Crash Team Racing Nitro Fueled

The Blue Fire Problem

Distance = speed x time therefore time = distance / speed, so for a racing game whoever has the best speed will in. It’s the fundamental principle of racing games like getting kills in a deathmatch or scoring goals in football. At the weekend a friend explained to me about the blue fire in Crash Team Racing Nitro Fueled which is all about keeping yourself at the maximum possible speed, so in theory it should be a perfect fit for a racing game except I kind of hate its usage in the game.

One of the key mechanics of CTR is boosting, if you time button presses during a powerslide or you jump off a ramp and get big airtime you’ll get a temporary speed boost that sees flames burst out of your exhaust pipes. When you reach the maximum speed boost from this the flames will turn blue and you’ll be travelling at a crazy velocity. Once you reach that state you can keep it going by repeatedly pulling off perfect boosts to maintain it. There’s a real skill level to doing this but the problem is that once you can do it if you do it while at the front you’ve won the rest of the race.

The reason for this is that CTR is not just a racing game it’s a kart racing game and that means there is the added factor of weapons, and while I enjoy these kind of racing games they tend to suffer from what I like to call the cluster**** problem. This problem is how the risk of weapons depends on the position of the driver. At a basic level if you imagine you have 3 racers with equal weaponry, the player in 1st is at risk of attacks from behind by 2nd place, the player in 3rd is at risk of attacks from in front by 2nd place. while the the player in 2nd is at risk of attacks from the in front by 1st place and attacks from behind by 3rd place so evidently they are most likely to be attacked. If you expand this out to 8 players you essentially end up with a cluster of racers in the center of the pack being most at risk. Add in the fact that for balance players at the rear have a better chance of getting a good item you end up with 1st place being the safest position which ends up as a self fulfilling prophecy because that naturally makes it easier to stay in 1st place. With CTR 1st place has the added benefit of being able to pull off the blue fire easier due to having less potential weapon interruptions so the lead just keeps growing.

Full disclosure I’m not very good at CTR so there’s not much chance of me winning but I’d like to at least finish races. See online has the annoying inclusion that once a player crosses the finish line a countdown timer of 30 seconds starts counting down before the race just ends regardless if the other racers have finished or not. From my experience it seems like the 1st place player finished about half a lap ahead of the other players and due to this big lead there’s a good chance the countdown will end up before a few players do. I’m not going to say to remove the blue fire mechanic outright to fix this instead I suggest options. Add 2 new modes: a hardcore mode that removes items to allow players to just focus on the blue fire and speed so basically just take the time trial tracks and let multiple players on them, and add a casual mode that removes the blue fire for us more skill impaired players. This is the simplest way of solving the problem and letting everyone get what they want from the game.

I doubt this is something that will happen as Activision will focus instead on new things they can sell for microtransactions. so I guess for now unless I master the blue fire I’m just doomed to Crash and burn.