I'm writing about as many unofficial PC ports as I am Pokémon ROM hacks these days, but hey, I'm not complaining. Any work completed by the Retro Gaming Community that helps to preserve old titles and keep that sweet feeling of nostalgia that I've dedicated my life to thus far alive is a winner in my book, which is why this port of CTR called "Crash Team Racing: High Octane" is fantastic news to start our week off.
Straight off the bat, I've had a look through the GitHub page for this port and have discovered that it's by Alessio Tosto, aka Rinnegatamante. I've covered his work on the PS Vita in the past, and when it comes to getting games onto the Vita, he's a bit of a big deal. Most notably, he's brought Mario Kart 64 and Majora's Mask to the Vita in recent years, and now he's put his skills to work bringing CTR to the Vita and PC.
Alessio hasn't mentioned that he's used AI in this port, and he hasn't mentioned that he's used it in previous works either. Therefore, I'm going to assume that he's doing this the old-school way by hand instead of vibe-coding, which a lot of ports are doing these days. Being. such a prolific figure in the PS Vita world, I would think that he has the know-how to do ports the old-fashioned way, and as I can't find anything to the contrary, I'm going to run with that hypothesis.
The port itself looks amazing and has some fantastic features, including:
- True widescreen with no stretching.
- Internal resolution of the renderer bumped to 960x544.
- MSAA 4x (PSVita) / FXAA (PC) for anti-aliasing.
- 60 FPS support.
- Penta Penguin has its stats set to its PAL/NTSC-J counterpart (6/6/6).
- Playable Nitrous Oxide (Unlockable via the original Spyro 2 Demo cheat code). (Credits: Original mod)
- Reserves Meter (Credits: Original mod)
- Customizable Cups (Credits: Original mod)
- Multilingual support with (optional) PAL voiceovers support (Check "How to use PAL voiceovers").
- Super and Ultra Hard Difficulty modes for Arcade mode.
- USF will show as blue fire (similar to CTR: Nitro-Fueled). (Credits: Original mod)
- Super turbopads are cyan to distinguish them from regular turbopads.
- Mirror mode option: Play any track in reverse
- Boss Fight option: Challenge Adventure mode boss fights on any track.
- [PSVITA Only] AdHoc Netplay support for two PSVitas multiplayer without the need of a router.
- Several vanilla game bug fixes (eg: PVS related glitches and Penta-Penguin wrong mask power-up HUD icon).
- Ghost Replay feature: Replay all your ghost data as if you're seeing the run being played live with an inputs viewer overlay.
- Increased ghost data limits: No more 7 ghosts globally; now there are 7 ghost data slots per track.
- Stats viewer for characters in the character selection screen.
- Online leaderboard for Time Trials and Relic Race results.
- Split-screen support for up to 4 players in local multiplayer for PC and PSTV users or PSVita users with MiniVitaTV.
- [PC Only] Discord Rich Presence support when playing with Discord open.
- Reverse tracks mode for Crash Cove, Roo's Tubes, Tiger Temple, Coco Park, Dragon Mines, Tiny Arena, Slide Coliseum, and Turbo Track available in Time Trial and Relic Race mode.
- Relic Race mode is available outside of Adventure mode and accessible with any character.
- Relic Race mode now has ghost support.
To install the game on PSVita, you'll need to install the .vpk file and then dump your legally acquired US ROM of Crash Team Racing for the PS1, placing the bin file into ux0:data/ctr/assets named as ctr-u.bin.
To play on your PC, you'll need to just follow that last step: dump your legally acquired US ROM of Crash Team Racing for the PS1 in your assets folder named ctr-u.bin.
Head to GitHub to grab Alessio's files for CTR: High Octane and start playing!
