There has always been a feud between karting gamers over the years; Mario Kart, or Crash Team Racing. And while the Mario Kart series has undoubtedly sold many more copies than Crash’s outings over the years, it’s definitely been Mazza’s main competition and garnered a lot of hardcore fans since its release back in 1999.
Now, thanks to a Tweet from Pirat_Nation, we’ve discovered that online Crash multiplayer madness reverse-engineered back to machine code and completely remade for PC online play is here for all to enjoy. And it’s free to play too!
Play CTR with people from all over the world, with dedicated servers in Australia, Europe (Spain), Brazil, Mexico, and the USA on the DuckStation emulator. All you’ll need to do is add the Online Multiplayer patch to your original copy of the game and voila, you can get online and wait excitedly in a lobby for other racers to join in the action. All of the characters and tracks from the game are available for you to choose from; all that’s left is for you to put aside a whole week off work to get lost in this classic game all over again.
The game can be found over on OnlineCTR. Once you click ‘Race Online Now’, you’ll be taken through to a Discord page giving you instructions on how to get everything up and running. The label ‘Race Online Now’ might make you think that you can just click on and play the game in your browser straight away like Pokérogue, but it’s a little misleading. Instead, you have to download and patch files in order to get things working and get you in a kart firing rockets at strangers.
Once you accept the invitation to the Discord channel, you’re met with lots of instructions to follow which can be pretty daunting for first-time ROM users/modders. Luckily, there’s a set-up video tutorial that you can follow that makes things clearer. Check it out below!
The graphics look incredible, and I’m looking forward to getting the newsletter sent out today and then sitting back while playing Crash Team Racing Online until the small hours of the morning. It’s also worth noting that the entire patch is Open Source, so gamers can download the modding toolkit from GitHub to play around with themselves.
