Hydro Thunder
When I first got my Sega Dreamcast at launch in 1999 it came with a demo disc full of game demos and trailers. This included the (very) recently released Hydro Thunder speedboat racing arcade game. I can't remember if I rented this game before I bought it or not, but I did a lot of that back around the time I owned the first PlayStation and Dreamcast consoles. I can't remember exactly when I stopped renting games, I know that at a certain point I felt it was a waste to spend $8 on top of the final price if I was going to buy the game anyway. Because I usually didn't rent games just to play them that once, but more or less to try them out and see if I wanted to pay full price. A practice which isn't as necessary anymore since most companies publish a downloadable demo and more recently full-playthroughs are available to watch on streaming internet sites.
Hydro Thunder was probably one of the first titles I bought for the Dreamcast. I loved anything that involved some kind of racing, this title was available at launch and at the time it looked absolutely gorgeous. When the Dreamcast was released, it really was a huge jump up compared to the older 32-bit systems. While the PlayStation and Nintendo 64 first brought us fully 3D rendered titles, the Dreamcast (and the later released PS2 and Gamecube) brought us cleaner, quality rendered titles were so many early issues were fixed. Texture resolution was now much more acceptable, polygon counts were higher and allowed for certain things, like people, to look much less like a stack of boxes and anti-aliasing allowed for the appearance of finer resolution. Hydro Thunder, which was first released the same year as an arcade title, took full advantage of this new processing power, creating, first and foremost, water that not only looked like water, but also acted like water.
Hydro Thunder was very much an arcade racing title. Physics were over-the-top and races were all designed with a timeout in mind so that in the arcade, running the timer out meant popping in some more quarters. In some titles this is a real bummer, but I never found this to be much of an issue with Hydro Thunder. So much so they may have even adjusted the limit to be more lenient on the console version.
I really did love this game though. It's not exactly a huge genre, noone else really makes a speedboat racing game. So if you want to jet around in boats on maps that range from the arctic to an apocalyptic New York City, this is a blast. They've finally release a long awaited sequel on the Xbox 360 titled: Hydro Thunder Hurricain. I really should try it out.
When I first got my Sega Dreamcast at launch in 1999 it came with a demo disc full of game demos and trailers. This included the (very) recently released Hydro Thunder speedboat racing arcade game. I can't remember if I rented this game before I bought it or not, but I did a lot of that back around the time I owned the first PlayStation and Dreamcast consoles. I can't remember exactly when I stopped renting games, I know that at a certain point I felt it was a waste to spend $8 on top of the final price if I was going to buy the game anyway. Because I usually didn't rent games just to play them that once, but more or less to try them out and see if I wanted to pay full price. A practice which isn't as necessary anymore since most companies publish a downloadable demo and more recently full-playthroughs are available to watch on streaming internet sites. Hydro Thunder was probably one of the first titles I bought for the Dreamcast. I loved anything that involved some kind of racing, this title was available at launch and at the time it looked absolutely gorgeous. When the Dreamcast was released, it really was a huge jump up compared to the older 32-bit systems. While the PlayStation and Nintendo 64 first brought us fully 3D rendered titles, the Dreamcast (and the later released PS2 and Gamecube) brought us cleaner, quality rendered titles were so many early issues were fixed. Texture resolution was now much more acceptable, polygon counts were higher and allowed for certain things, like people, to look much less like a stack of boxes and anti-aliasing allowed for the appearance of finer resolution. Hydro Thunder, which was first released the same year as an arcade title, took full advantage of this new processing power, creating, first and foremost, water that not only looked like water, but also acted like water. Hydro Thunder was very much an arcade racing title. Physics were over-the-top and races were all designed with a timeout in mind so that in the arcade, running the timer out meant popping in some more quarters. In some titles this is a real bummer, but I never found this to be much of an issue with Hydro Thunder. So much so they may have even adjusted the limit to be more lenient on the console version. I really did love this game though. It's not exactly a huge genre, noone else really makes a speedboat racing game. So if you want to jet around in boats on maps that range from the arctic to an apocalyptic New York City, this is a blast. They've finally release a long awaited sequel on the Xbox 360 titled: Hydro Thunder Hurricain. I really should try it out.
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