"Some kids play basketball after school. I have a reputation to defend."
— Max Justice
Hot Wheels: Velocity X is a video game developed by Beyond Games and released by THQ for the PC, PS2, Gamecube, and Game Boy Advance in 2002, based off of Mattel's Hot Wheels toy line. A Game Boy Advance version exists with a "slightly" different plot.
A teenager named Max Justice has just finished up with a street race when he gets a distress signal from home. Arriving there, he finds the place wrecked. To make matters worse, there is a car robbery and bombing at his father's engineering plant immediately afterward.In retaliation, Max goes to find those responsible, and retrieve the stolen cars. However, things turn out to be much more dangerous than they seem.
Hot Wheels: Velocity X provides examples of:
- 20 Minutes into the Future: The game is set in 2002, but has much more advanced technology.
- Absurdly Spacious Sewer: Underworld. Not only are the pipes several cars wide, but it's also home to Giant rotating gears, belts moving crates around, and a massive supercomputer silo.
- Always Night: Monument City, although it's more like Always Dusk.
- Awesome McCoolname: Almost every character in the story has one.
- Cool Car: All of them. They are actual Hot Wheels cars, after all.
- Critical Existence Failure / Only a Flesh Wound: Cars will become increasingly damaged as they lose health and eventually start burning, but can keep driving perfectly fine until they take a point of damage that brings them past zero.
- Crippling Overspecialization: The Surfin' School Bus. Mighty Glacier in battle mode, Joke Character everywhere else.
- Potentially a Lethal Joke Character in the right hands.
- Disc-One Nuke: You can complete all 18 challenges before stepping foot in Adventure, earning you the car Krazy 8s, as well as the ability to use every gadget, most notably
Magnet Mine. - Down the Drain: Underworld, the final level on PC and consoles.
- Dummied Out: The GBA version has the text of "I Like Monkeys" hidden in the game's files.
- Either/Or Title: Gains the subtitle Maximum Justice on PS2.
- Grandfather Paradox / Ret-Gone: Otto Von Diesel wants to use this to erase Max, his Father, and all Hot Wheels cars.
- Just Between You and Me: Otto Von Diesel reveals the Plan after Max defeats every other member of the gang, excluding Rupert..
- MacGuffin: The Disks are the main one, as well as the Uranium, the Data Cube, the Volcanic Gas, the Temporal Transmission...
- Made of Explodium: Often, destructible props. Even gently tapping a (prop) car or gas island will make it erupt in flames.
- Never Say "Die": When you take out an opponent, it's always described as 'Disabling Their Vehicle' even though the chassis and engine of the vehicle detach from the wheels and slide across the ground, burning, before exploding.
- No Time to Explain: Both Peter Justice and Gearhead do this to Max when he wants to know who Otto is after Sparky drops their name, because of the more immediate issue of the disc and the car with the Data Cube being at risk.
- Police Are Useless: Oh yes. A few examples:
- No police force is ever seen in any part of the game except for some idle, destructible SWAT Vans.
- In addition to this, bomb squads are not present at the Engineering Plant or the Tire Factory in the first two missions.
- You can drive under the 'minimum' speed limit of 75 in some areas of the game.
- Otto escapes police custody after being defeated in the final mission.
- Robot Buddy: Gearhead.
- Shifting Sand Land: Turbine Sands.
- Sickly Green Glow: The crates of Super Fuel (or possibly Uranium) in Underworld have this. The green liquid found in pipes and a giant vat near these crates also pulses slightly.
- Slippy-Slidey Ice World: Burnout Glacier.
- Super Prototype: The HW Prototype 12, the car with the highest speed stat in the game and main focus of the adventure mode.
- The Cameo: A few Hot Wheels cars you can't drive are seen on signs or as props, such as Semi Fast, Cabbin' Fever, and Speed Blaster.
- Timed Mission: The entire game runs on Timed Missions.
- Time Travel: Velocity X is this, involving the Prototype 12's cloaking and the Super Fuel's super-speed capabilities.
- Trainstopping: Happens in Mission 5 with the help of an unstable boulder.
- Weaponized Car: Through the use of gadgets you can pick up on the road. All gadgets manifest in the form of some sort of device on top of the car.
