Hey, do you remember Wipeout? Well, maybe you don't. It was a
franchise of sci-fi themed arcade racers that were popular in the late
90s. Although initially released for the Playstation, the games were
ported to numerous other platforms, including PCs. It had a brief bit
of popularity but by the mid 2000s the series had pretty much petered
out (except for the inevitable nostalgia-feeding remakes).

I first encountered the franchise in... well, I can't remember exactly
when, but I recall it had a superfluous amount of colored lighting and lensflare, so it was obviously running on a 3D accelerator (possibly
using my beloved Canopus 3DFX card; that thing was so awesome). But
that wasn't the first game in the series to be available on PC; that
honor lay with "WipEout", released in late 1995. And the PC version
was an extremely poor port, with disappointing graphics, awful
collision modeling, and a total lack of the sense of speed that made
the games so memorable on other games.

("Wipeout 97", which was the lensflared version I played, had greatly
improved on all these things and was actually fun to play).

Fortunately, the world has fanboys, and one dedicated player put in
the work to make the original PC game worth playing. Called "The
Phantom Edition", it is actually a sourceport that utilizes the data
from the Playstation version (so to play that, you'll need to find a
PSX CD... or maybe an ISO of the game Archived somewhere ;-). I
actually have a copy of the Playstation CD-ROM (because of course I
do!) so I was good to go.

And it's surprisingly fun, with updated graphics and much improved
gameplay. It's definitely a game of its era; edgy, rough around the
edges, and lacking any real depth, but it is head-n-shoulders better
than the original DOS version (which, yes, I also have). Just the fact
that it supports widescreen mode makes it worth playing, as far as I'm concerned.

So if you're a fan of the old series (and can dig up a copy of the old
PS1 version), give it a look. At the very least, you can give it a
watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfUbT2_0kls

My only complaint is that it doesn't run under pure DOS. I mean, it's understandable why it does not, but - while its not very competitive
as a Windows game - as a DOS game it would be awesome.




https://github.com/wipeout-phantom-edition/wipeout-phantom-edition

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