I’ve had a certain fondness, ever since the days of the original Playstation, for the “futuristic racing” genre.  Specifically, the F-Zero and Wipeout series, though I admit to a brief flirtation with Extreme-G.  The fondness is not returned. 

I was pretty good at F-Zero X, back in the N64 days, but that was a rare spark of competency.  Every other time I’ve bought one of these games, I’ve gone through a predictable cycle where I get about halfway through the career mode or through the available circuits, win a lot of races along the way, and start feeling good about myself at just the point where the game actually starts demanding some skill from me and I hit a brick wall, quit playing for good, and rage about how much money I’ve wasted in buying YET ANOTHER one of these things and shouldn’t I have learned my lesson by now and so on and so forth.

Wipeout 2048 comes free with Playstation Plus, so I downloaded it, played it for a few hours, beat the 2048 season, felt good about myself, started playing the 2049 season, got through a few races and then hit one where I came in dead last 5 times in a row and had the game pop up a rather humiliating “would you like to just skip this event?” message.

That’s when I realized that, well, technically I hadn’t paid money SPECIFICALLY for Wipeout 2048, and that I didn’t need to feel like I’d wasted anything by deciding that it was a good time to walk away.  So much less rage.

It is a pretty neat game, though.  I’m obviously not qualified to judge it on its merits as a racing game, but it’s got good music, the tracks are pretty, and it’s scratched the futuristic-racer itch for me for the foreseeable future. 

It’s just a pity that Liverpool Studios has been closed down, because now the only games I have to look forward to being terrible at are F-Zero games, I don’t own a WiiU, and even if they did release a WiiU F-Zero, buying a console just to play a game that I would hate myself for buying would be a new low.

I’m not sure what’s next on the Vita play schedule.  Maybe Knytt Underground since that was also free with PS+.  Dragon’s Crown is coming out in a couple of weeks, too, and that’s Relevant to My Interests…