Aqua Lightning



So yesterday I acquired a copy of Midway Arcade Classics 3 which has probably my favorite arcade racer of all-time -- Hydro Thunder. As anyone who worked with me when EGM was in Oak Brook knows, I *love* Hydro Thunder. I spent many long nights on that machine trying to get faster times on all the courses. It's a testament to a simply great racer that there's so much strategy involved in finding ways to shave milliseconds off your time. It's a fantastic game. The fine folks who designed it are now Swinging Ape Studios, behind such games as Metal Arms. Now they're salvaging Starcraft: Ghost as part of Blizzard. Fun, fun!

Of course, I'm a little disappointed that the version of Hydro Thunder on Treasures 3 is a port of the Dreamcast game. While the DC version is very close to the arcade Hydro, there are some differences. Lighting effects are missing on some tracks, the textures are to dull and earthen, the boost jump sends you too high and slows you down too much, and the superstart/boost-start is messed up so that you do a "hop" off the line, wasting valuable seconds in the air at a time when you should be putting turbo to water. Oddly enough my big complaint with the DC version, that the alligators were facing the wrong way, is fixed! (Well how do you like that!) It makes racing Lost Island a lot less frustrating for me, that's for sure. Then there's also the requirement that you have to unlock boats and tracks -- slightly annoying for someone like me who just doesn't want to use the easy- and medium-level boats. Plus, the DC version's menus are just plain fugly and obviously cut and paste jobbies. Luckily GameFAQs had a code up there on how to unlock the boats and tracks on the DC version and guess what--it works on the Xbox Treasures 3, too. Ka-lu-ka-ley.

But ya know what, after all that...it's still Hydro Thunder and I love it. It's still probably the best version of the game on home systems, though the N64 version plays really well (maybe even closer to the arcade than the DC one). I'm guessing the reason the DC version was used was because it was easier to port (the arcade machine used special 3DFX hardware, after all). The good news is that Arcade Treasures has Xbox Live scoreboards, and in a matter of a half hour I managed to work myself to the top time on Lost Island and Greek Isles. I've still got it, baby!

It'll be interesting to see what kind of competition forms on here, not that there's very much right now.

Posted: Fri - September 30, 2005 at 11:00 PM         | |

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