(Originally published to Glitchwave on 12/18/2022)
[Image from glitchwave.com]
Crash Team Racing
Developer: Naughty Dog
Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment
Genre(s): Kart Racer
Platforms: PS1
Release Date: September 30, 1999
Already, Crash Bandicoot seems like the perfect franchise for a kart racer. If there is anything that remained consistent with the orange marsupial in his trilogy of 3D platformers on the PS1, it never ceased in its wacky, cartoonish tone. Karts racers, by nature, are goofier and more imaginative than their quasi-realistic racing counterparts, fitting for the plethora of video game characters with less-than-realistic physical attributes in the fantastical realms they reside in. While the case for a Crash Bandicoot kart racer is solid as stone, it’s difficult not to compare the game to Mario Kart and make soaring assumptions about Sony trying to piggyback off of Nintendo and try to extract some kart racing revenue while the money river was still flowing. Crash Bandicoot has always tactfully worn its influences from Sonic, Donkey Kong Country, and Mario on its sleeves, but releasing a kart racer is bound to draw direct comparisons to Mario Kart due to the franchise’s borderline monopoly on the subgenre. However, there is quite a bevy of advantages to unabashedly ripping pages straight from Mario Kart’s handbook. Nintendo can only innovate so much for Mario Kart because a key factor of the franchise's success is accessibility. Because the Crash Bandicoot series has been less inclined to hold the player’s hand, perhaps a Crash kart racer could expand on the aspects of the kart racing subgenre that Mario can’t.
Mario Kart has always been presented very matter-of-factly. Many gamers, myself included, always assumed that the Mario characters partake in kart racing as healthy competition to blow off steam or they’re all the combatants in a Mushroom Kingdom tradition as celebrated and long-standing as the Olympic games. The player is forced to make their own assumptions because the game gives absolutely zero context to what has possessed these characters to blow burning tire smoke in each other’s faces. In Crash Team Racing, that missing context is granted with a reasonably high concept premise. Alien invader and kart enthusiast Nitrous Oxide has arrived on Crash’s planet to flaunt his self-imposed racing credentials. He claims there isn’t a soul alive across the entire solar system that can beat him in a race, and if the select racer from the planet loses to him, he’s going to make like Joni Mitchell and pave the planet into a paradise in the form of a parking lot where he will be its tyrannical leader. The plot sounds silly enough for a Crash game until the player reads into the subtext. An airborne menace named after a noxious gas that plans to industrialize Crash’s world to a comically bleak degree is an on-the-nose ecological message. Providing a premise to a kart racer made for an adequate evolutionary step, but Naughty Dog decided to exceed their expectations with a surprising hint of depth.
Each Mario Kart title offers a grand-Prix mode with four cups of four separate races, with each subsequent cup providing harder tracks to traverse. Racing on each track individually can be done via the versus menu, mainly against one or more human players. Extra modes like the battle mode can also be played to scratch the itch of combat-oriented driving gameplay. Exiting every gameplay mode either upon finishing or quitting the game ultimately circles the player back to the main menu, the calculated hub of the game. Crash Team Racing expands on Mario Kart’s streamlined approach to menu navigation by borrowing from fellow kart racer Diddy Kong Racing, adding a hub world in the single-player campaign fully traversable by driving. Admittedly, the fact that Diddy Kong Racing did it first does diminish the impact of Crash Team Racing including this, but the fact that Mario Kart has never even attempted something like this in the decades it has been the dominant kart racing series slightly elevates any game that includes a traversable hub over it. Driving around the field without the strain of competing against other racers feels liberating, and it can also serve as a practice ground for sharp turns.
