Today, Wesley Fenlon leads us on a high-speed race through futuristic tracks that blow by so quickly you almost don’t appreciate how stylish they are. Wipeout (or WipEout, if you prefer) was the first PlayStation game I ever played, and after a couple of minutes at the Toys R Us demo kiosk I went away confused. It was basically a cross between F-Zero and Mario Kart, right? So why did it feel so different? Why did the vehicles handle so strangely? What was up with all that Japanese text? Why did the music make me want to do the white man’s overbite? I never did figure that out until this article. Now I can sleep peacefully at night.

You may have noticed that I am breaking from the usual GameSpite layout template in order to make these online articles more accurately reflect their print incarnations, which in turn broke from the usual print templates in order to be more interesting. Or at least more fun for me to design. I hope this is OK with the general public.

For those of you who missed it yesterday because you wisely don’t read the Internet on weekends, yes, GameSpite Quarterly 8 is a live concern now. And the Blurb coupon NEWBLURB is definitely good for 20% off your order, unless you have already used it (as coupon codes are only good once). Even if you don’t have any interest in owning the books (and I totally understand; books are expensive and take up precious physical space), please help spread word of this new publication! I would like the world to know that we have attempted to canonize the PlayStation. Albeit with many typos, it seems. I am but one man, and even with a triple read-through of each piece, I cannot copy edit perfectly. Alas.

In other weekend news, I’ve received a healthy amount of interest in the call for contributions for a book on the anecdotal history of games to be published at some point in the indeterminate feature. I don’t think we could possibly have too many of these submissions, though, so if this concept strikes your fancy please drop me a line!