what makes wipeout clones so dull and why X-GRA is better:

[Romolus104]

Straight to the chase,

X-GRA did two things that ruined every other wipeout clone for me:

1: it had open sections and punished bad wheelmanship.
Even some of the more original wipeout tracks required actual reflexes and skills with the airbrakes.
Most of these clones have almost exclusively straight walled tracks with long sweepers, which to navigate is more busywork than anything else.

the bland actual track design is the one thing they all copy from the worst wipeout courses.
X-GRA had complex tracks with junctions actually challenging turns, banking, wide open sections with environmental hazards inside the level area, on top of that they had character and were actual places.


1 1/2: Most wipeout clones play more and more like guitar hero where the most important thing is to connect all the boosters or pickups. To be fair this game doesn't look like the worst offender and X-GRA had it's share of that as well but this leads us to the 2nd point:

2: The second one is sensation of speed.
Where's my
sonic cracks,
shockcones,
particles whizzing by the dirty roaring of super rich afterburners,
the airframes crackling and groaning under the load,
fisheye wide fov,
kilometer long dust trails picked up by the wash,
particles hammering against the nosecone and cockpit glass,
chaos effects of the thing continuously dipping into the black hole it's casting ahead of itm, I dunno...
shivering airframes,
Shock diamonds pulsing,
bodypanels caving in under the aerodynamic pressue,
warnings over systems failing and integrity declining due to the heat or stress
and plasma trails,
that on anything from wide, superbanked highways with splitsections to narrow cliffs edges littered with boulders and wreckage.
The later championships in X-GRA were borderline uncontrollably fast and I think this should be the number one priority to these games, to feel hyperfast even without booster strips, to best X-GRA's sensation of intensity and speed.

I'm not even saying X-GRA is perfect, it's just the best thing we got in the field of feeling fast really.
I need more.
Why isn't there more?

It hurts even more here where I like a lot of the artistic direction and ambient stuff.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Romolus104]

rambling->
Crafts should look and handle like they were on the verge of ripping apart under the load of being pushed to racing speeds, every acceleration, on every axis should convey the insane geeforces. Again, think jetage interceptor, 1960's F1, the podracer scene in Phantom Menace.
Make the damn things feel like actual things that are damn... fast!
Don't have them slam intotheir topspeed in 2 seconds and just sit there going "400" but feel like 30 on a 4lane, don't make not running over a booster feel like driving through a knee high puddle and make the player frightened of fire walling the throttle in any range of speed, be it flatout straights where the dirty air behind opponents will toss you around and one contact with a highspot in the bedrock would launch your craft skyhigh or chicanes at automotive speeds where you still pull gee forces that make you black out while desperately trying to get as much thrust into the right direction as possible.

Not saying it should be unforgiving, not even close to that, it should be accessible, mistakes recoverable and intuitive from the first minute, but borderline impossible to master, where the best are the most daring.

But that requires organic tracks and vehicle handling.
Instead of Guitar Hero and Audiosurf, look at ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ X-GRA and Pod Racer, then aim higher.

Yeah sure there's a market and an audience...
but there's two dozens of clean, easy going and sterile straightliners that appeal to that borderline rhythm game crowd, why compete for that when there's this whole corner of the market that's been derelict for years. A lot of people probably don't even know what they are carving for, settling with the next least worst and the rest of us just sighs at every new release of the same underwhelming thing following the tracks.

[ZLinkelda]

Phaseshift - if you haven't seen it yet is becoming a great XGRA clone, the only modern game like it really.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1372730/Phaseshift/

[runtyrex]

I think you're articulating what I wish these sorts of games did better.

The way I always described my pet peeve was it felt like you were being propelled down a bowling alley with the lane bumpers up. Like controlling the craft doesnt need skill because you can never leave the track. "Feeling of speed" comes at the expense of "feeling of control". I dont begrudge this game or others like it, its a matter of taste.

Another one to try if you feel the same is Vector 36.