YMMV / Crash Nitro Kart

• Angst? What Angst?: Surprisingly, neither of the Earth teams appears to care about their allies (Polar and Pura for Team Bandicoot, Dingodile for Team Cortex) being brainwashed by N. Trance and forced to race on his side and fight them. While it's somewhat understandable in Cortex's case because he's, well, a villain, the heroes don't even remember about Polar until the very end of the game, and even then you're left guessing how and if Pura and Dingodile were freed.
• Awesome Art: This is the only post-Naughty Dog game where the franchise's original design team, Charles Zembillas and Joe Pearson, worked on it, leading to incredibly authentic visuals and lush looking race tracks.
• Awesome Levels:
  • The game's signature track is without a doubt Out of Time, a winding desert that has a good deal of tricky, yet satisfying short-cuts and sharp turns with an amazing set piece in its giant clock that is traversed thanks to one of the only places of anti-gravity that doesn't lag.
  • A close second is certainly Deep Sea Driving, a big submarine track with extreme jumps and one of the best uses of anti-gravity in the game, a Shark Tunnel you can cross in 360 degrees.
• Contested Sequel: Fans of Crash Team Racing are rather divided in terms of if this game stacks up to the original, with the altered physics, different voice actors and several fan favorites being absent from the roster all being points of contention.
• Disappointing Last Level: The final race against Velo has an extremely steep Difficulty Spike, and for all the wrong reasons — you have never seen his track up to this point (and you don't unlock it until you reach it in the story either), it's excruciatingly long, hazardous, and filled with close quarters that make it very hard to consistently drift boost, and worst of all is Velo's obnoxious Rubber-Band A.I., which is so bad that the course map is hidden from the player because showing it would make it extremely obvious how much he cheats. On top of that, if you get ahead of him, he will send missiles after you, making it a lot easier said than done to maintain a lead. This is the only boss across both Crash Team Racing and this game who will attack you when you're ahead, and it's very obvious why none of the other bosses do this.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: The champion bosses in this game (Krunk, Nash, the two Norms and Geary) are quite popular with fans, especially Nash for having a design that could easily fit in with the evolved animals and Big Norm for being a surprisingly good sport. It's a pity that they're only playable in the GBA version. That said, when the bosses were announced to return in Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled, fans were both dumbfounded and delighted.
• Funny Moments:
  • In the intro, Crunch and Aku Aku are talking about a new fad diet. Several fans expressed interest in hearing the rest of that conversation because of how out-of-place it was in a racing game.
  • When the Cortex Team is abducted, instead of taking the whole castle, Velo simply pulls off the tower from the rest of the building.
  • N. Trance's mechanical body is so bulky that there's physically no room for a steering wheel in his kart. He gets around this by reaching his long arms down to the bottom edges of the kart and physically wrench it back and forth in order to steer.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • An anti-gravity gimmick in a Mascot Racer's sequel. Why does that ring a bell?
  • During the production of Nitro Kart, the idea of bringing back◊ Crash Team Racing tracks with updated graphics had been thrown around but ultimately scrapped. 16 years later and it's the Nitro Kart tracks getting that treatment in a Crash Team Racing remake.
  • Cortex dismissively refers to the Norms as clowns in a cutscene, which causes Big Norm to call him one in retaliation. Cue the Neon Circus Grand Prix in Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled, in which Cortex gets a clown skin.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: Much like Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex was to Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped, this game was accused of being a complete carbon copy of Crash Team Racing.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: Alongside the previous critics, the game only has 12 trophy circuits plus the final track, making only 13 tracks in total while its predecessor had 18, including 16 trophy races and 2 unlockables.
• Narm: Some of the racing quotes are extremely wooden and cheesy compared to Crash Team Racing. For example, Tiny says, "Tiny win race now!" in a giddy and excited tone, which is somewhat Out of Character for him.
• Nightmare Fuel: Dingodile, strangely enough. While Polar and Pura, the other two members of Team N. Trance, look completely normal, being brainwashed has given Dingodile a crazed, manic look that's absolutely terrifying.
• Polished Port:
  • The Xbox version has a leg up compared to the other two versions; aside from having better load times, the game is capable of going up to 720p using the Xbox component cables. This doesn't sound too impressive these days, but at the time, it was pretty much unheard of for console games to be outputting that high of a resolution. Unfortunately, running the game in that mode does massively slice the frame rate down, and the game also does not accommodate for the change in aspect ratio either.
  • The Game Boy Advance version. The game obviously had some downgrades for the weaker hardware, but pretty much the whole game is represented well for the handheld. The gameplay also runs at a faster speed more reminiscent of Crash Team Racing, and it even managed to put in some content not found in the console versions, including playable boss characters, and even Spyro the Dragon is playable.
• Porting Disaster: The N-Gage version is a rather tragic case that was actually a decent upgrade of the GBA version with more detailed tracks and music, unfortunately the game doesn't translate well at all to the console's narrow screen, making it absurdly difficult to see where you're going.
• Questionable Casting: Steve Blum as Crash. The ever-beloved bandicoot has an extremely high-pitched voice that doesn't really fit him at all. This is the only game where Crash's voice is done by Blum though, as he hasn't voiced him ever since.
• The Scrappy: You'd be hard-pressed to find fans of Zem and Zam. With a lot of fan favorite characters from the previous game missing (and the more well received boss characters of this game being non-playable in most versions), and with these two getting no limelight in the game's story and serving no purpose other than to give Nitros Oxide two partners to race with, they're frequently derided as being wastes of space with no real charm or personality. Of the two, Zem is more hated, with his Fat Bastard Gasshole dialogue getting real old real fast.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The anti-gravity seems like a good idea on paper, but it's not well-executed. Everytime the player goes on a tricky section, the game lags horribly and the camera doesn't always follow, and outside of some creative uses like Deep Sea Driving's shark tunnel and Out of Time's clock, it doesn't feel special at all.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Only the three main characters of Team Bandicoot and Team Cortex are playable throughout the main story. Oxide is Demoted to Extra and isn't playable in the Adventure Mode (and nor are his new minions Zem and Zam, castrating the opportunity to give them much personality), and neither are N. Trance, Dingodile, or Polar, which greatly limits the number of playable characters in the single-player campaign. N. Tropy, Pura, and Fake Crash are even absent from the story entirely and serve almost no role whatsoever in the game.
  • A unique set of bosses are created for the game's story, though outside the GBA version, they are ironically unplayable, and even Velo himself is only playable in his smaller form. That said, Nitro-Fueled brings back all of the new racers from this game and appears to give them more fleshed-out personalities.
• Vindicated by History: Over time, the reception to this game has become far warmer with many fans saying it stayed truer to the series' roots than the following Crash racing game, Crash Tag Team Racing (a Contested Sequel in and of itself), and this attitude only increased with the reveal of Nitro Kart content in Nitro-Fueled. The fact that all of the Original Generation characters from this game have been given more fleshed-out personalities definitely helps.
  • One part that's been vindicated more than most of the rest of the game is the track design. They were considered uninspired by critics at the time the game came out, but nowadays fans agree the issue is that they range from good to fantastic and are bogged down by Nitro Kart's slower and clunkier gameplay. When they were included in Nitro-Fueled and adopted the faster gameplay and better controls of that game, the Nitro Kart tracks (including the ones that received very few changes to their layout in the transition to that game) were found to be an absolute blast to race on and nowadays they are considered to be on equal footing with, if not downright surpassing, Naughty Dog's track designs.