply disabled?
- Out of curiosity: how are medals awarded? Only in Single Race and Tournament? How you are supposed to attain 50 of them?

One last thing: I have no idea how to use the downloaded ships. Say that I try to feature Nullcer in the custom ship selection menu. I placed its .ship file into the MyShips folder and opened it in Ship Importer, but I see no option to include it as custom ship at the ship selection screen. What should I do?