Crash Team Racing is the latest completely remade game – but how long can this trend last?
Crash Team Racing is the latest completely remade game – but how long can this trend last?

Pop CultureJune 27, 2019

Review: Crash Team Racing Nitro Fueled is nostalgic navel-gazing

Crash Team Racing is the latest completely remade game – but how long can this trend last?
Crash Team Racing is the latest completely remade game – but how long can this trend last?

Sam Brooks reviews Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled, an exercise in mining nostalgia for diminishing returns.

If you were a 90s kid and had a console, you were either a Mario Kart kid or a Crash Team Racing kid. These were the definitive party games of our era – more party and more competitive than the actual party games from both franchises (Mario PartyCrash Bash) – because they were games that you played over time and built up skills, rather than got lucky at.

Also? Because go-kart games are like shots of serotonin straight into your brain stem. Bright colours, bouncy sounds, quickfire gameplay. And Sony hasn’t had a good one since, well, the first Crash Team Racing game.

Remaking Crash Team Racing is an absolute no-brainer, especially considering the success of the Crash Bandicoot and Spyro remakes. The bones of that original game are so solid – it’s not just a rip-off of the Mario Kart format, but a subversion and upgrade of a few of that game’s mechanics – that it remains the gold standard for the genre. Hell, a few years ago, I remember people getting around a dusty old PS1 at a bar to play a Crash tournament, and while the graphics showed every single second of its 15 years, good bones are good bones.

It’s all your Crash favourites, including that polar bear you jump on for heaps of lifes.

In the vein of those aforementioned remakes, Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled gets right most of what it does simply by covering those old bones with a beautiful new skin. The core mechanics are the same, although you’ll run into trouble if you’re relying on two-decade old muscle memory to powerslide. You pick one of the Crash characters – either from the trilogy that absolutely everybody played and loved or the subsequent games that people played and absolutely nobody loved – and drive around various wacky tracks. If you pick up enough apples, you go faster. If you pick up weapons, you use them against your foes. Like any race, the driver at the front of the pack wins. Simple, sleek, satisfying.

In all honesty, it’s a reskinned Mario Kart. But when it ain’t broke, there’s no point fixing it. The upgrades are largely cosmetic – but it’s like going from the pharmacy to MAC. This game is straight-up gorgeous, as all of these remakes have been. There’s a slightly Dreamworks-y quality to the animation that makes me wonder how quickly it will age, but for the moment everything pops and it’s a candy-flavoured delight to look at. You might be surprised to see tracks and characters from the under-played and under-released sequel, Nitro Kart, in the game, and even more surprised to see tracks from the early, almost entirely unknown sequel Crash Tag Team Racing, but these just feel like icing on the remake cake.

This remake isn’t perfect, unfortunately. Some of those flaws are new, like the unfathomably long loading times. Sometimes it can take up to half a minute to load a race, which is fine if you’re boosting through adventure mode, but when you’re sitting in a group of people eagerly awaiting the next race to begin, it’s a bit of a drag.

Yeah, that’s as bad as it looks.

The other flaws are some straight-up racist depictions. We’re in 2019, and we shouldn’t be accepting some incredibly vague appropriation of Polynesian culture with Aku Aku and Uka Uka, two mentor-figures that exclaim ‘Ooga booga’ (or words to that effect) when they’re summoned to protect you. Additionally, Papu Papu – a bumbling, overweight vaguely Aztec tribal leader who refers to himself in the third person and in broken English – can’t be a character that anybody was crossing their fingers and hoping to see. The depiction of both is vague enough to almost get a pass, but being vague in what you’re appropriating is not quite the same as just not doing it.

Although fun, this remake does give me pause. What’s the end goal here? Is it to cash in on the skeleton of a game everybody already loved, and get them to shell out for a prettier version? Or is it to introduce these classics to a new generation of gamer who might balk at playing games that they consider to be ‘ugly’ with ‘old graphics’?

It’s no coincidence that the latter two of these remakes, Spyro and this, have had art styles that far more closely resemble Fortnite than they do their original games. Gamers aren’t stupid, but sometimes people who buy games for gamers are low-information, and end up going for something that looks similar to the game their kid/adult/significant human is playing. And in that situation, you could do a whole lot worse than Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled. If I could use that little Men in Black gun to make me forget Crash Team Racing and experience  it for the first time, I’d do it.

I’m glad, of course, that I don’t have to drag out my Playstation 2, blow it off, and then find my scratched-up Playstation 1 copy of Crash Team Racing. We’ve struck gold with both the remakes of the Crash trilogy and Spyro the Dragon trilogy now, but you can only strike gold so much before you start start hitting rock.

Crash Team Racing Nitro Fueled is available for Playstation 4, Nintendo Switch and Xbox One.

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Pop CultureJune 23, 2019

And the stars of Celebrity Treasure Island 2019 are…

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Alex Casey breaks down the full line-up for Celebrity Treasure Island 2019, including two weather presenters and a mandatory Lana.

