The audio – for a game that relies on adrenaline rushes – is surprisingly poor, with irrelevant, almost inaudible music and an annoying announcer who both manages to be obvious and bland. However, it’s a nice touch to have water splashing onto the screen whenever you land in the water after a big jump. There’s also some graphical tearing to be found when zooming in on objects, which tells me this didn’t get the full QA treatment. ![]() The stages themselves aren’t very attractive, featuring bland environments and uninspired design. There’s a lot happening in each stage – in two early instances, there’s a Viking with a gigantic axe attacking, and a large sea serpent coming up and causing a whirlpool – but the same things happen in each stage, at each interval, so it gets tired after awhile. Not a lot of effort was put into the game to make it worth that price. This is a $15 title, which seems like a lot to me. Whether or not the scarcity of tracks, boats and other things is worth the purchase price is a consumer decision. If you like arcade racing without simulation aspects, you’ll enjoy playing Hydro Thunder. Whether you’re boosting or not, you’re usually going at ridiculous speeds, and though it doesn’t feel as fast as other games such as WipeOut, I was too busy fighting the waves and everything else about each stage to notice. There is a boost meter that is gained by picking up nitrous oxide, which comes into play more often than it should as there is rarely ever a non-obscene level of boost in your reservoir. Following another racer and staying inside their swells gives a drafting boost, which is a nice little addition, though it is less of a requirement to stay in the swells as it is to just stay behind someone going back and forth to chop the sea up doesn’t help at all, so there’s no real physics at work. The two big changes are the elimination of the arcade timer – a plus, as this is not technically an arcade game any longer – as well as the addition of drafting mechanics. The controls are the same for the most part, both in terms of how to play the game and how the boats control, though sea swells seem to go higher this time around, which can put your boat uncontrollably into the air if you’re not careful. If all you care about is bringing back Hydro Thunder’s brand of twitchy racing, the remake brings that back accurately. None of that, however, is going to matter to old-school fans of the arcade game or the Dreamcast port. There’s not enough of anything to really justify long-term playtime, though I like how the Championships can be exited and picked up later. While those are nice, racing the same modes and the same stages with the same boats gets old, fast. After you medal in your first race, you’ll gain credits, which automatically unlock stages, different races on said stages, different boats which are broken down into Novice, Pro and Expert classifications, and other goodies like Avatar props and gamer pictures. As far as racing games go, this is very bog standard, and you’ve literally seen everything this game has to offer you within an hour of playing for the first time. There’s a standard race mode which is self-explanatory, as well as a Ring Master mode (drive through rings), Gauntlet mode (a race against the clock with exploding barrels) and Championships, which have multiple instances of all of the above in one series. There are four game modes, with various events contained within each mode. In the end, it’s up to what each gamer wants, but this is what you’d expect from an arcade game: lots of sexy sizzle, with precious little steak. I went into this asking if there was really a reason to bring back this franchise, now that Midway is dead, and if this was worth the $15. ![]() Of course, since the 2010s are the new 1990s, we have to bring back big “name” franchises, even if those “names” really weren’t that notable to begin with. After awhile, all of those Midway arcade racing games tend to blend together. ![]() Today, about the only place you’d see the original Hydro Thunder is if a department store still had an arcade cabinet, or attached to amusement centres one of the local hockey rinks around my area has one, I believe, though I could be getting it confused with some other racing game. Some of the games were even dedicated to simulating the art of driving a car, or shooting things! I know it seems like I’m about to tell you to get off my lawn, but it really does seem like a bygone era when a game like Hydro Thunder – which came along in 1999, right when arcades were starting to die down – was new and exciting. For those of you kids out there that think “arcade” is a genre, back in the old days, there were buildings that either had nothing but arcade cabinets – just like the one in our logo above! – or a majority of them.
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