Hydro Thunder - Nile Adventure (1st Place)

Описание: Hydro Thunder has always had a special little place in the list of my favourite ever games. It was one of the first games I bought for my Dreamcast and at the time it felt like the closest thing to actually owning an arcade game at home, it really blew me away. The version I'm playing here is the Eurocom PC port.

Nile Adventure is probably my favourite track in Hydro Thunder and, until today, it was the only one I'd never manged to get a 1 st place on, in both the PC and Dreamcast Port (the best I'd managed previously was 3rd). I love this track because I've been fascinated by the mysteries of ancient Egypt, the pyramids and the Nile ever since I was a kid. I also love Nile Adventure because it's just so utterly bonkers.

I really dig the idea here that the Nile (or maybe one of it's tributaries) actually goes underneath and through one of the Pyramids, and inside that Pyramid there's some absolutely mad shit going on, including a giant one eyed monster that seems to shoot laser beams at you, a freaky rotating tunnel and a giant serpent. In terms of difficulty, I think Nile Adventure is right up there with the hard level tracks and as I mentioned at the start, I'd actually manged to get first in all of those ones before this. The only other bonus track that comes close difficulty-wise for me is Catacomb, which was a bit of a ball ache to get first place in too.

In the attempts to get 1st place before this one, I was purposely avoiding the shortcut at the 01:57 mark, that opens up when you jump over the sarcophagus to get the red boost, which in turn then makes the doors open to get to a secret tunnel. Despite the shortcut seemingly being a more direct route, I always end up coming out of it in a lower position than if I'd just stayed on the track normally - you can see it happen here in one of my older videos:    • Hydro Thunder VS Hydro Thunder Hurricane -...   - I enter the shortcut in 4th place and come out in 6th. I actually got a faster time in that video but still only came third!

I think this is down to a peculiarity of the game's old school rubber-band AI. If you stay on the track and keep the CPU boats in sight you can catch them up, as long as you're constantly boosting. But, if you take the shortcut, the game seems to re-calculate their position and puts them in front of you when you come out of it and, for me at any rate, it seems to be impossible to catch up with the lead boat if you're not in at least in 4th place by that point. In fact, if you're not in 5th or 4th by the end of the first jump shortcut (around the 01:16 mark), you may as well just give up any hope of coming 1st. It's an annoyance, but I can forgive the game for it, in view of it's age and general awesomeness.

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