Author: Rob

The Player Replies…

Monday January 8th 2001

I received mail from Andrew Collins at The Player magazine this morning – nice of him to reply, most people cant face this sort of thing on their first day back in the office!

Andrew told me that as they were going to print, Sony announced that Wipeout Fusion would be delayed intil at least September, so the visit to Studio Leeds was cancelled. This left them with no feature.

This sounds like a reasonably good excuse and I understand (working for a publishing company) the predicament these things can cause.

So there you go – although guilty as charged, The Player was only a victim of circuimstance.

Thanks for clearing things up, Andrew.

WipeoutZone

Sunday January 7th 2001

WipeoutZone I created this PlayStation game fan site in early January 2001 to serve an online community that had grown from the popularity of the futuristic racing game “Wipeout.”

The site enables users to register then update their lap records for different tracks in the game, take part in forums, polls, chat rooms, and read feature articles, as well as download screen savers and wallpaper submitted by members.

The site does require a large amount of my spare time to run, but the positive feedback I have received from the community and from Sony Computer Entertainment Europe has made the effort very worthwhile.

The site was designed in Adobe ImageReady and Macromedia Fireworks then hand coded in Allaire Homesite in HTML and PHP. I use CSS to format the content extracted from the database. The navigation bar was created in Macromedia Flash, as it provided the effect I wanted for the button roll-overs.

The style of the site is in keeping with that of the Wipeout games and I decided to go with this to make it instantly recognisable to fans of the game.

At the time of writing, WipeoutZone has approx 250 registered members, hopefully numbers are set to increase when a new version of the game is launched for the PlayStation 2 in February.

Don’t Buy The Player

Monday December 25th 2000

Seriously, if you’re conned by the bright orange cover that says the contents include previews of forthcoming PS2 games, including Wipeout Fusion then you will be pissed off when you find out exactly how much there is on that game.

It was the only reason I bought the magazine and the sum total of information on ‘Fusion is a thumbnail of a screen shot that was released months ago and a caption that tells us nothing!

Crap like this leaves a taste worse than Claire Swire’s sex life – how can rags like this get away with shit like that? I’ve sent an e-mail to ask.