Regional Differences

This is a sub-page of Crash Team Racing.

European Version#

• The Naughty Dog intro plays for a bit longer before it can be skipped, whereas it can be skipped as soon as Cortex stops speaking in the North American version.
• A language selection menu is displayed before the title screen with options for English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Dutch.
• The spacing of the font is consolidated in order to accommodate longer words in the other languages.
• The menu option to toggle vibration on DUAL SHOCK controllers was changed from just "DUAL SHOCK:" to "ANALOG CONTROLLER -DUAL SHOCK-:".
  • The addition of the dashes causes this line of text to exceed the border of the menu, if they are removed, it then fits.
  • The vibration toggle now says "VIBRATION" instead of "VIBRATE".
• The default best times for Time Trial mode are now unique for each character and track, instead of them all being 9:59:00.
• The trophy animation no longer plays every time you go back to the title screen when the menus are reloaded after a race.
• The starting light textures were lowered in quality due to the limited space in VRAM from this version running at a higher vertical resolution.
  • The higher resolution also makes it so the HUD elements are less vertically stretched at a 4:3 aspect ratio.
• The 3D model of the animated checkered flag background was not adjusted in height to compensate for the increase in vertical resolution. This causes a gap to appear in the lower right corner of the menus and loading screens that shows the world background color.
• When selecting Adventure mode, the music will now fade out during the loading screen.
• Driving between the different hubs now shows the name of each area at the bottom of the screen.
• Various animations throughout the game play slower due to them not being retimed to natively play at 25 FPS, instead, they still play all of the frames from the 30 FPS animations of the North American version, making them run longer. This also makes the various track hazards move slower, allowing them to be dodged easier.
  • The head animations of the bosses were properly retimed to 25 FPS for their cutscenes, so this does not apply to them.
  • The introduction cutscene avoids being slowed down by instead skipping every sixth frame, making it play back with judder.
• All of the dialogue throughout the game has had the sample rate of the audio files halved to save disc space.
• The Super Turbo Pads cheat code no longer works in Time Trial mode.
• In 1-lap races, the track music was corrected to be sped up, and the race results fanfare plays properly when finishing the race.
• Fake Crash had a few changes made to him and his kart.
  • His face was altered so that his eyes and pupils are much smaller, and both the upper and lower parts of his eyebrows are now the same lighter shade of brown. The lower parts of his eyebrows were also made slightly taller to properly cover his smaller eyes, however, these changes introduced a glitch in Time Trial mode where his eyebrows are now glitched downwards and cover his eyes.
  • The vertex colors on the middle of the front fairing and steering spindles were corrected to be pale blue and silver, whereas in the North American version, they incorrectly shared the same more saturated blue and gold colors as Crash Bandicoot's kart. The vertex colors on the back of his kart that tinted the textures brown were also made grey.
• The scrapbook was shortened considerably, having a lot less pictures with no crossfading between them, along with the Japanese merchandise photos being omitted entirely. This was done to save disc space, as the European version only just fits on the disc due to the multiple languages.

• A misplaced wall texture in the deck hallway of Citadel City was fixed.
• The title of the ghost replay data has been changed from "TRACK:CHARACTER:SCORE" in the North American version to "CTR/TRACK/SCORE", replacing the character info with the game's acronym.

Penta Penguin#

Penta Penguin has different stats depending which region you play. In the North American version, he shares the Beginner class with Polar, Pura and Ripper Roo, while in the European and Japanese versions, he is classed as an Advanced character, like Tiny Tiger, Dingodile, and Dr. N. Tropy. However, he has the unique aspect of all his stats being maxed out, making him the best racer in the game. His max stats were even mentioned as part of his unused credits epilogue in the Japanese version.

When Penta gets a mask power-up in the North American version, the icon shows up as Uka Uka, but when activated, Aku Aku appears. The likely cause of this error is that since Uka Uka is internally the default mask, the developers forgot to update the power-up icon after changing Penta's mask to Aku Aku, as the icons are not directly tied to the masks themselves. This was fixed in the European and Japanese versions.

