Wipeout 2048 - Vita

[saturn-gamer]

Wipeout HD had much less things going on than 2048. HD looked very sterile. Thats why I'm with Dogg Thang, its simply weird that those HD tracks, which indeed look much more aliased and lower res as well, are hitting a lower framerate.

Its free DLC and its rather great, but this is disappointing still. I hope that the next DLC will be 2097 stuff, i'd pay for it.

[sj33]

It's not that I can't perceive the difference between 60fps and 30fps. It's like black and white, night and day etc.

It just makes absolutely no difference whatsoever to my enjoyment of playing the game and I can't understand why it's warranted such a big response.

In my case, it's because of the type of game - WipEout highlights the difference in framerate much more than, say, Metal Gear Solid.

[nakamura]

Metal Gear Solid 2 still looks stunning on PS2 and I would say that is down to the 60fps rate.

With 2048 I don't personally have issue with it being 30fps. I just think with all that power the Vita is meant to have we would get lovely looking games at high frame rates. Instead I feel they have overdone the detail or maybe even the screen resolution in order to make it looks like a small PS3 when I feel it would have looked better with a higher frame rate.

Ridge and 2048 look nice but Mario Kart 7 looks beautiful as you have vibrant colours and 60fps even in 3d mode. You don't need mega detail for amazing graphics, certainly not on a portable. Yet the Vita could increse detail over MK7 a fair amount and still maintain 60fps.

[sj33]

To a degree, the perceived framerate issues with the expansion pack are probably caused by the decision to implement cross-play support with the PS3, limiting the degree to which they could optimise the courses.

[Silvergun X]

Aye, that sounds reasonable.

The cross play works beautifully.

[Brad]

Metal Gear Solid 2 still looks stunning on PS2 and I would say that is down to the 60fps rate.

People try to dismiss it but I still put 90% of Modern Warfare's popularity down to 60fps even if people don't realise that's why they like it. You run a game at 30 and you end up comparing the visuals with tv and movies. Run it at 60 and you've got something entirely different from what you see at the cinema.

[sj33]

60fps also has half the input lag.

[Dogg Thang]

To a degree, the perceived framerate issues with the expansion pack are probably caused by the decision to implement cross-play support with the PS3, limiting the degree to which they could optimise the courses.

I would have thought the variation in frame rate across platforms would have caused more problems than amending visuals, but then I know nothing about the technicalities so should probably just shut up. I do know in the PSP ones that the input was frame-dependant, so whether or not you could successfully pull off a barrel roll, for example, depended on how smooth or not the game was running at that time. I thought that was the same on PS3 HD but I couldn't be sure. That's that input lag you're talking about, right?

It also depends one on what is causing the frame rate problems. There is such a variation across the tracks with some obvious offenders (Moa Therma, for example) so I can't help feeling it's something fairly specific beyond just general lack of optimisation. Bloom lighting effects or track shines etc, some of which I thought could be dropped without affecting any major geometry.

[Wools]

I've been playing WipEout 2048 for the past few weeks after grabbing the Tesco.com deal, and it really is one of the best games in the series.

When the reviews hit and before I owned a Vita, I was put off because of the long load times, some criticism that the near future aesthetic is not as striking as the far future design of previous games and that old circuits were not reprised in 2048. After 15 - 20 hours of playing the game, the loading is not as bad as you would expect (Comparable to the load time of Forza 4 or Gran Turismo 5) but is still a bit of an issue considering this is a portable game. However, the trade off is how marvellous it looks and presumably this is because of the amount of assets it has to load in.

The tracks are beautifully designed and the mix of brick and mortar buildings combined with high end carbon fibre materials snaking an anti gravity racing circuit between skyscrapers is striking. The Vista's stretch far into the distance, the textures are high resolution and the details is incredible for a current generation game, let alone a handheld with that beautiful OLED screen.

The drawbacks are that the campaign does stretch on and I'm currently on my 7th try of the final race as the difficulty jumps so dramatically in the final class that I've considered giving up multiple times. Also, there's no Time Trial mode selectable in the main menu to practise the tracks so you have to trawl through the single player map to find the TT and circuit to go along with it.

Besides a few niggles, it has the best track selection of any WipEout (This coming from someone who's played them all) and looks beautiful. Probably the most under rated WipEout and Vita game I've played, it deserves more praise and players.