Arctic Thunder
I wonder how many synonyms we can think of for the word "crap"?
Published: October 20, 2001
Let's just get this out of the way right now: Arctic Thunder sucks, and sucks hard. Don't even think about buying it. Rent it if you must, but under no circumstances should you plop down more than 5 bucks of your hard-earned cash to play this game. I'll explain why this bargain bin-bound game isn't worth full price in a while, but let me make that point abundantly clear.
That said, it would only be fair to explain why I have such utter disregard for this game. There are, of course, a multitude of reasons why I've reached this conclusion, but let's start with the first. Arctic Thunder's gameplay is a crapshoot. You can race the exact same track with the exact same rider in the exact same way taking the exact same shortcuts and firing off the exact same weapons while picking up the exact same power-ups and end up placing anywhere from first to last, and the odds of hitting any of those places seems randomly chosen from the start of the race. I even started up a race and put a heavy weight on the X button (had to turn off the vibration to keep it from sliding off) leaving it to drive in a straight line and took 5th place. Then I did it again and took 7th. Then I did it again and placed 2nd. Does that seem wrong to anyone else?
The problem here is that Artic Thunder was designed from the start to be a coin gobbler. It's one of those arcade machines that provides an adrenaline-powered 2 1/2 minutes, and then it's over. Driving skill does very little to help you win the race (as is evidenced by the wonderful results from my little experiment), and thus the game stops being a racer, and more of a game of roulette masquerading as a 3D game. As an arcade game, it's fine, but when the goal of the game stops being to suck as many credits from the player as possible, it loses almost all fun. It's also THE perfect example of entertainment for the hummingbird attention spanned ADD addled teenybopper generation. There is so much happening on the screen at one that it is literally impossible to take it all in. I didn't even realize I had a gauge that gave me readouts on stuff like weapons, health, boost, etc. until about 2 hours into the game. The on-screen action was so distracting that I was completely zeroed in on making sure I was steering straight and firing off as many shots at everyone as humanly possible.
The game does offer a little in the way of extras, including the obvious arcade and time trial modes, but it also gives you the opportunity to race races in order to upgrade both the riders and the different sleds. You race in the Championship mode to unlock levels, then turn to the Points mode to race them in a setting where your attacks and power-up pickups will net you some points, usually a hundred or so at a time. Taking the various jumps that dot the different levels will net you a few more points than usual, so it's always a good idea to gun for them. The upgrades do seem to help a bit with the random placing of your character (or it may very well be my imagination), but for the hours of time you'll have to put in racing the tracks normally to unlock some of the later levels, then re-racing them to earn points feels needlessly tedious when the gameplay is so shallow. After a while, it becomes a game of steering slightly, collecting as many power-ups as possible, and hammering on the weapons button at all times. There's just not enough depth to the action to hold any extended interest.
When Arctic Thunder hit the arcades just under a year ago, it was a fairly graphically impressive game, much like Hydro Thunder (which, by the way, is a far, far, FAR superior arcade-to-console port, not to mention a better game in general). But there have been rather large graphical advances since then, and the aging graphics board that Midway has used for a while is showing its age. Amazingly, this should have been an almost flawless port, since Arctic Thunder, besides being fast and furious, really doesn't throw any huge graphical fastballs. Spy Hunter, another Midway game (though not developed in-house), is set up level-wise in much the same way, where things are largely on rails, yet it looks about 10 times better than Arctic Thunder. Scary thought.
I suppose it's time to really get into picking apart AT's graphics. Frankly, they suck. The menu screens are decent enough, with the exact same mountain side menus, though a few more were obviously added to handle things like multiplayer options, and it all moves along rather smoothly. Like the rest of the game, the lighting is rather plain, but pulled off well, it's not overabundant, but neither does everything feel under lit. The menu transitions were well done, and it helps the whole clump of screens that take you into the action feel well produced. The problem is, once you leave the comfort of the menus, you're thrust into the rest of the game. The effect is not unlike being shoved through a plate glass window.
The game moves along at a brisk clip, no doubt, but that's the whole idea. You're being carried along a lightning-fast snowmobile that's careening down mountainsides and through snow-drenched cities. Everything is textured with some rather low-res textures, but because you're moving so fast, it's not a big deal. There are some nasty little graphical shortcomings, such as the absolutely atrocious effect of the rooster tail power-up. For those that don't know what a rooster tail is, it's a long plume of snow or water kicked up in the back by both snowmobiles and personal watercraft. The effect in AT, though, is utter crap. Besides blinding you, which it's supposed to do, the effect just looks terrible, with what looks like giant-sized sprites that are kicked up. Sprites or no, the translucency around the edges is about as nasty as something you'll find on the PlayStation. It just looks terrible.
