Ten days into Eric Vs. 365, only a million to go. Today's game is Crash Team Racing: Nitro Fueled. Despite being the second PSOne game Eric ever owned, we never really played the original Crash Team Racing very much, largely because there were just too many other good games to play at the time. We loved the Crash Bandicoot N-Sane Trilogy (more games we didn't ever play originally ...) so much, though, that we gave the Crash Team Racing remake a try out of pure blind faith. Check out our thoughts on the game, and how this video came about, below.
I've beaten the story mode and got the achievement for winning on every track, so I've spent a fair amount of time with Crash Team Racing: Nitro Fueled and I like it quite a bit. The visuals are generally quite nice, the characters look great and have lots of personality, and the gameplay feels really, really good. I like that it handles power sliding and turbo boosts differently from Mario Kart so it doesn't just play like a MK reskin. I don't really like the unlock system, though, because it takes forever to grind out enough coins to buy stuff. The game also has wild spikes in difficulty. Easy mode is too dumb, medium is frustratingly inconsistent, and hard is just brutal. Trying to earn the time trial relics is also pretty ridiculous until you learn every shortcut and pull off perfect laps every time. All in all, though, it is very fun and very solid and worth picking up for PS4 and Xbox One fans that can't play Mario Kart 8 Deluxe instead.
For this video I decided to play online against other real flesh and blood opponents even though I hadn't ever won a race up to that point. Things started off pretty embarrassingly terrible, of course, and I struggled through about 3 races - almost all of which were cut from the video - until things started picking up. I thought I was going to have to scrap the whole thing until I found a server with players more along my skill level, then I started doing better. And then the servers started glitching out, which turned the video from "Eh, I don't think I can use any of this" to "OMG gurl this is going to be gold!".
I won a race only to be shuffled to second in the results, despite having a better overall time. Then people started teleporting around. Then everyone else was dumped from the server, except maybe the vengeful ghost of another player maybe. Then I got dumped out of the server myself. It was an entertaining mess. Then I did a goofy fun thing at the end of the video for laughs.
All in all, this turned out well.
