Crash Team Racing: Nitro Fueled World Record Glitches

Crash Team Racing: Nitro Fueled time trial leaderboards have been overtaken by players using a handful of unintended glitches added into the remake. Since its release, the CTR remake has generally been praised by members of the speedrunning community, but with glitches and skips being discovered faster than Beenox can fix them, the game is in a bit of a hot spot.

So far, even though some of these illegal ultra shortcuts have been patched, Beenox has not reset in-game leaderboards, and there is now a great deal of discussion in the speedrunning community about splitting glitched and glitchless runs into separate categories.

Here's a glimpse at the sorts of skips people are finding:

Thunderstruck Skip (Patch 1.6 Edition)

Just as players rejoice that Thunderstruck's infamous illegal shortcut has been patched, which let players skip 50% of the trick, a new illegal shortcut has been discovered. This skip is only slightly smaller than the last one, and it requires players to have Ultra Sacred Fire (Blue Fire), so it's only achievable on laps 2 & 3.

Thunderstruck was reportedly pulled from online matchmaking while Beenox fixed the previous skip, but it was added back into the online rotation yesterday.

Floating Start Line Skip

This skip's footage comes from Thunderstruck again, but this skip is possible on every single track whose starting line is on top of a pit. This glitch was used in the top times for Thunderstruck, Electron Avenue, Hot Air Skyway, and more.

The floating start line skip is undoubtedly the most hotly contested skip in the game, since it's significantly faster than any other style of play, and realistically removes most of the interesting gameplay from a run.

Papu's Temple Skip

Papu's temple has always been about shortcuts, but this skip is pretty ridiculous — it lets you skip three loops and two shortcuts, while sending you straight into the final shortcut (which skips the last loop of the track) into the finish line. It would be fair to say that this skips 80-90% of the track, as it cuts lap times down to a mere 12 seconds.

Old Oxide Skip

Old Oxide Skip was intentionally removed in Crash Team Racing: Nitro Fueled, but it was a staple of world record runs in the pre-patch, pre-online play era. Ironically, though, a new shortcut was discovered in almost the exact same part of the track. We've put videos of the shortcuts in both versions of the game next to each other so you can compare:

Some things never change. Despite the controversies surrounding these skips, CTR speedrunning is alive and well. The community is looking to Beenox for fixes, but committed players are still fighting neck-and-neck, millisecond by millisecond for rankings on glitched and glitchless speedrunning leaderboards.

Cover Image Courtesy of Beenox