Double Jump

Wipeout HD vs. Energy Drinks

2010-10-21T00:00:00+13:00

A BriEf NotE on CapitaLizaTion

Some smart bastard in the marketing department insists the title be stylised as WipEout. I refuse to comply with the choice due to the following three reasons:

It sucks.
It sucks.
It's against my religion.*

* Because it sucks.

The Fast and the Futuristic

September, 1995. Sony released a brand new game console, the “PlayStation”, at $299.99. Three weeks later, Wipeout — a new game that had you piloting a futuristic anti-gravity ship at superhuman speed — hit the shelves, and a million childhoods were irrevocably ruined as the pale mist of reality, normalcy and human interaction gave way to the hedonistic vista of sparkly lights, dance music and instant gratification.

Oh, sweet memory.

Fifteen years on, enter Wipeout HD for the PS3. Let’s get something out of the way: HD ain’t a brand new game. Its DNA has been spliced from sister titles Wipeout Pure and Wipeout Pulse – handheld releases that did a great job at suffusing nostalgic electropop beats with the giddy, rushing gameplay we’ve come to know and love.

“HD has a knack of latching on to your head like an enamoured facehugger.”

After a few short minutes it’s clear that HD was a game hewn from the still-beating heart of a speed junkie. Nanosecond maneuvers, high speed explosions and the weapons system keeps even the most confident gamer on his toes. While it definitely rewards picosecond-perfect timing, Wipeout newbies need not bring a crash helmet; the difficulty curve resembles a goodly-sized hill rather than the all-too-familiar vertical cliff of ice and fear.

At its best, HD has a knack of latching on to your head like an enamoured facehugger. As it pulls you deeper into the rabbit hole, your consciousness dissipates, the room drops away, reality suspends. It’s just you and the race. Twisting through hairpin turns at break-neck speeds becomes a matter of perfect timing and eidetic memory; its a combination enough to cause racing fans’ already arrhythmic hearts to skip a faulty beat.

In the fastest speed mode, the map is a blur. You hardly see the next bend before it’s reached and passed you by. Steering is done by instinct and memory, the slightest flick of the analog stick and a tap of the shoulder button sees you rolling narrowly by a corner that didn’t exist a second ago. Falter for a second and the game is lost.

While you’re counting the attoseconds between turns, take a moment to admire the view. Retina-popping visuals are painted like a digital Michaelangelo on crack. “Zone” in particular layers a psychotropic dreamscape that you won’t forget in a hurry. If you’re looking for justification to sell your kidney/friend’s kidney for an HDTV, this might just be it; Wipeout HD is sexy at full 1080p. Seriously, it will get your TV pregnant.

The music weaves a distinctive and catchy soundtrack into your brainstem, managing to masterfully queue breakbeat electronica with a homage to the series’ traditional electronic roots (spot the Kraftwerk, kids).

HD offers a two-player multiplayer and online multiplayer matches with up to eight players. Unfortunately, multiplayer feels little more than an afterthought, and the lack of gameplay options is downright glaring. Lag is something of an inevitable issue for a game where a second can stretch to infinity, and some kind of background sourcery helps keep online gamers in sync, but often no-one has any idea who’s won until the unperturbed, disembodied voice announces the winner. We can’t blame the developer here, but it is a gripe we have nonetheless.

All-in-all, where another developer might have been tempted to expand the title to score arbitrary marks on a feature list, Sony Liverpool has dodged the temptation like a Harimau taking a corner in the Ubermall: smoothly. The game is pure racing and nothing more, and priced accordingly at that. Where a series like Burnout might come running towards you, Cramer-like bells and whistles trying to get your attention, you’ll find Wipeout HD sitting by itself, with an air of quiet confidence and elegance few games in the genre can sustain.

Awake at 4am

Warning: The following section is not recommended for children, pregnant or lactating women, or individuals sensitive to caffeine.

Aristotle said, “Nature does nothing uselessly.” In other words, mankind is personally responsible for all the uselessness in the world. After Jersey Shore, Chatroulette, and staring at aisle-after-aisle of tragically sensationalist energy drink cans, we’re inclined to agree.

A total of fourteen synthetic sins were picked for this comparison. Stephen — human expendable extraordinaire — was sent forth to consume and subsequently document each beverage, while R&D observed the results with mop, bucket, and Replacement Stephen (you never know). Thus, the following chart of science was produced, with much verisimilitude:

A Brief Review

We’re not gonna lie; subjecting a fellow primate to the carbonated kingdom of chaos was a morally questionable act and indicative of a severe lack of intelligence. But man never would have discovered fire without first attempting to kill rocks with wooden clubs and therefore all acts of stupidity can be excused for the sake of progress. Most importantly, it seemed a good idea at the time.

