Joining The Club!

[Task]

You want a SanDisk memory card, I think it's a "Duo Pro" or something. I'd say 1 Gig at least, 2 Gig would be better, 4 Gig would be whole bunches.
I bought an official Sony one and paid a bit too much, but it was all they had there at the time. I couldn't wait the day it would've taken to find the SanDisk elsewhere. 8 (

[RJ O'Connell]

I bought my 1 GB at Wal Mart.

It was the generic Lexar brand. Only $40. Boo. Freaking. Ya. ^_~

Yes, and in a few months I will be racing zargz, stin and all the others on Wipeout: Pulse!!!!

[stin]

Yes but I will need to find a 32mb for zargz and send it to him!.

stevie

[RJ O'Connell]

He can have mine for all I'm concerned - I don't need it.

Oh, that's right, I dunno where that one is either. X_X

[phl0w]

I am willing to part with mine too. 32mb memory stick, that is. My purchase back then was the following: PSP + 2gb SanDisk + Pure + Lumines. Although many may beg to differ, best thing I spent my money on in many years.
Whoever desperately needs it should drop me a message, one should consider though that it's too small for Pure's downloadable content

[stin]

It`s ok guys, I have it here and ready to send it away within a hour.

stevie

Edit I did try my best for dl packs for you but it`s not enough space so it`s all down to you

[zargz]

hehe thanx, bud! I need it so I can save my progress so I don't have to start all over again every time i wanna play.
now, since yesterday I left it (the psp) in sleep mode. wonder how long I can do that?
amt I'm looking for a 1G on the net! cheers!
Man! is pures steering differnet from wo3 or is pures steering differnet from wo3!!? hmm!

another thing - I never had a portabe so I yesterday I had problem seeing the screen
coz I held it like I hold the psx controller the d-pad facing to the roof instead of standing 90¤ to face my eyes! LOL!!!

[phl0w]

the d-pad facing to the roof instead of standing 90¤ to face my eyes!

I hold it like that on purpose when the sun's shining, you'll see nil otherwise.

since yesterday I left it (the psp) in sleep mode. wonder how long I can do that?

My PSP is always in sleep mode. Doesn't harm her (yes, it's female ) in any way. Besides it takes an eternity to boot Pure anyway, might as well leave it on in the first place. Just make sure you always go into sleep mode on Pure's main menu. It's got a tendency to crash when you turn it back on.

[zargz]

okay, thanks!

[infoxicated]

heh! Mine is always in sleep mode so that it can turn itself on in the morning and download all my podcasts before I go to work. Occasionally I forget the battery is low and it runs itself dead, though.

[phl0w]

Mine does that with RSS feeders. Maybe this is a stupid question, but what is a "podcast"?

Yesterday I looked at the league menu to choose a track for free play and had some business elsewhere. So I left my PSP running. It took longer though than expected and when I came back like 5 hours later, my PSP was off obviously. I fed it some ac/dc and when it awoke there were only Alpha and Gamma displayed. Silence. After my initial shock (pulse ~180) I figured it MUST have hung up and hard resetted the thing. Luckily my savegame was fine...

[Task]

So I think I've got Rapier fairly well now. I'd say I'm about as good at Rapier now as I was at Flash two months ago. 8 P

The difference between them is incredible. Vector and Venom are truly just training, Flash is where it starts to really happen, but Flash ain't anything compared to Rapier. And I still don't have a very tight grasp on Phantom, but at least I think I can play it without embarassing myself too badly now. 8 )

Still, I've finally got all the SR golds up to Rapier, and the tournament ones (minus Descension till I can get a solid half hour of no interruptions that I'm not working in), and most of the TT ones as well. There's always more work to be done in TT. I think I'm actually missing more Flash TT golds than I am Rapier TT golds, I really don't know why Flash is so difficult in TT. Probably because it's the first time barrel rolls are really doable and yet I'm not very good at doing them.

At this point in the game I think I'm finally familiar with all the tracks (racing and music), but I'm still not much of a pilot. The physics are still kind of strange to me and it's taking a long time to get used to them. I'm seeing a whole lot of the "flying off the track" going on now that I'm spending a lot of time on Rapier, and I'm definitely not liking that much at all. The last turn on Exostra, I point myself towards the finish line and fly sideways right off the track. It doesn't happen all the time, but every now and then. It's obviously the way I'm flying the corner, boosting up the hill and not turning early enough because I'm too close to the inside, but the low accelleration of the game really shows in instances like that.

