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Crash arrives on the N-Gage. Crash Nitro Kart is a very solid racing title for the N-Gage but unfortunately some technicalities do not enable the game to reach its maximum potential.
Crash Nitro Kart features a strange story, to say the least. A bored emperor decides to force Crash and friends, as well as Dr. Cortex and his group to race in order to amuse himself. If they don’t entertainment the twisted ruler, he will destroy planet Earth. In adventure mode, you start off in a hub that features warp pipes to the actual races. As you progress, you’ll unlock additional races and eventually you’ll be able to save the planet.
If you don’t care for the story, at all, you can choose to play the game’s Arcade mode. Here, you can choose whether to have a single race or cup race (initially, there are four cups in the game, each with three tracks but you can unlock more in the Adventure mode). They are pretty self-explanatory: in single race, you race in one track (you set the laps) and in cup race you race in the three tracks of that specific cup. There is also a quick race mode that sets all this for you should you want to race immediately.
All of the races are basically racing around the tracks, collecting power-ups to use against the others. In addition, there is a Time Trial mode for each of the tracks. You can upload your best times to N-Gage Arena, where others can then download and play against.
Crash Nitro Kart expands its replayability by adding multiplayer components. The game allows you to race with up to three others via the wireless Bluetooth multiplayer. You can play in races or in the battle mode. Additionally, the game supports N-Gage Arena albeit slightly. Using N-Gage Arena, you can download ghosts of other players and race against them.
The game’s visuals are quite nice, about as good as the original Crash racing game for the PS One. The tracks feature much detail and the game maintains the colorful look of the console versions. The tracks are also in full 3D but are not fully ported from the consoles. Instead, they are 3D versions of the shortened tracks Vicarious Visions used for the Gameboy Advance version of the game. If you played that version, you’ll know the basic layout of the tracks in this version very well.
The audio of the game is acceptable. The jolly background music fits the cheerful game very well. Otherwise, you’ll hear sound effects from the karts and power-ups and occasionally, some voice lines.
If I were to end the review here, Crash Nitro Kart could easily score an 8.5 or so. Unfortunately, some technicalities do not allow me to do so.
First off, the controls in the game take some getting used to. You’ll need to use four keys (which are user-programmable) to accelerate, break, hop and fire. Unfortunately, the N-Gage QD doesn’t allow you to press many keys at the same time. I was able to use my thumb to hold the acceleration and hover over the hop button (keys 5 and 2, respectively) but when it came time to use a power-up I needed to let go of the acceleration. This is more of a problem with the unit than the game, but it could have been eased if Vicarious Visions assigned acceleration to the up directional pad key instead of a face key.
Secondly, the narrow screen really impedes the action. Most games, like Spider-Man 2 on N-Gage, are zoomed out a bit (compared to their GBA counterparts) so the gamer can see more of the level. For some reason, Crash Nitro Kart is actually more zoomed in. This makes turning quite a pain since you never totally know when to turn and you’ll often end up crashing. To put this in perspective, Crash on the GBA game takes about 1/7 of the width of the screen while he takes nearly 1/4 of the screen in the N-Gage version.
Crash Nitro Kart has solid gameplay and is a lengthy affair but the combination of the narrow screen, close-up perspective and control issues bring the game down a few notches. -- Jose Liz, PGNx Media
---- Sep 11, 2004
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