This issue now firmly dealt with, we shall move on. For your reading pleasure, each drink was dutifully recorded in painstaking detail for future reference. Some favourites include:

Playboy

Despite the unwelcome association with such an overbearing brand, this piquant brew mixes notes of medicinal fluid with essays of orangade and publications of tang. A bouquet of acid reflux punctuates its otherwise silky finish.

Lift

From the finest local laboratories, this sensual summer drink is sure to placate the casual connoisseur. With the colour of sun-warmed urine, plastic overtones corrode Lift's metallic tang to produce a flavour with the cheeky nuance of candied fruit.

V

A lithe, full-bodied flavour with a mulish kick. V's rush hits you like a rampant wildebeest. An effervescent sting gently paddles your mouthglands, leaving a faint hint of apples in springtime.

Mother

This formidable broth waxes the earthy flavours of clay and other clay to make for a taste not unlike clay. The hit is a burst of joyful, bounding energy, like a frolicking unicorn. Mother will leave you sweaty and nauseated, but in a good way.

Relentless

The drink for the raver in all of us, Relentless is an avante-garde pastiche of the classic energy drink, a chemical homage and an instant favourite to new wave energy drinkers. Strong hints of tin and cough syrup.

Red Bull

Its name is apt; this beverage rampages around your mouth as though it were indeed a bull taunted, perhaps, by the addition of red to its proximity. An easy drink, non-complex and with simple flavors. One for beginners and connoisseurs alike.

Demon

Imagine a thousand bodies, burning with the infernal flames of demonic energy, endlessly putrefying, shedding maggots and rotting meat as you watch in a slow, detached horror. All that you hear is the sound of crackling flames, and all you smell is the horrifying, bizarrely alluring smell of cooking human flesh. You try to scream, and all that comes out is the sound of static. Now unimagine it, because Demon simply doesn't have the chops to pull it off. Two stars.

Happily, Stephen survived. His stomach contents, sadly, did not. (The matter ejected from his face could, we believe, be successfully classified as a new category of life-form.) Replacement Stephen was terminated to save overhead. Alas, the harsh rigours of enterprise.

The Verdict

And now, without haste, we must reduce this absurdly long literary discharge to mere summary, lest we break some immutable Internet Law. In other words, TL;DR.

	Wipeout HD	14 x Energy Drinks
Price	$20	$20 (Not including cleaning expenses.)
Gameplay	An arcade-inspired rush of speed, fun, and explosions. A minimalist masterpiece of racing meets a few choice additions.	A series of mini-games beginning with jitters and ending with vomit.
Graphics	Beautiful futurism in 1080p.	Blurred.
Audio	A well-chosen mix of arcade-style electronica and sound effects.	The walls are talking.
Notes	An energetic, impulsive game that lives true to its history and looks great on your liquid crystals.	Hilarious for spectators, intestinally damaging for player.

There you have it. While your adrenaline might spike on caffiene, Wipeout keeps on going like an Energizer Bunny in heat. It’s an awesome game to add to your collection, impulsively fun and justifiably affordable.

But then again, why choose?

More in Versus: Sins of a Solar Empire vs. Justin Beiber

Sins of a Solar Empire vs. Justin Bieber

2010-06-21T00:00:00+12:00

In 2008, a freshly cast Ironclad Games launched its debut title, Sins of a Solar Empire, into one of the most complex and venerable genres in the world: the RTS. The result was a surprising success, with the sci-fi space epic going through awards like priests through a nunnery.

Bieber who?

We're not exactly sure just who Justin Bieber is (or what gender it is for that matter), but we've been assured that the music produced by this would-be wunderkind is, in fact, gut-wrenchingly terrible and time would be better spent on other, less grating hobbies like beehive smashing or herpes testing. Nevertheless, the laws of populist entertainment condemn us to a fate of joyless experience for the thirty-something minutes this album takes, and we are nothing if not slaves to gimmicky effect. God forbid someone judge us on the quality of our articles.

Well, that was two years ago now, and while Ironclad Games may have risen to success and produced a further three expansion packs, the low price of Sins has only fallen. (If you spend more time looking for spare change down the back of the couch than looking for a job, this might just be the game for you.) Here at Double Jump, we think there’s worse things you could spend your money on, so we’ve set out to prove it. Right now, it’s about the price of a Justin Bieber album. So here it is: a side-by-side comparison of one of the best games to come out of 2008 against one of the worst albums ever made.

Sinsational

Here’s what you need to know about Sins: it’s good. Damn good. The fat’s been cut, but what’s left is nothing more than raw, undiluted fun. There’s no story beyond some simple background lore (at least until you get into the expansion packs), nor even a campaign mode; just a simple player/map game creation screen. Ironclad lets Sins ride on the merits of its execution, which is a refreshing approach leagues apart from today’s buzzword-compensating industry, where every game seems to be trying to cover as many bases as it unreasonably can’t.