I think my least favourite alteration is the effect of nose control. It has nothing to do with handling as far as I can tell, instead it's just an altitude control while flying and (this is the part I don't like) a speed increase while driving. If you nose down, you'll go faster. The biggest problem I have with this is that the AG craft should be optimized for least air resistance at an even keel. So when you nose down you should be giving youself a _worse_ profile, creating more friction with the atmosphere, and going _slower_. Not faster. I was able to take 2 seconds off my lap time just by holding down the nose. I really don't think that's the way it should be.

So, more TT work ahead of me and then... Phantom! I've already played a fair amount of Phantom, but I still haven't really tackled it full-force.

[Mad-Ice]

I think my least favourite alteration is the effect of nose control. It has nothing to do with handling as far as I can tell, instead it's just an altitude control while flying and (this is the part I don't like) a speed increase while driving. If you nose down, you'll go faster. The biggest problem I have with this is that the AG craft should be optimized for least air resistance at an even keel. So when you nose down you should be giving youself a _worse_ profile, creating more friction with the atmosphere, and going _slower_. Not faster. I was able to take 2 seconds off my lap time just by holding down the nose. I really don't think that's the way it should be.

So, more TT work ahead of me and then... Phantom! I've already played a fair amount of Phantom, but I still haven't really tackled it full-force.

You describe it so well, I totally agree with you. I really enjoy reading about your progress, good luck.

[Task]

It's been over a month since my last post in this thread, but not because I'm done with it. Oh no. It's just because I haven't been playing Pure a whole lot. I want to, no doubt about that. So why haven't I?

Well.

Now that I'm halfway competent in Phantom, the single-player experience just doesn't have the draw anymore. What I've learned about Pure in the past month or two is that the single-player portion of the game (which is likely what >95% of the purchasers were buying into) only has one purpose: To get you ready for multiplayer.

Now that I have tasted of the glory that is multi-player WO (and by multi-player I mean more than 2, something that unless you linked up SE and had 3 hardcore wipers nearby nobody had experienced before Pure) it's all I really want to play. The shine is gone from single player, I want to play against human opponents. Not just because of their skill either; after all, the AI can still beat me on most tracks at Phantom. Nah, it's because the human players are so much more _fun_ to play against! So much more interesting.

Have you ever had an AI opponent just lose it for a couple seconds and slam back and forth between the walls in front of you? No, of course not. I'll tell you though, it was pretty hilarious to watch my cousin do it! I could hardly fly straight myself I was laughing so hard.
Has an AI opponent seen that they can't catch up in the remaining lap and found a way to place SIX bombs in one treacherous area, pinning all their hopes on taking you out with a minefield? I'll bet not, but I flew through one of those minefields. Dodging all those mines and surviving the one I couldn't gave me FAR more satisfaction than beating someone by half a lap ever could have.
No AI opponent is going to pull out surprise tactics like that. There's a lot you can learn racing the AI, but it'll only take you so far. If you want to break your limits, you're going to have to take your game online and find out just how little you really know.

I wasn't so sure when I heard that "solo play has gone the way of the dinosaur", but now I see that there's a large amount of truth to that. If a game can be taken online, then it probably should be. And if it isn't, well, I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't sell well. Which will definitely have the end effect of making a ton of single player games obsolete as they're replaced by multi-player variants.

The really good news here is that WO seems to be doing very well in this regard. Pure was developed a bit limited in this area, but it's a bit of an older game I guess, and ways around some of those limitations have since been found. Pulse might very well have no limitations at all, and offer us the ultimate multiplayer WO experience. The same could easily be true of WOHD as well, and I'm sure we'll find out soon enough.

I've mostly been a solo-play gamer myself. A bit of hotseat Warlords in the distant past, and some Age Of Wonders in the recent past, are about my only forays into real-time multiplayer. For the first time _ever_, I really want to take my game online, to the expense of my solo play time.

And that, right there, is (to me) an incredible achievement. WO has changed me.

