This probably counts as a napalm+bridge post, but I've known about this for a wee while now.

Mostly because the game strobed so much it made me want to throw up watching other people play it, although it wasn't as bad playing it myself, I still felt pretty sick. I said often towards the end of last year that the environments were far too busy - too much strobing neon on the tracks that added very little to the feeling of speed because it strobed towards the horizon, effectively giving the feeling of going backwards at certain speeds.

The artist who created the track textures wanted to create a different texture for every track, which was admirable in terms of effort, but the patterns used in an attempt to make them all unique just gave me motion sickness. Add the patterns to the other strobing neon in the game and it should have come with a (probably designer) sick bag.

Unfortunately I'm pretty succeptible to that kind of thing, and most people didn't seem bothered, so I gave up commenting on it in the face of the usual mantra of "it's okay when you get used to it" (Intrestingly, it's the same thing that had been said when I commented that the steering was too sensitive at high speeds in the Formula One games. Funny that it every review said at F1 0x was "hard to control", yet none of them mentioned that "it's okay once you get used to it." Maybe it should have been put in the manual; "Yes, the steering is really sensitive and minor corrections at high speed will probably result in an unintentional crash, leading to frustration and the notion that you should just go and play Burnout or Race Driver instead, but trust us, it's okay once you get used to it." Yay! for Nick Burcombe who finally got that handling sorted out when he became lead.)

But I digress.

The designers, Col & Karl, had asked for the neon and strobing in WipEout HD to be toned down many a time, but the lead artist has his own vision of what he wants the levels to look like. Notice I say levels and not tracks - that's the way they are created; the fact that they're supposed to be race tracks is incidental - the artists are trying to craft an environment in a similar way to what they would if it was an adventure game.

Essentially the lead artist gets more say than anyone else. He's a good guy, not a bad guy, but as an art director at Studio Liverpool he carries a lot of clout and generally any attempt to suggest that the environments weren't quite working were dismissed, by and large. Probably because art is subjective. Certainly the way I perceived it is that you shouldn't question something you aren't qualified to understand as far as art style is concerned.

I qualify this by saying that I didn't like his vision for WipEout Pulse when it was first explained to me, but it ended up more my kind of thing than Pure. I was completely wrong in my initial thoughts that it was "yet another" utopian future re-hash, although I think some levels were more successful than others in terms of being race tracks and environments. Sometimes you have to trust the man with the vision, even when you cant picture it in a good light yourself.

Whether or not all of the above is at the root of the epilepsy problem, I don't know. Don't work there any more and I'm not privy to that kind of information. All I know is that the game made me want to barf six months ago, but since I had no intention of playing it (me buying a WipEout title with barrel rolls in it would be like Michael Moore attending a fund raiser for George W Bush's retirement) I felt I could shrug and walk away. No sense creating a fuss about something that, ultimately, wont affect me.

And as for David Reeves... I mean, **** me, he really should just shut the **** up. For good. He's worse than Phil Harrison when he was chugging the kool aid. Phil said some stupid stuff, but at least he came across as passionate for the brand, not a condescending buffoon like Reeves does. When Reeves is telling you that it's a "technical problem you wouldn't understand", he's really telling you he thinks you're beneath a proper explanation and should just sit down, shut up, and keep buying his product, m'kay.

Anyhow, I'm fairly confident that the folk at Studio Liverpool can fix the "very technical issues" with WipEout HD to the point where it wont leave you foaming at the mouth (assuming you're not doing that over the delay in the first place).