It may have taken some time and patience from PlayStation 3 owners, but the PlayStation Network has grown into a well-stocked showroom of quality downloadable games. Since it has no upper limit on download sizes, games that warrant brick-and-mortar disc releases like Warhawk and, soon enough, Burnout Paradise have shown up on harddrives the world over. WipEout HD falls into the same category, and it’s not for quantity of content.

Fan of the long-running WipEout franchise are likely to feel some deja vu when playing WipEout HD. This new entry doesn’t have a lot of new content -- the tracks are recycled from both WipEout Pulse and WipEout Pure for the PlayStation Portable, as is most of the game’s soundtrack -- but WipEout HD presents this old content in 1080p and at 60 frames per second, and the audio is output in Dolby 5.1-channel surround.

It’s a stunning new coat of paint for anyone with high definition hardware. Visual detail can be found everywhere, from the lightweight HUD to the sleek vehicles and tracks. The game’s framerate never falters or stutters, nor is there any sign of texture pop-in or glitching. The game truly is a visual wonder, and is one of the best looking games of this console generation.

The game’s campaign is split into eight events, which are in turn split into a number of individual events. These events come in five flavors: Single Race, which is your typical eight-vehicle race event; Tournament, a series of four to twelve races; Speed Lap, where players get seven laps to score the best split time they can; Time Trial, where players race to beat full-race target times; and Zone, in which players race around a single track at ever-increasing speed until the inevitable crash. For added variety, a speed limit is imposed on your vehicle that is determined on the event’s speed class.

WipEout HD, at its core, is little more than an arcade racer, where you zip around tracks in a loosely realistic way. There are only eight tracks included with the original $20 download, sixteen if you include the reversed tracks, so one might get the impression that the novelty of pretty graphics wears out quickly-- one would be mostly wrong. While Single Races and Tournaments are similar, and while Speed Laps and Time Trials are equally similar, there’s enough of both types to give players some variety. Toss in a Zone event from time to time and soon enough, the ages-old "just one more level" will be escaping your lips.