If the game moved along at a steady 60 fps, it would ease so very, very much of my anger. After all, I can put up with sub-par graphics if it's at the cost of a nice, smooth framerate. But of course, that wasn't to be. Most of the time, Arctic Thunder putts along at about 25fps, frequently dipping into the teens and rarely shooting up to a silky smooth 60 frames a second. The fact that its normal framerate is so low is frightening, but the frequency of the lower-end dips is just annoying as hell. It comes at an understandable time, when there are a lot of riders on screen or a lot of effects happening at once, but if they were having problems locking down a steady framerate, it makes one wonder why the game was even released in the first place.
The most problem-free part of the port appears to be the sound. From what I could tell after a quick trip to the arcade to play the sit-down version, the PS2 version has every bit of the arcade's effects and music in place. The effects themselves are done well enough, with the appropriate percussive booms and annoying quips from each of the characters (usually triggered when firing a weapon or being hit by one, which means you'll hear all their little catchphrases quite a bit). It's not that the sound is lacking in any way, if anything it's the best part of Arctic Thunder, it's just that with so much happening on screen at once, the sound effects start to sound all ground together.
The music is also perfectly suited for the game. It's fast, driving, and doesn't ever let up. It's much like the end boss music in an adventure game or RPG, except that it's playing all the time. It does the job I suppose of jacking up your blood pressure elevation a bit more, and for those few minutes where all hell is breaking loose, it fits just fine. The racing music meshes well with the venues too, with little touches like electric guitars belting out riffs of "Hail To The King" on the Blizzard in DC level. The menu music is more grating, however, with what sounds like about 3 or 4 measures of the same thing over and over and over again.
Arctic Thunder suffers in too many areas to make it worth playing for any extended amount of time. The framerate issues harm the most important part of and game: gameplay, and the game as a console effort just can't work when the original goal was to get people to spend as much money as possible in as short as possible. If it weren't for the absolutely awesome Hydro Thunder, I'd wonder if it was worth it at all to port arcade games of this ilk to home systems, but that game was a shining example of a great port. I don't want to beat a dead horse here; just avoid Arctic Thunder, and maybe Midway's next port won't fare so badly.
That said, it would only be fair to explain why I have such utter disregard for this game. There are, of course, a multitude of reasons why I've reached this conclusion, but let's start with the first. Arctic Thunder's gameplay is a crapshoot. You can race the exact same track with the exact same rider in the exact same way taking the exact same shortcuts and firing off the exact same weapons while picking up the exact same power-ups and end up placing anywhere from first to last, and the odds of hitting any of those places seems randomly chosen from the start of the race. I even started up a race and put a heavy weight on the X button (had to turn off the vibration to keep it from sliding off) leaving it to drive in a straight line and took 5th place. Then I did it again and took 7th. Then I did it again and placed 2nd. Does that seem wrong to anyone else?
The problem here is that Artic Thunder was designed from the start to be a coin gobbler. It's one of those arcade machines that provides an adrenaline-powered 2 1/2 minutes, and then it's over. Driving skill does very little to help you win the race (as is evidenced by the wonderful results from my little experiment), and thus the game stops being a racer, and more of a game of roulette masquerading as a 3D game. As an arcade game, it's fine, but when the goal of the game stops being to suck as many credits from the player as possible, it loses almost all fun. It's also THE perfect example of entertainment for the hummingbird attention spanned ADD addled teenybopper generation. There is so much happening on the screen at one that it is literally impossible to take it all in. I didn't even realize I had a gauge that gave me readouts on stuff like weapons, health, boost, etc. until about 2 hours into the game. The on-screen action was so distracting that I was completely zeroed in on making sure I was steering straight and firing off as many shots at everyone as humanly possible.
The game does offer a little in the way of extras, including the obvious arcade and time trial modes, but it also gives you the opportunity to race races in order to upgrade both the riders and the different sleds. You race in the Championship mode to unlock levels, then turn to the Points mode to race them in a setting where your attacks and power-up pickups will net you some points, usually a hundred or so at a time. Taking the various jumps that dot the different levels will net you a few more points than usual, so it's always a good idea to gun for them. The upgrades do seem to help a bit with the random placing of your character (or it may very well be my imagination), but for the hours of time you'll have to put in racing the tracks normally to unlock some of the later levels, then re-racing them to earn points feels needlessly tedious when the gameplay is so shallow. After a while, it becomes a game of steering slightly, collecting as many power-ups as possible, and hammering on the weapons button at all times. There's just not enough depth to the action to hold any extended interest.
