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By Contributing Writer Jimmy Payne Rating: Good Wipeout 3 is much better than the original Wipeout, but nowhere near as innovative as Wipeout XL was for its time. Setting comparisons aside, Wipeout 3 is a very fast and fun game that should not go un-noticed by fans of the series. Anyone who bought a PlayStation when it first came out was more than likely playing a lot of either NFL GameDay, Twisted Metal, Destruction Derby, or Wipeout. Wipeout was the game that caught my attention, but I found it to be a very shallow game. The same can be said to a lesser extent about Wipeout XL, but it was dramatically improved and made Wipeout look like a longer than usual demo. Now with Wipeout 3, everything that went wrong with the first two titles has been polished up, but it seems to have been polished about three years too late. Wipeout 3's control is just like the original game's, only without the annoying physics system of barely touching a wall and coming to a complete stop. The analog sticks are also very helpful in controlling the game. The original Wipeout's d-pad control left a lot to be desired, but Wipeout 3's analog control is excellent. Wipeout 3's backgrounds aren't sacrificed for the sake of speed. While F-Zero-X had a bunch of colored blocks for backgrounds, Wipeout 3 has so much eye candy that it's bad for your teeth, and its gritty feel creates an indescribable mood. The tracks also have a lot of enclosed areas like tunnels that allow you to focus your eyes on one place, whereas in F-Zero X I couldn't help but get the feeling that I was floating around in the middle of nowhere. One of this series' biggest flaws is its insane difficulty level, and this holds true for Wipeout 3. The first tournament in Tournament Mode is unbelievably easy, but the game quickly switches to extremely hard (so much for a learning curve) and eventually becomes nearly impossible. Speed probably helped this series make a name for itself more than any other single thing, but sometimes Wipeout 3 is too fast for its own good. It's not uncommon to be going so fast and be facing turns so sharp that there's almost no point in trying to turn at all (since you're more than likely going to hit the wall no matter what you do). This kind of difficulty is never welcome in any game, and whoever came up with the idea to make it this hard should be locked in a dark room and not let out until he or she beats all three Wipeout games. Wipeout 3 is basically what Wipeout was four years ago, only with better graphics and a more polished control system. It's hard to come up with a reason to buy Wipeout 3 if you already own the original game, and there is pretty much no reason to buy it if you own Wipeout XL. Send your thoughts on this review to jimmy@mastergamer.com
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