GotW: Hydro Thunder + Hydro Thunder - Hurricane

I always wanted to play this one, but never got the chance. How does it compare to Wave Race?

The arcade machine is very fun. It seems Midway couldn't do wrong at the time when it came to arcades. The same thing can be said for Williams, and Atari around this time.

There is always a few on the older consoles. But in general, boating games are not that common.

Short review:
The first game was casual madness. You could beat the easy and medium levels relatively easily. But once you got to the Hard levels, you had to prsctice like hell and master the expert-mode boats that came with them and master the art of boost jumping.

Hurricane added a lot of stuff. New unlockable modes and skins. In the game, you could "draft" and even explode if you hit a wall too fast! The announcer even got two extra levels in sass. Come last, he'll say something like "Can we go back? There's a few walls we missed!"

Cervantes that water trend didn't entirely went away. I remember Black Flag's ocean on Assassin's Creed was a talking point on early PS3/PS4 comparisons, but you are right, it doesn't match how huge it was at those specific years.

By the way, as an old-school Nintendo fanboy, I have to disagree with Cervantes about the water in Wind Waker; I thought it was HORRIBLY botched. There was nothing special about the way it was rendered (no reflections or cutting-edge pixel shaders like in those other games he mentioned), but that wasn't even the real problem. What really sunk the ship so to speak was the fact that they removed literally everything good about water in the N64 games: you can no longer swim indefinitely or dive underwater, and in addition to that the water isn't transparent! You can't look down and see anything under the surface! Now, you only got crude silhouettes of creatures under the water's surface! Why the hell would it be a good idea to take all that freedom away from the player, especially when the entire emphasis of the game is water? I've always wanted to swim across the entire map, you know, to make it feel like a survival sim, like Desert Bus or Daggerfall. but it would be impossible without a fan mod to remove that stupid drowning meter. Wind Waker was one of the biggest missed opportunities in video game history and deserves to be forgotten. If you want pretty water in an open-world game that doesn't suck, play Morrowind. It had some of the prettiest pixel-shaded water for an early 2000s game. Morrowind might be something of a dumpster-fire for different reasons, but at least
it was an exceptional open world game. Wind Waker was not an exceptional open world game then and it is not an exceptional open world game now in 2022.

I also disagree with his opinion on Far Cry's water. It's a dystopian shooter that takes place in the year 2025, but the oceans look all healthy and pretty. Oceans in dystopian works should never look pretty and healthy. As an environmentalist, I'm disgusted and offended that Crytek didn't incorporate the effects of climate change into the visual design. The waters in Far Cry literally look healthier than they do now in 2022: there's an abundance of fish everywhere and no signs of coral bleaching at all! WTF. They really pussied out on that aspect. This is precisely why I think governments around the world should start censoring the game industry when they miss these important details, like what China is doing. The planet can't afford to keep getting grossly misrepresented by artists like Cevat Yerli and film makers like George Lucas.

But I do 100% agree with him on Super Mario Sunshine's water and the beaches in Final Fantasy X. They both had some of the prettiest tropical graphics of any 2000s video game. The water effects in Maro Sunshine in particular might have been the single prettiest in any Nintendo game of the 2000s. Maybe Wave Race: Blue Storm had prettier water? IDK I haven't played it.

I feel like fantasy-genre games like Mario Sunshine, Sonic Adventure, and Final Fantasy X are the best candidates for making beautiful beaches and cutting-edge water effects because they aren't linked to reality, so they don't have to be responsible for accurately portraying real-life calamities like coral bleaching, microplastics and coastal erosion. Does anyone else agree?