Misleading Nomenclature

I went to Crystal Cove this weekend with a friend to shoot a bit of wildlife and landscape (you can thank her for giving me the bird names below). I was confused by both the lack of coves and the lack of crystals. The photos that I liked are below, click to see the huge versions. Comments welcome!

And yes, Ireland pictures are still coming!

White Crowned Sparrow

Western Gull

(Some kind of Sandpiper or a Golden Plover?)

Whimbrel

Liverpudlian Difficulties

Edit: Worth noting that they patched away my complaints below regarding the time trial and speed lap events. Now you can choose to race on an easier setting with lower time requirements for the gold, silver, and bronze medals. Of the new selectable difficulties, the original medal deadlines are now the hardest. I feel like my voice has been heard!!

Sony Computer Entertainment finally updated one of my favorite franchises last week with the Playstation Network release of WipEout HD [wipeouthd.com] for the Playstation 3. It’s been in development at Sony’s Studio Liverpool for a good long while. Those who have played both will probably immediately see the resemblance to WipEout Pulse [wipeoutpulse.com], Studio Liverpool’s recent PSP iteration on the series. The both share the same design sensibilities, including similar menu structures, load screens, and race campaign ‘grid’ systems. And they both share a bizarre, massive spike in difficulty over the previous games in the series. I quit playing Pulse when I hit the proverbial brick wall, hoping that the game was just rushed to market and that the time for difficulty tuning had been cut short. I’ve been playing the WipEout series since the original Playstation debut by Psygnosis, and I’d definitely consider myself quite good at the series. The first one was brutally difficult, mostly because their physics model made your craft come to a near-complete stop every time it even brushed the edge of the track, but they resolved that issue and had a very nice difficulty curve for the rest of the Playstation games in the series (let’s ignore the Playstation 2 WipEout Fusion shall we? The consumers certainly did). WipEout XL, Wip3out, and WipEout Pure presented a balanced challenge to the player. When first learning a new track it was difficult, but once you knew it well and had it’s ‘flow’, you were a serious contender for placing every time you raced it. Getting first was just a matter of a few retries once you’d reached that point.

Now, Studio Liverpool has crassly discarded this player-friendly difficulty paradigm for Pulse and HD, and I don’t understand why. Races run on the normal difficulty setting in the second half of the campaign are so difficult that it begins to feel like getting a gold medal is more luck than anything else. You can run a nearly perfect race – hitting every boost pad, avoiding enemy crafts and attacks, firing weapons when available, only grazing walls once or twice – and still easily not even place. I think it’s reasonable that if you run a great, almost flawless race, you should win – if not every time, then at least with a fair regularity. This is the way the previous games in the series were. It is a good, satisfying feeling to win a race when you know you’ve done your best. It is, however, immensely frustrating when you’ve done your best and you still lose handily, again and again. Bear in mind that I’m talking about normal difficulty. If Studio Liverpool had chosen to implement this kind of tuning for the hard difficulty, I’d find that totally acceptable.

As frustrating as races can be, they are nothing compared to the time trials in these latest two WipEouts. By the last half of the game, getting a gold on one of these events requires a flawless run, knowing exactly where to use the free boost item they give you every lap, doing barrel rolls for extra boost at every possible opportunity, hitting every boost pad, not touching ANY walls, and having chosen the correct vehicle for the track. Studio Liverpool has taken the game’s feel from a nice arcade-style racing romp to a Gran Turismo grind-fest, where you have to continually race over and over, shaving tenths of a second off of your score until your race is flawless just to get the gold medal. This seems especially senseless in a game that enjoys online leaderboards. A much better design decision would be to let the people who enjoy this Gran Turismo style duke it out on the leaderboards, competing with each other for global bragging rights, while loosening the time requirements for the single player medals so you don’t frustrate players not interested in racing the same track over and over again for an hour just to get close to – but not achieve – a gold medal.

Studio Liverpool has made a puzzling decision in moving the difficulty of the WipEout series in this direction. I suppose they could address my complaints in a patch but given the amount of time they had to work on these games, it seems that they have released the game they wanted to release. It’s still fun and I’m sure I’ll continue to play online, but I’m really disappointed with the steps they’ve taken towards a less casual-friendly single player game. Hell, you know it’s bad if I’m complaining – when it comes to WipEout, I’m anything but a casual player.