WipEout HD Hands On

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Mag-Strips, from WipEout Pulse, which tether your craft to the tremulous terrain and impossible loops, are represented by electric legs crawling along beneath your craft, and despite all the potential clutter from explosive bombs, rockets and other weapons, the current preview build is visually coherent. This is all delivered fluidly, without resorting to motion blur, jarring degrees of anti-aliasing or other similar effects, and there's almost no screen-tear remaining. The detail bleeds into audio too, as explosions ring in your ears and shields coat your craft in oily protection and muffle the soundtrack, which includes Stanton Warriors, Kraftwerk and DJ Fresh, but can be replaced by a PS3 playlist. We put on the GTA IV soundtrack, obviously, to stay alpha.

The major exception, visually, is Zone. If you didn't play the PSP games, Zone reskins the original tracks and puts a distance meter in the top of the screen, counting ever upward. You relinquish control of your craft's speed, which increases gradually until you're at Super-Phantom and eventually Zen speeds, struggling not to bash into every single surface. Each phase of the track is decked out in a two-tone colour scheme, and the traditional track and scenery textures are replaced with audio equalisers running beneath and around your race-craft. At the transition point between speeds, a white wave sweeps past you, as though you're watching in a neon disco intestine spasm, and switches to new hues.

In addition to Campaign mode, Racebox allows you to set up your own tournaments and practice single events, and online options will be included for eight-player simultaneous racing, although these aren't active in our preview build. When it's up and running, you'll be able to create a lobby for a race, set the parameters and start it when enough people have joined, judging by the in-game documentation, and leaderboards will be accessible in-game and via the Internet.

3D details on the track surface give the graphics a lot of depth.

WipEout HD will also be backed up, post-launch, by downloadable content, with the developers openly promoting the idea of HD's basic release as a launch-pad for add-ons. Lead designer Colin Berry said recently that "a mixture of old tracks of old tracks and brand new ones" would be possible, along with "an extra game mode or two", although nothing had been decided at the time he mentioned this, and Sony has yet to make any announcements.

WipEout HD's close relationship with Pure and Pulse means that a lot of it is familiar, like the weapons - quake, leech, cannons, shields, machineguns, autopilot - and the ability to replenish your craft's health by absorbing power-ups, but then WipEout's old-school blend of high-speed, high-concept steer-from-the-back hover-racing, learning boost pad positions to zoom past other racers across futuristic Blade Runner worlds, is as strong now as it was in 1995, and much better for the new visuals. If the price is right, and Sony Liverpool eliminates the minor slowdown and tearing, this will be what we're being told it is, and so we shall celebrate.