At this time’s PlayStation Underground episode reveals off a pair extra thrilling items of content material from Crash Staff Racing Nitro-Fueled: a deep-dive into one in every of our favourite remastered tracks from the sport, Dragon Mines, in addition to a reveal of the PlayStation-exclusive monitor, Retro Stadium. Now, I’m comfortable to present you guys a more in-depth take a look at every of those tracks.
Respiratory Hearth into Dragon Mines
At Beenox, Dragon Mines has turned out to be one in every of our favourite tracks in CTR Nitro-Fueled, as a result of we really feel it actually exemplifies the injection of persona that we’ve tried to place into each aspect of the sport. Again within the authentic CTR, Dragon Mines was a enjoyable monitor from starting to finish, with superior particulars of being down within the caves, minecarts whizzing by you, the attractive glow of the subterranean lake, the large gears making the entire operation run — racing on this monitor actually enveloped you within the setting. But, with ‘90s-era know-how, loads of the heavy lifting needed to be achieved with your individual creativeness. The items have been there to assist encourage this, nevertheless it was actually your thoughts taking the comparatively restricted element and creating a gorgeous and immersive panorama out of it.
With the instruments at our disposal at present, we don’t need to depend on creativeness, alone, to fill within the gaps. Like the entire different tracks In CTR Nitro-Fueled, we now have tried to present Dragon Mines an unbelievable stage of element and life that can envelop you prefer it by no means has earlier than. Except for the graphical updates and the artwork path that went into the 2019 model of the monitor, an enormous a part of this course of was giving a narrative to the monitor. That is one thing we’ve achieved with loads of the tracks for the sport — offering context to the element that we now have added. For Dragon Mines, the unique monitor didn’t even have any dragons in it (though it will get its title from being Komodo Joe’s residence monitor).
For CTR Nitro-Fueled, we felt it will be enjoyable to carry that component into it. The monitor’s story is easy: a bunch of miners have found an ageing dragon’s treasure deep below the earth and have now constructed a complete group to reap the treasure out. Creating this story gave us the path to start out animating a ton of enjoyable particulars into the monitor, like miners working to the beat of the music, mischievous rats entering into bother, and even a slumbering dragon, sitting on what’s left of his treasure, attempting to breathe fireplace on the racers as they move by (however sadly, solely mustering a feeble puff of smoke earlier than he loses curiosity and goes again to sleep).
A miner desperately reaches for a cussed bat on the beginning gate. One other tries to have interaction in a (literal) sport of whack-a-mole whereas being mocked by a household of them. A complete underground city bustles because the workday goes on. These are just some extra examples of the humor and particulars we felt would give this monitor a setting that gamers would need to re-visit again and again and can be one thing we wished to ensure to do throughout the whole sport. It’s value noting, although, that we additionally wished to ensure that the monitor structure was simply as followers remembered from the unique.
The turns are the identical, the hills are the identical — even the shortcut is similar! [As a tip for you readers, when you come across the minecart rails that cross the racetrack at about the halfway point, you can follow them to the right and through the tunnel to gain an extra bit of ground on your opponents. But make sure to go in with a boost, since the minecarts will be hot on your tail!] As with all of the remastered and re-imagined tracks within the sport, we wished to present followers a way of nostalgia whereas additionally giving them an setting that can wow them. We really feel that Dragon Mines is an ideal instance of this.
Going Previous Faculty for PS4 Gamers
Now, switching gears fully, I’m excited to speak to you about one other monitor within the sport which is on the alternative finish of the spectrum by way of modern-day element — Retro Stadium. Absolutely revealed at present, this monitor rounds out the set of retro content material supplied solely to PS4 gamers of the sport. Along with the retro skins for Crash, Coco, and Cortex, and their retro karts, this bonus monitor brings you again to the times of low-polygons and minimal-pixel textures!
The monitor relies off the unique Turbo Observe in CTR, and to create it our staff had loads of enjoyable reversing the mindset we have been taking with all the opposite tracks within the sport. Whereas we’ve been spending most of our time seeing how we are able to carry the unique tracks from CTR and CNK into the following stratosphere by way of graphics and element, with Retro Stadium we turned off the feel filtering within the stage, scaled again particulars with a “much less is extra” mindset, and embraced the pixelated look of video video games of the late ‘90s. With the high-fidelity qualities that we’ve been placing into all the opposite tracks in CTR Nitro-Fueled, we felt it will be enjoyable to supply PlayStation gamers a solution to step into the previous with this monitor in the event that they wished to.
Along with this, we actually did need to make this monitor an homage to the PS1, and the historical past of the Crash franchise on the PlayStation platform. The platform and the franchise basically received their begin collectively and have each created a ton of nice recollections for me, for all of us at Beenox, and for tens of millions of gamers the world over. This monitor is a solution to hearken again to the early days of those two gaming icons, and it’s merely enjoyable to have the ability to suppose again to when graphics like these have been blowing you away!
With Dragon Mines and Retro Stadium, we now have highlighted two tracks which can be polar opposites by way of graphics and element, however each of which we now have tried to pack with the spirit and enjoyable that CTR Nitro-Fueled is all about. We are able to’t await PlayStation gamers to strive them each out on June 21!