Again. 8 )

[Lion]

very eloquent
and I can totally relate to the sentiments you express.
and not that this point is relevant to wipeout in any way that I can really determine, but cooperative play makes developing a single player campaign worth it in a lot of games. it's something that is sadly missing from too many games now. Halo3 impresses in that regard
I can't really see that working in wipeout except in teamplay multiplayer. a blocker and a runner could be great (like an F1 teams championship)

[Rapier Racer]

Yeah, just think of some of the unstoppable teams that could be formed....

[Asayyeah]

ohhh a pure killer added to a crazy racer sound like a poisonous mixture team for the other fellow pilots

Jay : amen again to what you said, multiplayer is the essence of multiple feelings that is hard to find in one race vs AI. From the rage of global fury being eliminated by your dear mate to the explosion of happiness when you beat him by the smallest margin possible after a deep intense battle during 5 laps. Only multiplayer (through kai or gathering/convention) can give you this . Complitely in agreement with you

[Medusa]

100% agreement with you, Task! You know exactly how to describe it.

I find this Wipeout (Pure) such a big departure from the others in this regard, because I find the other wipeouts very satisfying to play alone. They each have a remarkable addictiveness while flying solo that I just don't find in Pure. I still can't nail down the exact reason but Pure just seems to be quite boring (dare I say it??) most of the time when playing Single Player. Perhaps it isn't as immersive in Single Player mode compared to the other games, I don't know what it is.

I find myself playing on Phantom most of the time on Kai instead of by myself (which still isn't that often unfortunately!). Consequently I still don't even have all of the packs unlocked in Phantom, no Ascension gold yet. Just find it hard to convince myself I should sit down that long to play Pure by myself...

[Task]

Absolutely, it is NOT as immersive.

I think the reason for that... is the controls and the environment.

The earlier wipeouts (the ones responsible for building the franchise) had a very strict control scheme, the craft would only do exactly what you told it to do, immediately and without limitation. If you told the craft to fly at maximum speed off in yonder direction, that's what it would do. If you told it to slam into a wall at full accelleration, you could hear the "whang!" and really feel the rebound. The controls in Pure are more... slippy. Tenuous. Vague, even. There's a lot of sliding, and I do love the sliding, but it's more the lack of reality to it. It's somehow "off by a bit", so it definitely feels like a simulated world, it doesn't have the physics of the real world exactly. You can't suspend your disbelief that you're actually in an AG craft because it just doesn't react quite exactly the way you'd expect. It's really close, and I'm hoping they get even closer in Pulse, but that small difference makes it difficult to really immerse yourself into the game.

Or so I've determined. YMMV.

And then there's the environment. It's pretty. Beautiful, even. Artistry like was in Fusion, only glitzier! Rich sounds, too. That's a lot of information to process. Track surfaces are different, track shapes vary, the differences from track to track are huge compared to the earlier games. It was easier to focus on the track when all the tracks were the same channel shape, the same width everywhere, and the graphics were severely limited by number of polys and simple textures. Now they've got this beautiful environment trying to convince us we're looking through a window into the real future... And the difference between the control inputs you give and what you'd expect to happen is made even more jarring by it.

So I think it's the difference between simulation and reality that leads to a less immersive experience, and a less satisfying solo play.

It's just off by that little bit, and it shakes me out of the zone.

Ah well, it's a long weekend! That means I'll have time for some WO! A bit of multiplayer up at the cottage and hopefully some more Phantom practice, get the golds in those tournaments...

Oooh, and then the next Toronto Gathering!

It's a good future that has Wipeout in it. 8 )

[lunar]

I really like the ever so slightly random or "vague" controls in Pure. It`s very hard to fly the same lap twice, which makes it addictive. But, as you say, you also don`t really get the zen like immersion of the old games.

Your description of multi v single player is very apt. Kai finally killed off my last vestiges of interest in single player games. Before that I had been tweaking Madden AI sliders to try and get a good game out of it. After playing on Kai I realised that I no longer saw any point in just trying to beat a computer program, in any game really. Offline play is just practice for the real thing, or indirect competition with other humans via time trial. Having said that, I wouldn`t mind tweaking Arnaud`s sliders down a bit.


@RR - the ultimate team would surely be ASA as the speed merchant and yourself as his wingman/protector/enforcer. That would be a deadly Scottish/French duo indeed. You could reverse the roles on Sinucit though, and maybe one or two others.