Gather round peasants, Celebrity Treasure Island is coming back for the first time since 2007 and you should all be screaming bloody murder. This is the show with the killer coral! The weird txt speak! The forbidden durries! And after all the sequins and spray tans of Dancing With the Stars NZ, isn’t it about time we took our celebrities down a notch by giving them a break off work to visit a tropical island paradise? 

Our early predictions might not have been right on the money – no Max Key, no Erin Simpson in sight – but there’s still many, many shiny stars for you to look forward seeing transform into a bearded, delirious Tom Hanks in Castaway. Here’s the full rundown of celebbies for your consideration.

Lily McManus

Charity: National foundation for the deaf

Lily being gnarly with no water in Bachelor S3

Whomst? Lily was runner-up on The Bachelor NZ season three and later reached international stardom on The Bachelor Winter Games. She’s also one of the most exciting cast announcements, a wildcard who isn’t too precious to do a shooey and brush her teeth with no water. Surely that will come in handy on the island at some point.

Shane Cameron

Charity: Key to Life

Whomst? You would have recently seen the bloke absolutely biffing Brittany through the air like a javelin on Dancing With the Stars NZ and, before that, showing off his meat hands when he was a contestant himself. He’s also a famous boxer, obviously, and the owner of a Birkenhead gym. That fitness will surely come in extremely handy, plus he has a nice smiley face advantage.

Matty McLean

Charity: Rainbow Youth

Whomst? Breakfast’s Matty McLean is a longtime Survivor super fan and for that reason I hold deep fears that he going to overthink every part of the game and get booted in the first couple of weeks. Blessings and good tidings to you and yours. At the very least he will be able to have a weather-presenter-off with none of than…

Sam Wallace

Charity: Starship Foundation

The Sticky TV host, turned weatherman, turned radio guy is perhaps most famous for the above iconic moment, perhaps our filthiest weather fail since Jim Hickey’s cumburgers. My personal favourite Sam Wallace moment is when I went to see the Counting Crows play on Breakfast and Wally was there, Shazaming the whole damn thing. I wish him all the best.

Lana Van Hout

Charity: Child Cancer foundation

Whomst? As it is written in the bible, every season of Celebrity Treasure Island must have a woman named Lana on it. I just have my fingers and toes crossed that this long distance runner and influencer is going to protect her precious feet against all scary coral with a vendetta against Lana’s worldwide. Actually, the coral’s all dead now so jokes on them. And me. And you.

Zac Guildford

Charity: Upside Downs NZ

Whomst? Let’s just say that the last time this ex-All Black went to a tropical island, things went quite badly indeed.

Moses Mackay

Charity: Dream Chaser

Whomst? One third of SOL3 MIO, Moses and I are actually best friends after appearing in the above video together four years ago. I have very high hopes that this guy will be the sol3 surviv0r of Celebrity Treasure Island.

Gary Freeman

Charity: Big Buddies NZ

Whomst? At 56 years old, this ex-league superstar is going to be the oldest on the island, but if Horse taught us anything it is that age is just a number and a human name is sometimes an animal name.

Athena Angelou

Charity: Diabetes NZ

Whomst? She somehow made it out of a Teuila Blakely call-out alive, so this Flava host might just have the chops to survive the harrowing conditions of Celebrity Treasure Island.

Karl Burnett

Charity: St Johns

Lovely low-res picture of Nick and Waverly here

Whomst? It’s only bloody heartthrob Nick Harrison back from the dead! One of New Zealand’s biggest stars of the 90s, Burnett was on Shortland Street for 13 years until producers rudely axed his character and sentenced him to celebrity jail aka Sing Like a Superstar. I am truly amping for his return and think it is absolutely crack up that St John’s is his charity. Viva la Nick.

Rosanna Arkle

Charity: Heart Kids NZ

You might remember Rosanna from the absolutely hectic reality series The GC, or perhaps from the time that Jaime Ridge beat her up in the name of charity. Since then, Rosanna has climbed the Instagram ranks and has as many followers as New Zealand has people. 

Ladi 6

Charity: Safe man, safe family

Whomst? Ladi 6 is so fucking cool and also says she has done zero preparation for the show, which I respect MASSIVELY. After what sounds like an extremely stressful year that caused her to retreat from the public eye, hopefully scrambling around in the dirt with celebrities is just what the doctor ordered.

Jodie Rimmer

Charity: Talk Peach

Whomst? Having appeared on Shortland Street, Young Hercules, In My Father’s Den, The Strip and even Melody Rules (RIP), if you don’t know Jodie Rimmer, you’ll know Jodie Rimmer. Are her and Karl Burnett mates from Ferndale? I bloody well hope so.

Shannon Ryan

Charity: Blind foundation guide dogs

Whomst? Shannon Ryan was all over our radio and TV for a good while there, fronting C4 and George FM and The Block before disappearing to Tinseltown. Based on this NZ Herald article, she has quite a philosophical approach to travel: “It’s not just about the destination, the sand and sun, the fresh snow and cosy fire… I’ve learned that my desire to travel stems from a curiosity to understand us funny old humans.” Good social game? I sure hope so.