XP Arcade: Hydro Thunder
XP Arcade: Hydro Thunder
A water-based arcade racer where the home console ports were basically just the arcade game again.
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. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
Sometimes, an arcade game is ported to consoles, and it gets all these new features or modes that are specific to the home version. And sometimes, you just get what is basically the arcade game and that’s it. Midway’s Hydro Thunder, with one exception, is a lot more of the former than the latter. There is no menu music at all, which just feels… weird. 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.
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. 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. 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. 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.
Maybe it was an issue of space, given the N64 utilized cartridges and it took using the Expansion Pak and a reduced frame rate just to have enough space and juice to run the game to its full potential, whereas the Playstation is famous for switching to the roomier discs that broke Nintendo’s run at the top of the console market. Regardless of the why, it feels like there isn’t really a definitive edition of Hydro Thunder because of it: the Dreamcast one looks the best, the Playstation one has the career mode, and the N64 edition has the most robust multiplayer experience, to the point it’s actually an improvement over the single-player mode in terms of speed and fluidity. It’s kind of amazing, given the extremely crowded racer market of the day, that more wasn’t put into making such a popular arcade game stand out on home consoles, but then again, given that popularity, maybe Midway felt that the name would get the job done.
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. Ah well, at least that’s still available, as it’s backwards-compatible.
Anyway, 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. 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. 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. 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. Rinse, repeat, in settings that range from a course specially made for this, to going through some semi-futuristic and semi-apocalyptic settings of places you recognize from around the world.
You start out with just Easy mode and three boats to choose from, but if you finish in the top three in each of those stages, you unlock three new boats and three new courses. Finish in the top two in those, and you unlock another three speedboats and another three courses. Finish in first in those, and you unlock the bonus courses, and first-place finishes in those will give you the bonus boats, which you can then use to try to improve on your times in every difficulty. There are 13 boats and 14 tracks in all, and it will take you some time to unlock them all since, after the first easy courses, it’ll take some mastery of both the boats and the tracks to finish in first. The Easy-level boats handle with, well, ease, but have a low top speed. The Medium boats go faster but are a little tougher to maneuver until you get the hang of it, and the Hard-level boats have intense high speeds but are a nightmare for novices to handle, which is why you don’t even get access to them until you’ve crushed Medium. The courses themselves become more treacherous to navigate as you increase the difficulty, and longer, too, with more room to mess up or miss out on boosts that you’ll find were very necessary to keep pace with the pack of 15 other boats.
Beating out the other boats is the challenge of it all: the default fastest times are pretty sad, actually, and you’ll find yourself setting new top times even when you fail to accomplish the goal of reaching the top two or what have you. I don’t even mean making it into the top 10, either, but actual new top times for a medium course even if you finish fourth on a track that required you finish in the top two to move toward unlocking hard courses. It’s the kind of thing online leaderboards would be great for, in terms of both humbling you and making you feel like you’ve actually accomplished something, and they would also serve the purpose of making sure the kind of people who buy competitive arcade racers would have reason to keep going back even after unlocking everything and setting all the top local times.
Being an arcade racer, there are significant differences in the feel of how the arcade and console versions play. The home versions are what you’d expect for the most part. You use the shoulder triggers to accelerate or brake on the Dreamcast, with the A button used to fire off boosters and Y for the camera, for instance. The arcade cabinet, though, has a steering wheel and a throttle, which you jam forward or backward depending on if you need to accelerate or decelerate. The boost button is conveniently located on the side of the throttle, so that when you want to pull off a special jump — a “Hydro Jump,” in the game’s parlance — you can get the throttle to the brake and press the button with the same hand, pulling the move off smoothly with your right while continuing to use your left hand to steer.
The seat is also used for more than just a place to put yourself: the subwoofer inside of it is meant to rumble loud enough to vibrate as a form of feedback, so that you feel like you’re inside one of these speedboats in the same way that racing a car around in an arcade game by using various pedals is meant to make you feel more like you’re actually recklessly driving around a very expensive piece of machinery. Sure, the N64 had a Rumble Pak, but you probably won’t get very far in that version of the game by sitting on the controller.
The arcade edition is the definitive version of the title given how it feels to play, but the home versions, for whatever issues they have, are still a good time for one reason or another. The N64 single-player might feel slow, but Eurocome disabled a bunch of the frills that made it slow for the multiplayer, which results in a fast-paced experience you can’t have on the other consoles if you bring three friends along. The Dreamcast port is as close as you can get to the original, outside of the control scheme, and the Playstation edition gives you another challenge to overcome in the form of the Circuit Mode, which is basically a Hydro Thunder gauntlet. (Not to be confused with a Hydro Thunder Gauntlet, which Midway really should have made before they dissolved.) As said, we really do need a new version of Hydro Thunder that tries to add the missing depth and modes of the console version in: it feels like the perfect kind of game to exist in a world with Game Pass, just as the budget-priced Hydro Thunder Hurricane made a ton of sense for the start of the digital download era.
While Midway themselves never made a sequel for Hydro Thunder, there was a spiritual successor put together by former Midway devs, including the original game’s creator Steve Ranck, in 2009: H2Overdrive. This one stayed arcade exclusive, so unless you’ve done a deep dive on Hydro Thunder or stumbled upon it in its natural habitat, you might never have known it existed, but it does! And there was of course Midway’s Thunder series of racers which came from Hydro, like Offroad Thunder, Arctic Thunder, and 4 Wheel Thunder, which all found varying levels of success and reach.
Sadly, it’s not easy to get your hands on Hydro Thunder these days. You can stumble upon an arcade cabinet out in the wild like I did, which reminded me that hey, I wanted to write about Hydro Thunder, but you can’t exactly bank on that sort of thing happening. Nor can everyone be expected to have a Dreamcast or N64 or Playstation still around and working, with a copy of the game ready to go. My own at-home version plays on the Xbox, as part of 2005’s Midway Arcade Treasures 3 collection that focused exclusively on racing games, whereas the first two volumes in the series were all over the place, genre-wise. Oddly enough given the collection’s title, but the version of Hydro Thunder included in Midway Arcade Treasures 3 is actually based on the Dreamcast port, not the arcade edition, likely a decision made in order to include additional bonus content only found in the home version. Given how close to arcade-perfect the Dreamcast edition was, and the major difference in the control schemes between at-home and arcade, it’s a decision that makes sense for a number of reasons.
That’s the last time Hydro Thunder saw a proper release, though: Microsoft hasn’t added a port of the original to the Xbox Marketplace, and collections like Midway Arcade Treasures don’t get the backwards-compatibility treatment between various rights issues and the fact that publishers just want to sell these games to you again. As I said before: Hydro Thunder HD. Make it happen.
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