Just like any RTS, you’ll find yourself fighting a complicated balance between attacking, defending, obtaining resources and base building. What sets Sins apart is the sheer, vertigo-inducing scale that the game hurls your omnipresent birds-eye-view into. You’ll find yourself amongst a vast (at times bordering on endless) series of planetary systems, each usually consisting of a single planet and several asteroids which contain metal and crystal, the two main resources of the game.

On the larger maps, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the size of the single-star galaxy you start in. On the truly massive maps, with three, four or even five stars and associated planetary systems, you finally start to grasp the enormity of this digital tubcat. Be warned, though: those larger maps will see you sinking more hours into finishing a single game than watching your laser-worn Firefly collection back-to-back.

The gameplay is your standard-fare divide and conquer, but exceptionally well-balanced. An endless supply gut-wrenching, knife-edge decisions will make you step carefully at every twist in the game. The distributed nature of your base and fleets make for some tricky management at times. Leave your planets undefended at your own risk and the moment your fleet is over the other side of the galaxy, your enemy will launch a sneak attack more dastardly than a 1960s cartoon.

The magnitude of such a portly celestial plane is compensated in part by allowing for a postively unwholesome quantity of ships. Fleets can be truly massive, almost seeming to fill entire planetary systems at times. While it is somewhat unusual to see an fleet of that size attack as a as a unified whole, those moments will be devastatingly awe-inspiring. Feeling the rush of adrenaline that follows jumping a cornered fleet into a different system only to be met by a fleet of a similar size as yours makes you wonder just how this game manages to supply such consistently epic moments. Even watching a few evenly matched ships going head to head is exciting, and it only gets better as each player advances technologically, until you’re watching ships which range from miniscule bombers and fighters to huge capital ships battle it out.

The AI is well-balanced, if a little humdrum (you’re probably safe keeping one massive fleet and just walking over everything in your path), but the real action is in multiplayer. Sins is one of those games that is remarkably good at exposing the heart of human deviousness. Play against humans and you’ll be forced to accept that, as a species, we’re a bunch of cunning, overzealous and frankly rather cruel bastards.

“Play against humans and you’ll be forced to accept that, as a species, we’re a bunch of cunning, overzealous and frankly rather cruel bastards.”

Smaller battles are quite capable of providing serious entertainment as well, particularly if you’re not intending to play for ten hours straight. The focus simply changes from more occasional large, strategically important battles to brief, tiny skirmishes until one person gets the upper hand, either economically or strategically.

Added into the mix are three races, each realtively similar but with enough distinctness to reward experimentation. One of our favourite aspects is civilian manipulation: subjugating your population in order to exact an ever-increasing level of tax to keep your fleet romping its way through enemy systems.

The best player will balance civilian politics with military might; a series of upgrades through military, strategic or holy-crap-that’s-a-big-gun technologies. Sins is on the lighter side of the tech tree shtick, and we can reassure you that you’re not going to have to make spreadsheets or have a degree in economics; it’s easy enough to just pick up and play.

Back to Bieber

Now, lets not get ahead of ourselves. The point of this article is to contrast the merits of purchasing a magnicifent, well-wrought game filled with hundreds of hours of hand-crafted, excellent gameplay to those of purchasing an album with all the artistic merits of a Uwe Boll film enacted by Furbies (a look, incidentally, which JB captures perfectly).

The source of all human knowledge and future sentient overlord of mankind, Wikipedia, says that My World is JB’s first EP album. Launching into the first track with all the grim determination of a man wrestling a grizzly bear for the last cold beer (a thing that happens, we’ve seen it on TV advertising), we’re guessing EP stands for Ear Punishment.

Allow us to construct, graphically, the timeline of mental degeneration one can expect to suffer through:

Put simply: Justin Bieber’s “album” My World is nothing short of a weapon of neurodegenerative warfare. It should be banned, burnt, or smashed into a thousand tiny digital splinters. Twenty bucks to listen to it? We’d rather listen to Going Rogue, the audiobook.

The Verdict

So, here it is, your final breakdown:

	Sins of a Solar Empire	Justin Bieber's My World
Price	$20	$20
Gameplay	Plot, plow and plaster your enemies across a broad, sweeping universe. Wrestle with diplomacy and direct an empire behind sharply tuned controls.	Play. Pause. Erase.
Graphics	Nothing spectacular, but done well enough to invoke a grandiose sense of magnitude.	Eyebleeding.
Audio	The vast, expansive sounds of celestial battle fleets hum and drone amisdt a fittingly epic soundtrack, which oscillates between tones of eerie wonderment and triumphant battle themes. This is exactly what interplanetary conquest should sound like.	Invest in a mute button.
Notes	High critical acclaim, widely regarded as one of the best games of 2008.	Possibly contains thetans.

It’s twenty bucks, people. Go buy this game, and if you see any blond-haired boy/girl looking like it just stepped out of a Singstar commercial — shoot it.

More in Versus: Wipeout HD vs. Energy Drinks