In addition to this fix, his stats were set as originally intended, and both of his placeholder voice clips were replaced by actual penguin grunts for the European version. Since the Japanese version had new voice lines recorded for all of the characters, replacing them meant that the placeholder voice clips were corrected in the process.

Just like his placeholder voice clips, the mistake with the masks was also referenced in the remake, where he can obtain both Aku Aku and Uka Uka masks, though the icon inconsistency was fixed. In addition to this, he was given unique animations that reflect his "two-faced" nature, where he will have an evil grin and clasp his flippers when winning a race, or mockingly laugh at the other racers before realizing what he is doing and going back to being cheerful during the winning podium animation.

No Language Glitch#

When prompted to select a language before the main menu, you can press Triangle to cancel it, causing none of the six available languages to be selected. This leaves you with mostly blank spaces with the occasional hyphen, question mark, and exclamation mark where words would normally be. Only numbers will display as normal.

This mistake is a result of the game setting the language to index 0, which is the address for the Japanese language. However, since 0 was not intended to be selectable here, there are no textures for the Japanese font loaded into VRAM, meaning it has nothing to display. The are only a few places where letters will still appear due to the use of Latin text. Menus where text related to CTR challenges are will instead show CBR. This is due to the game's name, and therefore letter acronym, being changed to Crash Bandicoot Racing in Japan. The only other menu where letters are displayed is for the neGcon setup menu, where a blue A and red I will show as it does in the Japanese version when this controller is connected.

Additionally, the lack of Japanese voice lines will cause the masks to be silent with no mouth movement for all of their hints. Part of this is due to the masks relying on the voice lines to animate their mouths to in real time, unlike the bosses who use predetermined animations. The masks having no voice lines to animate their mouths to will make it so every time they would speak, their mouths will remain still, and they will automatically disappear as soon as the player is usually able to skip their hints.

This glitch, for yet unknown reasons, also causes four of the five bosses heads to be switched during their cutscenes, with Ripper Roo being the only one not affected. This is likely due to him being the only boss to have the same dialogue and head animation for all six languages.

During the boss cutscenes with the no language glitch active.

• Papu Papu will have Pinstripe's head.
• Komodo Joe will have Nitros Oxide's head.
• Pinstripe will have Komodo Joe's head.
• Nitros Oxide will have Papu Papu's head.
• The bosses will all be silent with random mouth animations.

Komodo Joe having Nitros Oxide's head causes an additional glitch where his opening cutscene will be instantly skipped with a very brief glimpse of glitched geometry visible in place of his head. This happens due to Nitros Oxide himself not having two cutscenes during the normal story mode. While it seems like it should be the second cutscene that would not play, given the other head swapped cutscenes still play in the correct order, this oddity can be explained. There are unused voice lines for what would have been Nitros Oxide's first cutscene present for all the languages, giving him two cutscenes as well. Since the one cutscene he does have was originally his second cutscene, it playing as Komodo Joe's second cutscene is correct.

Some miscellaneous side effects of the language glitch are:

• Only voice lines that are animal noises or non word sounds will play during a race.
• The icon for Circle shows after a podium cutscene, but as it's not programmed to proceed to the hub like it is in the Japanese version, pressing it does nothing.
• Saving a ghost replay will display the Japanese names of the tracks and characters in the memory card data.

Japanese Version#

Many changes were made to the game in accordance with the Japanese marketing for Crash at the time. As this version is based off of the European version, changes made in that version have been retained.

• The Japanese intro has an announcer reading out the messages before the start of the game, and the music is completely different.

• Remixes of the Japanese theme song now play at startup and the title screen.
  • The main menu theme from the international versions now plays in the character select garage.
• You can no longer skip the Naughty Dog box screen.

