Hotshot Tales, Part 22: The Volcanic Absurdity of the Heated Highway

Hotshot Tales, Part 22: The Volcanic Absurdity of the Heated Highway

Hotshot Racing is known for its retro-themed aesthetic and old-school track design, but one variant - the Heated Highway route on the Coast map - takes the absurdity of its settings to extremes. Although its technical layout makes it one of the most challenging layouts in the base game, it's not the reason I'm mentioning it here. The key feature of this track (for which it is named) is a tunnel running through an active volcano spitting chunks of solidified lava into the air from two pools of magma either side of the actual track. Obviously, such a geologically active region would be very ill-suited to being a racing venue (or even a construction site for road building) in real life, but then again, the game doesn't even pretend to be realistic in any way. As for the sector's layout, it begins with a tight 90-degree left-hander, followed by a short straight that feeds into another sharp 90-degree left as it enters the volcanic tunnel, which is essentially a right-left-right chicane made narrower by artificial bottlenecks at the tunnel's exit.

Above, from top: Heated Highway is the most escapist track configuration in Hotshot Racing due to having a section of track with a volcanic magma pool either side - a geologic feature that would easily preclude any form of road construction nearby in real life.

It is very rare for a car to be launched into the lava pits through a glitch that can cause them to clip through the edges of the track, but even if this occurs, the car will simply respawn back on the track within seconds, as it would when it goes out of bounds elsewhere. So why am I mentioning this lava-sculpted twister of a track again on this blog? A recent nearby volcanic eruption that made the sky slightly dimmer and forced me to take extra precautions to avoid unnecessary exposure made me think of this track (along with its alternate configurations), and how a single eruption could shut down the entire map for racing purposes for months. Specifically, if the volcano through which the Heated Highway route runs were to erupt, almost the entirety of its third sector would be completely impassable, thus necessitating a time-consuming excavation and reconstruction procedure after the eruption ends.

Obviously, the fallout from such an eruption wouldn't be limited to the lava flows and ashfall - earthquakes and tsunamis would also ravage huge sections of the map - but the fact that Lucky Mountain Games had the audacity to place an active volcano in the middle of one of the track configurations in Hotshot Racing shows that the racing game genre still deserves to have some element of escapism in it, and this is no exception.