Dreamcast Retrospective Day 3: Hydro Thunder

Now this is my kind of racing game.

Screw Gran Turismo.  Get Forza out of my face.  I want a bunch of stupidly fast boats speeding recklessly through totally insane courses that have no basis in reality whatsoever and are way, way cooler because of it.

Hydro Thunder may have been ported to other consoles later on, but I still strongly associate it with my beloved Dreamcast.  Not only were its graphics closer to the arcade version than any other port, but the release date for this little racing gem was none other than 9/9/99.  

This game was one of the cherished few that I brought home with me on launch day and played the crap out of, because that’s what you do with launch games on a new system.  

And this was a game deserving of my time.

Like Crazy Taxi, this is a game born out of a true arcade heritage.  In fact, the first time I played Hydro Thunder wasn’t even on the Dreamcast, it was on a true, honest-to-god arcade machine at a real, existing, miraculously-still-surviving arcade.  It had a big plastic seat that you sat down in, speakers placed right behind your ears for maximum immersion, a large grippy steering wheel, and a spiffy throttle thingy that was a lot of fun to use.

This is why I lament the loss of arcades.  Sure plastic peripherals seem to be all the rage nowadays, and I admit I’d rather play Guitar Hero than Guitar Freaks, but there’s nothing quite like experiencing a game like Hydro Thunder in a true arcade cabinet with the sound cranked up and a big ol’ piece of tape over one of the broken “Insert Coin” slots.

All the more impressive, then, that the Dreamcast version of Hydro Thunder so wonderfully captured the feeling of its bigger arcade counterpart.

This was a fairly no-frills game, but you don’t need any frills with a game like this.  There was no needless career mode to stretch out the game pointlessly.  There was no abundance of modes that are not actually any fun.

There’s just a bunch of tracks and a bunch of boats.  You race on the tracks and unlock more tracks and boats until it gets too hard and you have to keep trying over and over again until you finally do unlock everything but then you keep going back because it’s so damn fun.

Throw in a multiplayer mode and you’re set.  

There were some truly wild courses in this game.  Sure you had your typical tropical island and icy courses.  But what other racing game lets you race through the Greek Isles, plow through some Chinese city in mid-festival, speed through the canals of Venice, venture through a post-apocalyptic flooded New York, and navigate down the Nile and into an Egyptian tomb, all in the same game?

The graphics were absolutely stunning at the time and really helped justify my purchase of a Dreamcast.  It was a real showcase game for the system’s abilities.  Sure it doesn’t look all that stunning today, but what game of this era does?  I think it at least manages not to look like utter crap, which considering how some games from the era look these days is pretty impressive.

While the graphics may be a bit of a rough ride, the gameplay holds up just fine.  The sheer thrill of racing from checkpoint to checkpoint, always just on the verge of running out of time, finding elusive secret paths, and collecting boost meter extensions along the way to keep yourself going as insanely fast as possible by mashing that boost button at every possible opportunity just doesn’t get old.  

I’ve dabbled in Nintendo’s Wave Race series before and, while I usually enjoy them, they’ve never been more than a passing fancy.  Their highfalutin wave physics are fun and all, but, go figure, racing at high speeds on actual waves is really freakin’ hard.

Give me something like Hydro Thunder any day.  It remains one of my favorite arcade-style racing games. 

Sadly, this is a genre not seen in its pure form very often these days.  With even Burnout going open world and games everywhere, the racing genre included, getting more and more complex, the simple thrill of this genre is surprisingly hard to find.  Kart racing games are the only reliable source of this kind of fun anymore and, while they’re plenty fun in their own way, they’re just not the same.  

I actually haven’t played any of the other “Thunder” racing titles, but maybe I should seek them out just to see if they still hold up since there are so few modern equivalents.

It really is a shame Hydro Thunder hasn’t gotten a proper modern sequel.  It really could be fantastic.  

