wipEout

Overview

Grip at full throttle is a negotiation in this clean-room reimplementation of the 1995 PlayStation racer wipEout, where a hovering craft clings to a banked circuit only as long as you feed it smooth lines. Brush an airbrake too hard mid-corner and the hull steps sideways, the nose swings past the apex, and what was shaping into a clean lap becomes a fight to scrub speed before the wall arrives. The rewrite, written in C by Dominic Szablewski and compiled to WebAssembly through the Emscripten toolchain so it runs straight in a browser tab, recreates the original's floaty hover physics, its weapon pickups, and its championship ladder without shipping any official asset — the code is the engine, and the build plays live at the author's own site. It is aimed squarely at players who judge a racing game by how the ship feels under braking rather than by the size of its car list, and at anyone curious how a console-defining anti-gravity racer holds up three decades on. Laptimes persist between sessions, rival ships fight for position, and the speed ceiling climbs with every clean sector until the track stops feeling like asphalt and starts feeling like a rail you can fall off at any instant.

How to Play

The craft accelerates on its own once the race starts, and you steer it with Left and Right while feathering the airbrakes — typically the left and right shift or shoulder keys — to rotate the nose through a corner without shedding too much speed. A brake key scrubs velocity for tight chicanes, weapon pickups grabbed off the track let you harry the ships ahead, and a boost pickup opens up the top speed for a few precious seconds. The goal across a single race is to finish ahead of the rival craft, and across a championship to bank enough points over a sequence of circuits to top the standings. Collisions are expensive: a hard wall hit bounces you wide and drops seconds, so the quickest laps come from riding the edge of traction rather than from raw acceleration. Pick a ship and a circuit, hit start, and the countdown drops you straight into the field.

Tips & Strategy

Lean on the airbrakes, not the steering alone. The fastest line through a sweeping bend is a short, deliberate airbrake tap at the entry to point the nose at the apex, then smooth throttle out — holding the brake down only scrubs speed and invites a slide that you then have to correct at a cost. Learn each circuit's boost-pad and pickup placement cold; a boost timed onto a straight buys more time than a perfectly clipped corner, and a shield pickup is worth more than a missile when you are leading the pack and taking fire from behind. Resist the urge to chase the speed ceiling too early, because at maximum velocity the craft's turning radius balloons and a single off-track excursion in the final sector erases two clean laps of work. Treat wall grinds as a last resort rather than a technique — the rewrite softened them, but they still bleed speed. And pick a higher-grip ship for technical circuits and a speed-focused hull only for tracks with long straights you can actually use.