In an open environment, the races are coordinated differently than selecting a cup in Mario Kart. Crash Team Racing’s hub is divided into four separate areas, each with four tracks located in every corner. Instead of selecting the area, the game starts the player with the four tracks of N. Sanity Beach, which provides the supposed easiest four tracks in the game. As restricted as this might seem at a first glance, having the player climb up the difficulty ladder instead of picking and choosing a track feels better suited to a game with a story. The player races through each track individually as opposed to racing through the four tracks sequentially in a grand Prix. While only racing on one track at a time might negate the difficulty of accumulating enough points to earn a gold trophy, the game offers more after simply winning the race. Another reason why the kart racer subgenre and Crash Bandicoot are natural soulmates is because, for the last two mainline titles, the player had to race through Crash’s levels on foot with the time relic challenges. The developers, of course, easily transcribed the relic challenges over to Crash Team Racing as the player earns a specifically colored relic based on the amount of time they took to finish driving through three laps on a course, breaking open the multiple time blocks to momentarily freeze the ticking clock for a better score in the process. The other challenge offered is the “CTR” challenge, where the player races against the other characters again, only with the stipulation of collecting the letters C, T, and R scattered around the course. This challenge is kind of lame and pointless as the time relic trials already added a satisfactory enough extra challenge. All the same, completing all of these tasks for a single course feels fulfilling and lets the player become readily acquainted with each course.
As for the tracks themselves, each of them is stripped right from the various levels of the PS1 Crash trilogy. Not literally, of course. The developers don’t expect the players to suspend their disbelief that a race track is located a couple of blocks away from levels like Cold Hard Crash and Slippery Climb, faintly seen from the player’s peripheral visions. Crash Team Racing simply recognizes the series' various level motifs, such as jungles, sewers, laboratories, and icy levels seen across the trilogy, and renders them into racing courses. Not only do the varied themes create a wide array of tracks that feel appropriately Crash Bandicoot, but the track design is equally diverse. Tracks are brimming with the frills of boosters, half pipes, ramps, moving obstacles, and tons of other thrilling attributes synonymous with the kart racer subgenre. Most courses have unique gimmicks that make them discernable, like the submerging ramps in Mystery Caves, the thick mud of Tiny Arena, the ravenous plants that snatch up and chew anything in their vicinity in Papu’s Pyramid, etc. Courses in kart racers should feel as distinctive as the elemental levels from platformer games, and Crash Team Racing nails the selection.
As par for the course, item boxes are strewn across every track situated in a symmetrically-paired line of four or five, separated by only a few meters. Kart racers wouldn’t be the same without a slew of weapons and other advantages to even the playing field, something that would be highly unethical in any realistic racing game. Of course, flinging the various tools that randomly appear after hitting any item box is another liberal helping from Mario Kart. The task at hand here to avoid even more accusations of creative appropriation is masking them with notable Crash Bandicoot properties. Even with the effort to disguise the items from Mario Kart here, it doesn’t take a genius to discern that chemical beakers are bananas, the tracking missiles and bombs are green and red shells, and the Aku Aku/Uka Uka masks act the same as the invincible star power with musical quips accompanying them. Crossing a TNT crate requires more proactive measures to prevent being inconvenienced by an explosion than a fake item box from Mario Kart, but it essentially functions the same. Crash Team Racing innovates on the items through the wumpa fruit crates located alongside the item boxes on the track. Collecting ten of Crash’s go-to snacks and holding that amount without getting hit evolves a weapon and gives it advanced properties. TNT crates become Nitro Crates that explode on impact, red beakers add a rain cloud affliction, etc. Upgraded versions of the items are excellent rewards for maintaining a certain rhythm while on the course.
