The story in this game is the usual silly Crash Bandicoot fare, with a new villain named Nitrous Oxide wanting to turn the whole world in to a parking lot. The animation, by the way, is fantastic, especially for a PS1 game. Whats awesome is how each boss kind of takes a page from 'Diddy Kong Racing' with how each boss talks to the player face to face. The adventure mode in this game is great, as it takes you through each track, as well as have you race against bosses from previous Crash games. The power ups in this game are all fun and add a lot of competition to each race. The tracks have so much variety between them and are all fun and they all look great. The visuals are fantastic for 1999, as they are colorful, vivid, and well detailed for a PS1 game.

The gameplay is fun and energetic, and the inclusion of the boost mechanic just adds to the enjoyment that this game already offers. Somehow, Naughty Dog, who's famous for specifically making platformers, made an amazing kart racing game that may actually be better than Mario Kart 64. This game, however, is a completely different story. Usually with game developers that are masters at making one genre of games, when they make a game that's a totally different genre, the games are usually either mediocre or down right bad. This further supports the theory that the Japanese version was built off of the PAL one, also evidenced by the fact that it retains all the improvements from it. As you've probably guessed, these challenges use the letters CBR instead of CTR in that version. CBR stands for Crash Bandicoot Racing, which is the name of the game in Japan. The reason it seems to do this is because the CTR challenges in adventure mode will say 'CBR' along with some missing characters. The game seems to change to the Japanese language when you do this (the only problem is that neither the voice lines nor the Japanese font are there, and that's why it doesn't work). Another difference is that Aku Aku/Uka Uka will be silent. You can get such atrocities as Papu Papu with Pinstripe's head, Komodo Joe with Oxide's and Oxide with Papu Papu's (Ripper Roo, on the other hand, remains untouched).

The glitch gets really interesting in Adventure Mode, because most bosses strangely swap their heads and dialogues with each others.

When prompted to select a language before the title screen, you can press Triangle to cancel it, leaving you with nothing but blank spaces and hyphens where words would normally be. In the PAL version, there's an interesting glitch.

Crash team racing characters