The original Crash Team Racing is about as close to perfection in the genre as you can get. A surprisingly comprehensive single-player campaign with hub worlds, boss fights and extra challenges, a soundtrack consistently better than the original platformer trilogy it's based on (listen to Dragon Mines, N Gin Labs or Cortex Castle and challenge me on that) and deep intricate mechanics like Reserves and Sacred Fire that can be used to blitz through tracks without ever encroaching on the enjoyment of a casual player.
As good as the best Mario Kart games are, (and they're very good!) they simply can't compete with CTR in my opinion. Nintendo would never allow the kind of deep gameplay provided by the aforementioned Sacred Fire mechanics for irrational fear of alienating casual players - as a matter of fact they'd fight against it. (And already have by toning down powersliding mechanics in recent games.) They also wouldn't design tracks with so many shortcuts, intentional and not baked into their layouts. Watch a speedrun of this game and watch runners absolutely take apart tracks like Papu's Pyramid or Hot Air Skyway, it's immense, and almost entirely down to the player's own skill.
If Crash Team Racing is an almost flawless kart racer, then CTR: Nitro-Fueled is similarly an almost flawless remake. Literally all it does is visually update the games and add tons more content, as any decent remake should do. Almost everything mechanically is left pristinely preserved, even if a few of the original's cooler glitches are sadly and understandably smoothed over. It's insane the lengths they went to to add new characters to this game, the villains from Crash Nitro Kart are here, Spyro is here, the fucking dancing girls from the win screen are here??? The game was supported for a surprisingly long time after its release with free new characters, tracks and cosmetics, it has about as much content as you could possibly ask for from a game of its kind.
Really the only thing holding it back from being perfect was its lackluster online matchmaking/systems at launch and Activision's general bullshittery - adding what were basically lootboxes to the game after previously promising they wouldn't before launch.
The game's a bit dead now, and I think that's a bit sad - because I don't think it ever got the recognition it deserves. As far as remakes go, I think it deserves to be held up alongside the Resident Evil 2 and Final Fantasy 7 Remakes as one of the best ever. Online may be barren now, but it will still and forever be worth a purchase for the sheer amount of single-player content it has to offer. Huge recommend.
As good as the best Mario Kart games are, (and they're very good!) they simply can't compete with CTR in my opinion. Nintendo would never allow the kind of deep gameplay provided by the aforementioned Sacred Fire mechanics for irrational fear of alienating casual players - as a matter of fact they'd fight against it. (And already have by toning down powersliding mechanics in recent games.) They also wouldn't design tracks with so many shortcuts, intentional and not baked into their layouts. Watch a speedrun of this game and watch runners absolutely take apart tracks like Papu's Pyramid or Hot Air Skyway, it's immense, and almost entirely down to the player's own skill.
If Crash Team Racing is an almost flawless kart racer, then CTR: Nitro-Fueled is similarly an almost flawless remake. Literally all it does is visually update the games and add tons more content, as any decent remake should do. Almost everything mechanically is left pristinely preserved, even if a few of the original's cooler glitches are sadly and understandably smoothed over. It's insane the lengths they went to to add new characters to this game, the villains from Crash Nitro Kart are here, Spyro is here, the fucking dancing girls from the win screen are here??? The game was supported for a surprisingly long time after its release with free new characters, tracks and cosmetics, it has about as much content as you could possibly ask for from a game of its kind.
Really the only thing holding it back from being perfect was its lackluster online matchmaking/systems at launch and Activision's general bullshittery - adding what were basically lootboxes to the game after previously promising they wouldn't before launch.
The game's a bit dead now, and I think that's a bit sad - because I don't think it ever got the recognition it deserves. As far as remakes go, I think it deserves to be held up alongside the Resident Evil 2 and Final Fantasy 7 Remakes as one of the best ever. Online may be barren now, but it will still and forever be worth a purchase for the sheer amount of single-player content it has to offer. Huge recommend.