Platform: Nintendo GameCube
Price I Paid: Free! (I think)
Crash Tag Team Racing, one of my all time favourite games and arguably the best racing games of all time, featuring Crash Bandicoot and a whole host of old and new characters. Anyways, a bit of backstory to this game, Von Clutch has an amusement park but all of his power crystals were stolen, so it's up to Crash and everyone else to find them, whoever finds them all wins the theme park as a prize for helping him get the power crystals back, including the one in his stomach. New character wise, we can play as Von Clutch and Passedina, a rat who's trying to win the park for Von Clutch. A very noble job, but as you're Crash Bandicoot they can both go to hell and we're gonna win the theme park, even though we haven't really got the paper work to do so.
The game blends platforming and racing very well. You run around a hub based world and go through the racetracks, racing for power crystals. Coming in first place will win you three crystals, second place will get you two crystals and third place will win you one crystal. You can also find multiple crystals in the hub world surrounding you. Each mini "level" has three races to do, outfits and collectables to find, including the crystals, minigames and car parts for Crash.
Each character has three cars that you can unlock in a variety of ways, such as bringing someone a power crystal, giving them a certain amount of Wumpa coins or just fetching something from the hub worlds like an engine or costume for them. Surprisingly enough, characters usually have one or two unique costumes, such as N-Gin getting a...nurses outfit and Crash getting an Indiana Jones themed outfit. The cars are also really fun to drive around, with the characters getting three cars each too.
The most unique mechanic of this game is the racing. You can merge with different cars by hitting the Y button, which makes you and the driver of that car a two man TAG team, see what I did there? One person drives the car and one person man's a turret that can blow up other opponents. That's all good isn't it? Not really, opponents don't merge with other cars on the easiest difficulty which is a really big shame as this is where the game gets insanely fun.
There's also a stunt type minigame where you do flips and stunts to get the most points. That was actually really fun, with a nice selection of stunt arenas to do flips in. There's also a battle mode where you're paired up with someone and see who can kill the most people in a given amount of time.
Hell, there's more! Death animations are done by the hundreds, yeah they get old quickly but there's a unique death cutscene for everything, shot out of a cannon, falling in water, eaten by a yeti, punching a chicken...the list goes on. The powerups for the racing is pretty much everything you'd expect, missiles, chickens, piano's and cows. You can throw the piano's and cows though so that's nice. One thing I must say, the tracks are great, lots of hidden paths that you can take to give you an advantage in a race while there are lots of obstacles, for example Neptune's trident could blow up your car on the way around the track.
I need to make special mention of the music, mainly the menu theme. It brings back a lot of memories from my childhood, racing around as Nina or N-Gin, finally finishing the game 100%. Good times. I haven't got a bad word to say about the game.
Crash Tag Team Racing gets a 10/10
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