Actually, the items, whether or not they are evolved, don’t really factor too much while racing. Holding onto a few in a pinch can be useful in a pinch, but the player can’t use them as a crutch to carry them to victory like in Mario Kart. Because the player competes on each track one at a time instead of in a grand Prix, any of the CPUs can potentially win, so bombarding the CPU in first place with an onslaught of items will only aid another CPU dragging behind. The key to success in Crash Team Racing is pure, ferocious speed. Blazing past the competition is a matter of mastering the drift move. Holding down either the L1 or R1 button and pressing the alternate trigger three times in succession will give the player a short boost. Given how much space the player has to drift at a crooked angle matched with how accurate their timing is, the player can rev themselves to the speeds of a cocaine-addled NASCAR driver. Executing this isn’t too tricky, as the drift controls are as tight as a Chinese finger trap. It’s a matter of combining triple boosts to really burn some rubber. The layered secrets planted in inconspicuous routes around the layered courses can accommodate the player’s skill with shortcuts that are hard to reach for any novice player. With impeccable skill, the player can zoom through these courses and seem like a speck of stardust in the eyes of the competing players.
The ease at which the player can become the elusive speed demon in Crash Team Racing also depends on which character they choose. Only one character per campaign can conquer Nitrous Oxide, and they are all displayed working on their karts in a garage like a group of steamy pin-up girls ready to be picked. Crash Bandicoot’s roster may not be as recognizable as Mario Kart’s, but at least every character will register somewhat for anyone who has played each game in the PS1 trilogy. Crash is a requisite for the game. Coco fulfills the role of the token female character like Peach, numerous boss villains like Cortex, N. Gin, and Tiny Tiger, to furry creatures like Pura and Polar. Unlike Mario Kart, selecting your character based on cuteness or your arbitrary affinity for them from the mainline games would be unwise. Each racer has three separate stats: speed, acceleration, and turn. Some characters like Crash are balanced for beginners, while characters like Dingodile are speed savants that turn more rigidly and require more skill to hone effectively. Differentiating characters based on stats is far more complex and interesting than picking a character for superficial reasons, like in Mario Kart. The player may have to be reminded what the character’s relevance is to the series, but they’ll become more familiar with them through their individual driving prowess, which also extends the game’s replay value.
With only one character, Crash Team Racing’s replay value is still prolonged through the numerous unlockables. Another note from Diddy Kong Racing that Crash Team Racing peered over was the inclusion of boss races. Once the player earns every trophy per race in an area, a familiar foe will challenge the player to a race. I'm not sure how the developers decided which Crash bosses would be apex challenges and regular racers, but beating them will unlock the next area with a “boss key.” Their advanced mano a mano race only includes a track the player has already won on, plus the constant flinging of bombs and other items behind them. Once the player accelerates past them, their cackling and trash-talking will only be heard faintly until the player beats them. These boss races themselves are not what makes their inclusion exciting, however. If the player wins a grand Prix with all the races in their area, that boss is available as a racer. Unfortunately, this is not the case for Nitrous Oxide because, apparently, the PS1 engine couldn’t handle his presence on every track. Maybe if the player was manning his kart, he wouldn’t have to gain a cheating head start like a cheeky fucker. Three additional characters on top of the bosses can also be unlocked in other ways, totaling to seven unlockable characters. It gives the player more incentive to keep playing than Mario Kart did.
They’ve always said that a great work of art doesn’t have to be original to be exemplary. Kart racers always carry an apt comparison to Mario Kart, but Nintendo doesn’t own the intellectual rights to any racing game with the premise of a dozen kooky characters pelting each other with shit on the topsy-turvy pavement. The Crash Bandicoot series was destined for kart racing greatness. While it’s obvious that the developers might have scanned over several properties from multiple kart racers, it is anything but a derivative imitation. Crash Team Racing is the racing game’s answer to kart racers, which is why it excels over every kart racer before. It’s as accessible as any other game from the subgenre. Still, the skill ceiling is elevated to the top floor of a skyscraper, allowing the player to perform feats that surpass anything in Mario Kart. The game also benevolently rewards the player for honing their skill with a bounty of unlockables and rewards, something Mario Kart 64 doesn’t. Even though I’m comparing Crash Team Racing to Mario Kart 64, its now-antiquated influence, none of the subsequent Mario Kart games have matched Crash Team Racing’s unique aspects. That is impressive.
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