When Arctic Thunder hit the arcades just under a year ago, it was a fairly graphically impressive game, much like Hydro Thunder (which, by the way, is a far, far, FAR superior arcade-to-console port, not to mention a better game in general). But there have been rather large graphical advances since then, and the aging graphics board that Midway has used for a while is showing its age. Amazingly, this should have been an almost flawless port, since Arctic Thunder, besides being fast and furious, really doesn't throw any huge graphical fastballs. Spy Hunter, another Midway game (though not developed in-house), is set up level-wise in much the same way, where things are largely on rails, yet it looks about 10 times better than Arctic Thunder. Scary thought.
I suppose it's time to really get into picking apart AT's graphics. Frankly, they suck. The menu screens are decent enough, with the exact same mountain side menus, though a few more were obviously added to handle things like multiplayer options, and it all moves along rather smoothly. Like the rest of the game, the lighting is rather plain, but pulled off well, it's not overabundant, but neither does everything feel under lit. The menu transitions were well done, and it helps the whole clump of screens that take you into the action feel well produced. The problem is, once you leave the comfort of the menus, you're thrust into the rest of the game. The effect is not unlike being shoved through a plate glass window.
The game moves along at a brisk clip, no doubt, but that's the whole idea. You're being carried along a lightning-fast snowmobile that's careening down mountainsides and through snow-drenched cities. Everything is textured with some rather low-res textures, but because you're moving so fast, it's not a big deal. There are some nasty little graphical shortcomings, such as the absolutely atrocious effect of the rooster tail power-up. For those that don't know what a rooster tail is, it's a long plume of snow or water kicked up in the back by both snowmobiles and personal watercraft. The effect in AT, though, is utter crap. Besides blinding you, which it's supposed to do, the effect just looks terrible, with what looks like giant-sized sprites that are kicked up. Sprites or no, the translucency around the edges is about as nasty as something you'll find on the PlayStation. It just looks terrible.
If the game moved along at a steady 60 fps, it would ease so very, very much of my anger. After all, I can put up with sub-par graphics if it's at the cost of a nice, smooth framerate. But of course, that wasn't to be. Most of the time, Arctic Thunder putts along at about 25fps, frequently dipping into the teens and rarely shooting up to a silky smooth 60 frames a second. The fact that its normal framerate is so low is frightening, but the frequency of the lower-end dips is just annoying as hell. It comes at an understandable time, when there are a lot of riders on screen or a lot of effects happening at once, but if they were having problems locking down a steady framerate, it makes one wonder why the game was even released in the first place.
The most problem-free part of the port appears to be the sound. From what I could tell after a quick trip to the arcade to play the sit-down version, the PS2 version has every bit of the arcade's effects and music in place. The effects themselves are done well enough, with the appropriate percussive booms and annoying quips from each of the characters (usually triggered when firing a weapon or being hit by one, which means you'll hear all their little catchphrases quite a bit). It's not that the sound is lacking in any way, if anything it's the best part of Arctic Thunder, it's just that with so much happening on screen at once, the sound effects start to sound all ground together.
The music is also perfectly suited for the game. It's fast, driving, and doesn't ever let up. It's much like the end boss music in an adventure game or RPG, except that it's playing all the time. It does the job I suppose of jacking up your blood pressure elevation a bit more, and for those few minutes where all hell is breaking loose, it fits just fine. The racing music meshes well with the venues too, with little touches like electric guitars belting out riffs of "Hail To The King" on the Blizzard in DC level. The menu music is more grating, however, with what sounds like about 3 or 4 measures of the same thing over and over and over again.
Arctic Thunder suffers in too many areas to make it worth playing for any extended amount of time. The framerate issues harm the most important part of and game: gameplay, and the game as a console effort just can't work when the original goal was to get people to spend as much money as possible in as short as possible. If it weren't for the absolutely awesome Hydro Thunder, I'd wonder if it was worth it at all to port arcade games of this ilk to home systems, but that game was a shining example of a great port. I don't want to beat a dead horse here; just avoid Arctic Thunder, and maybe Midway's next port won't fare so badly.