As it stands, though, Hydro Thunder remains a standout Dreamcast launch title that remains fun to this day.  I’m still glad that I chose it to go along with my Dreamcast on the Day of Nines all those years ago.

The Mystery of Mortal Kombat

To celebrate my recent purchase of a shiny new Madcatz Street Fighter IV Tournament Edition Fightstick, I began scouring Xbox Live Marketplace for any demos of fighting games I might have missed. There wasn’t too much to be found, honestly, but one I did happen across was Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3.

It was only five dollars!

Ah, what could be better than a bit of old-school nostalgic fun with the wacky cast of Mortal Kombat, right?

So I plugged in my stick and fired up the demo. After only a few minutes, I was left with one question.

How in Raiden’s name did anybody ever like this game?

All the characters play the same. There’s no variety in move sets, aside from a couple of lousy special attacks per character. The movement is slow and plodding.

Oh yeah, and the game has the worst, most frustrating AI in the history of everything ever created by man.

I’ve poured over 40 hours into Street Fighter IV at this point (a small number by hardcore standards, but a lot from my more casual standpoint) and I’ve put nearly 30 into BlazBlue. These are games are different from Mortal Kombat, but surely the 2D fighting game basics I learned in them would translate into at least enough basic knowledge to beat the first character on novice difficulty in arcade mode, right?

Nope.

I’m not ashamed to admit, Kitana handed me my ass over and over and over again as I tried out an assortment of stupid-looking characters trying desperately to get the hang of one of them. Never mind that they all played exactly the same, I thought that surely one of those times I would be able to beat her.

And I did, eventually, through sheer dumb luck. Yay for me. Then I was promptly defeated by enemy number two.

See, the problem with the AI isn’t just its difficulty. Oh, it has plenty of that, don’t get me wrong. But good fighting game AI will make you feel like you’re fighting against another person (at least to as large an extent as possible). Mortal Kombat seems to revel in its cheap, cheating, cheesy AI.

At no point did it come even close to fooling me into thinking I was playing against something smart. I was simply playing against a series of canned responses. Had I spent more time with the game and figured out some of its patterns and learned more good patterns myself I could have gotten farther. But as that would have been the opposite of fun, I did not.

Some deep, dark part of me has a strange fondness for the Mortal Kombat characters. I can’t explain why. I hated all the MK games as kid, too. My next door neighbor used to sucker me into fighting him all the time and continually beat me to a pulp because I had no idea what I was doing and he didn’t bother to tell me. My times with every Mortal Kombat game I’ve ever played have been almost universally negative, with the sole exception of playing the surprisingly decent Shaolin Monks with a friend.

Despite all of this, I still occasionally play an MK game, hoping to find something decent and justify spending more time with these terrible characters I love for some reason, yet it rejects me every time because, well, all of the games are absolutely terrible.

Street Fighter holds up well and is still playable to this day.

Mortal Kombat is a giant pile of crap and always was.

I suppose I was hoping to fire up the Ultimate MK3 demo and find something decently fun enough to relive a couple of memories for a few bucks. Maybe I was even hoping for an experience like I’ve had with Street Fighter IV recently, where I finally discover the game’s hidden secrets and find out why it’s so much fun for so many.

But to have an experience like that, I suppose the game would have to be good.

Even the port of the terrible game was terrible. The menus were basic, amateurish, and ugly and the game had almost no options. I couldn’t even find a way to remap the controls to make them work better with my arcade stick. What arcade fighting game in its right mind, no matter how terrible, doesn’t allow players to easily use an arcade stick? Madness, I say. I know the game was an early example of an XBLA release, but man does it ever show how far we’ve come since the early days.

Well, I can definitely say this: had I bought this Xbox Live Arcade rendition of Ultimate MK3 based on some crazy notion of nostalgia that came from nowhere, it would have been the worst use of $5 I’ve had in quite some time.

Come to think of it, though, I haven’t tried Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe yet.... Maybe that one is better....