Crash Team Racing PS1: Ranking EVERY Racer From Worst To Best
Who was the best of the best in the original version of the game.
With Crash Team Racing: Nitro Fueled dropping recently, it's a good time to take a look back at the classic edition of the game, released in 1999. Coming up to its 20th anniversary, the game definitely still holds up.
Here, each playable character from that original game is ranked, based purely on the original. The newest Nitro Fueled version will be getting a ranking too, but there are other factors at play there.
For example, the new version has extra characters, a Pit Stop store front, different ways of unlocking the various available characters and will have Nitrous Oxide as playable character.
Remember how you couldn't play him on the original? Even after beating every mode backwards, forwards and standing on your head? That means he won't be joining us here.
How the character's career trajectory went following Crash Team Racing is fair game in the remake’s list, but not here. This means that the Nitro Fueled version isn't just this list with the new ones crammed in, as there's a different set of criteria, leaving us with a different order.
With all that out of the way though, it's time to dive in.
15. Pinstripe Potaroo
Pinstripe Potaroo is a good idea done very badly, which is a surprise, given that Crash Bandicoot tended to do fairly weird ideas exceedingly well. A gangster Potaroo with his ratlike appearance makes for a good first impression, but after that he's all downhill.
Pinstripe is one of the last characters you unlocked in the original version of the game, and as such by the time he was a playable character, you already had settled into you favourite. Of course, some characters higher up the list made you want to change over and see what you'd been missing out on... not Pinstripe.
He's irritating in the extreme, and quite clearly isn't designed to be. He's just not particularly enjoyable to race as or with. He brings with him a great track, but it doesn't feel all that representative of him. It feels like it was picked with a boss race in mind, but not necessarily Pinstripe.
Somebody has to come last, basically. Crash Team Racing is an amazing game with some great characters, but Pinstripe just isn't one of them. Any easy choice for last, although 14th place tried their best to finish bottom too.