The shortcuts are just the right balance - tricky, but almost illicitly tempting - so I'm still going for them, at the risk of pointlessly throwing away a lead, when I really should know better. Its items are weirdly intricate, so much so that twenty years of playing this ridiculous game to death still isn't enough to completely master the remote-detonating of a rolling bomb. Image Credit: ĬTR has some of the best kart-racing tracks ever made - Hot Air Skyway, Polar Pass, Papu's Pyramid - just like the original Crash, between the difficulty spikes or maybe because of them, still has some of the most compulsive pass-the-pad platforming. it's great!" - and finding that they actually taste better than the original. Look past the jorts and the eyebrows and the extreme wonk of those characters - seriously, just take a second and actually look at them - and you'll find an absolute gold mine, like popping open a tube of Prongles - "Once you pop. There is no better franchise to hide an authentically brilliant racer in than Crash Bandicoot. The before-and-afters, like this one provided by Activision, are genuinely impressive.īut the received wisdom, let me tell you, is wrong. Crash Bandicoot, all '90s eyebrow-wiggling and nu-metal jorts-wearing, is not a good enough character to be an entire platform's mascot in 1999, let alone 2019 and the Crash Bandicoot Cinematic Universe is not even close to a good enough universe for it to get its own sixteen-character kart-racing spinoff - or, at least, so the received wisdom goes.
There are almost no off-brand bangers, you see, and I think that's why CTR gets such a bad rap from the usual Franchise-Kart fans, what with all their blue shells and banana skins and other definitely-ripped-off-from CTR things.