Slam into opponents’ boats while boosting to knock them off course, try not to crash into tour boats and alligators and whales and whatever other regionally appropriate stuff has been placed in the waterway to slow you down or distract you, and do try to finish in the top three or two or in first, depending on the difficulty, to open up more of the game. It’s a pretty simple game to explain, in terms of the actual gameplay: race around collecting short and long boosts, use those boosts, pull off a trick to do jumps to collect more boosts and reach some shortcuts. It’s a real shame that N64 port developer Eurocom decided that edition needed all the same visual tricks and effects as the Dreamcast version in its single-player mode, because racing as fast as you can on on these speedboats feels great. Ah well, at least that’s still available, as it’s backwards-compatible.Īnyway, as for the better portion of things, the Hydro Thunder we did get is loads of fun in spite of its obvious faults and omissions. Wouldn’t it be nice if someone made a Hydro Thunder HD that combined the best bits of each edition into one budget-priced re-release? That someone would have to be Microsoft, since they acquired the rights to Hydro Thunder when Midway went broke and their intellectual property was sold off, but they’ve been silent on that front since releasing a sequel, Hydro Thunder Hurricane, on Xbox Live Arcade in 2012. In a way, the Dreamcast omission is understandable, since it released first (September 1999) and maybe no one had come up with the idea for this extra mode until later on, but the N64 and Playstation editions each released six months later, and only one had the Circuit Mode despite that. The Dreamcast release, despite being the most powerful of the consoles the arcade port landed on and certainly capable of extra modes, is notable mostly for looking the most like the arcade version of the game, while the N64 has that expanded multiplayer but also feels slower than the Dreamcast’s Hydro Thunder. The Playstation’s Hydro Thunder includes “Circuit Mode” where you start with some money and need to pay an entry fee to race, and your goal is to attempt to win enough money in each race to make it through all of the courses. On the worse side, it would have been something if all of the console ports - Dreamcast, N64, and Playstation - had a career mode like the Playstation edition did, but for whatever reason, that was exclusive to those version. There are a couple more (race) tracks in all of the console ports of the aquatic racer, and in the case of the Nintendo 64 version, four-player multiplayer (instead of two) is a possibility if you have the Expansion Pak, but otherwise, for better or worse, what you could play in arcades is what you can play at home. There is no menu music at all, which just feels… weird. Midway’s Hydro Thunder, with one exception, is a lot more of the former than the latter. And sometimes, you just get what is basically the arcade game and that’s it. Sometimes, an arcade game is ported to consoles, and it gets all these new features or modes that are specific to the home version. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link. This column is “XP Arcade,” in which I’ll focus on a game from the arcades, or one that is clearly inspired by arcade titles, and so on.
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