WipEout

Futuristic third-person racing — that was the thing in the nineties. WipEout takes it literally: little flying craft without wheels, conserving energy and shields like proper racers using brute force. The game came out in 1995 as a clone of the famous Psygnosis title, but the translation into MS-DOS turned out more like a lesser relative than a new classic.

You're racing a little craft down abstract tracks in some present or future world. The essential thing: you pick one of four different tracks, stay centered through the curves, and collect power-ups along the way. The third-person view on the vehicle makes spatial orientation a mystery — you're never sure if you'll make it through an opening without a penalty. The physics are harsh, collisions send you flying off, restarts are merciless. Controls like games from that era: direct, but brutal.

In its own way, it keeps you on edge. You want to master the track without crashing, without scraping your bumpers on the walls. Except the graphics are already wrestling with the computer's limits — polygons are jaggedly flat, textures look more like dirty smudges, the framerate chugs when something happens on the track. The music plays in the background, but it's not the kind of thing that sticks with you for weeks.

Today WipEout is mainly an artifact. Psygnosis polished its own work, while this attempt never really had a chance. All the futuristic racing games from that time blur together in memory — some were better, some were worse. This one gets forgotten the fastest.

Playing it in a browser today is like visiting a museum of bad ideas. It's not a bad game, just soulless. If you're expecting something like F-Zero, it's not — that was a touch of elegance. This is grunt work without wit. If you're in the mood to fly between walls pointlessly, there are worse choices, but there are also things history looks back on more kindly.