The Final Word game review

WipeOut 3 -- Psygnosis

R.I.P.
...A 57" TV doesn't help the text. At all. Seriously!

Having pretty much played this game to death, I'll have to say that it kicks ass. To be honest though, when I first checked out WipeOut 3 at E3'99, I can't say that I was as amazingly impressed with it as I had been with the last two PlayStation versions in the series. I really don't know what the problem was, but it just didn't click.

Then after playing for a good bit with the stock Dual Shock controller, I decided "to heck with this" and busted out the NegCon (really, the only way to play racing games on the system... period). By the end of my first race I felt I knew exactly what was wrong... I had been playing with the Dual Shock.

Screw the hand massage "rumble" feature... With the NegCon this game instantly fell into place for me. Play control was precise, and everything I've grown to expect from this series.

In game graphics are on par with XL, but I had one SERIOUSLY major complaint involving the out of game graphics! While the menus were all stylish and cool, minimalistic looking, etc... I couldn't read a single bit of text except main titles, and menu headers. Curious about what the stats are on that ship you're about to pick? So am I, it is illegible. I tried everything from using a high-resolution composite monitor, to a 57" TV and the text is just unreadable because the font size selected was to small. I'm sure it looked fine on their dev system hooked up to a SVGA monitor, but they obviously didn't check it on a TV... and this isn't just me. We had a good size group of people standing around when it was on the big screen, and the text became the joke of the whole session.

Aside from that problem though, the game is excellent. Music is top notch as always, eventhough this time Psygnosis went out of house for their primary music score. They hired DJ Sasha to compose original music, and organize music from other contributors, ending up with probably the best techno soundtrack in a game this year since Rollcage. For a sample of the music, (you can check out our Video Pit where we have provided a compilation of music samples from the game in MP3 format).

If you've been a WipeOut fan in the past, you owe it to yourself to pick up this sequel.

>>>>> 24.0/25 <<<<<		R.I.P.
Graphics		4.5
Sound		5.0
Gameplay/Control		5.0
Longevity/Playability		4.5
Overall		5.0
Total		24.0

(10/99)