International	Japan

• The logo of the game featuring Crash holding a trophy has been changed to him sitting in his kart. Both models are based on their region's respective box art.
• Since the game is called Crash Bandicoot Racing, the tokens now sport that acronym as well, and the second letter to collect is a B instead of a T.
• All of the track preview videos were updated due to the start banners now displaying the CBR acronym. However, that has also caused the camera to follow a different path on tracks that contain split-paths. The camera now goes to the left split-path in Mystery Caves, and takes the shortcut in Sewer Speedway.
• A glitch where each track on the Arcade Cups could have 5 or 7 laps depending on which option was highlighted in the level select menu has been fixed.
• Time Trial and Arcade options are switched.
• The "TNT" label on TNT crates has been replaced with an image of a bomb, and the "Nitro" label is written in Katakana.
• When selecting a track in Arcade mode, there are now Wumpa fruits next to the minimap indicating how difficult the track is. It goes from 1 fruit (easy) to 5 (hard).
• There is a turbo counter on the HUD that appears when you chain 3 or more turbos during a race, and displays your highest turbo chain at the end of a race. This feature can only be activated in the international versions via cheat code.
• Trophies are localized as "Winning Cups".
• Ripper Roo speaks in an actual language now, rather than his crazed laughing, which also means he no longer needs subtitles.
• Both Circle and X are able to be used to proceed after a podium cutscene has finished, whereas only X can be used in the other regions.
• You must have two boss keys and also open the Gem Cups door in order to access the CBR challenges and Bonus Rounds.
• The trophy girls all have brown eyes as opposed to light-blue for Isabella, green for Ami, red for Megumi and purple for Liz. Their eyes are in their original colors in the credits, though.
• The scrapbook is also different in this version, featuring a few pieces of art not found in the other versions, mainly from Japanese promotional material and the bonus videos found in the Japanese versions of the Crash games.

• Fake Crash's eyes textures are now fixed in Time Trial mode.
• Nitro Court now features a proper CPU racer path.
• Character epilogues have been completely changed.
• Polar's raw icon has an extra pixel of graphics of his body out of the frame, although it is still cropped as the previous releases when rendered in-game.
• The title of the ghost replay data retains the slashes from the European version, but now adds back the character info initially displayed in the North American version.

Characters Icons#

Character	International	Japan
Crash Bandicoot
Coco Bandicoot
Dr. Neo Cortex
Fake Crash
Penta Penguin
Pura
Dr. N. Tropy

Some character icons were remade to resemble the 3D renders used in promotional media for the Crash Bandicoot series in Japan. Interestingly, when Polar's icon was made for the Japanese version, the design was kept for the North American and European icons too, making his icon the only one to originate from his Japanese design.

Oxide Taunts#

'...But what does it mean?' This game has text or audio that needs to be translated. If you are fluent with this language, please read our translation guidelines and then submit a translation!

Nitros Oxide has four additional taunt files that play during the boss race. These clips are not present in any other region of the game.

Bonus Video#

Watch on YouTubeLike with the Japanese versions of the previous two Crash games, a hidden video has been added and can be viewed by holding L1 + L2 + R1 + R2 at the PlayStation logo during startup. Again, you have to reset your console after the video has finished playing.

Epilogues#

The localization team took the liberty of writing their own character epilogues for the Japanese audience. Rather than simply translating the English script like the European languages, they featured their own stories.

Note that, despite not appearing in the Japanese credits either, Penta Penguin and Fake Crash still received unique epilogues. Therefore, their entries are included here for comparison.

Cheat Codes#

Almost all of the cheat codes were changed. For example, a different code is required to unlock Penta Penguin, and to access the Spyro 2 demo, you have to hold a specific button combination during the PlayStation logo (much like the bonus video), rather than entering a code at the main menu. Most inputs require fewer buttons to press, but have different holding patterns according to the type of cheat.

• The only cheat code that did not change was the turbo counter display, which is completely pointless in this version anyway, as the counter is already enabled by default. The code was most likely left behind unintentionally.
• The Icy Tracks cheat code has been removed.