3/5 ★ – Spongyoshi's review of Nicktoons Racing.

With the growing popularity of kart racers with titles such as Diddy Kong Racing or Crash Team Racing, the growing kids channel "Nickelodeon" likely made it a good business idea to produce a kart racers with all their most popular cartoon characters! But will the growing brand help the kart racer sub-genre grow as well with this title? Right out the bat, the game has a lot of charm and personality to give. Although the menus are kind of obnoxious on the PC and PS1 versions, the presentation is playful and colorful, the roster features a lot of popular cartoon characters of the time (even featuring the newly-created "Spongebob Squarepants" in the mix) with three cups of four tracks each and the soundtrack is honestly really enjoyable. Some fitting the vibe of the show very well like the CatDog and Spongebob tracks, others remixing or giving nods to other tracks of the franchise like the Ren & Stimpy track sort-of remixing one of the main themes of the show or the Rugrats tracks remixing music for another Rugrats game, great stuff! The tracks themselves are fun and represent well their respective shows although it's kind of a shame a lot of them take place in an urban setting, it gets a bit old at the end, even if they all have their own spin on it. The gameplay itself is pretty interesting. On PC and PS1, the game doesn't have boosts given by drifting, instead you collect sparkles on the track that fill your boost meter that you can release at anytime by holding a button. While interesting, your meter gets emptied by itself over time so it sadly minimizes strategy. Also part for the course back then, you can drift to do sharper turns and pressing the drift button makes you jump, a given from kart racers at the time and a very fun and powerful tool in this game to abuse as it can give you more airtime, help you even better with sharp turns or little adjustments and is just a lot of fun to execute in general. And of course, you also get random items from different shows to use from "gift boxes" and you can hold some behind your back but sadly no ability to throw a banana-like item forward for example, shame.. However, all of this comes at a cost. While the first cup is fairly begginer-friendly, the game gives you one of the (if not THE) hardest track of the game as the first track of the second cup. Very sharp turns and busy tracks that will not hesitate to put a lot of solid walls on the middle of the road in some sections as well. Walls are also very punishing in this game because they halt you real good and turning around can sometimes be a pain. The terrain is also fairly rough and uneven as well so staying on track can be very difficult as tracks get more and more wild. However, this isn't the only way in which this game suffers with being begginer-friendly. The items are also fairly brutal. While they are tamer on easy, all of the items are offensive except for only two, the shield and the item stealer, that pop-up for the top spots WAY more than the bottom ones. It makes it really hard to catch up on lower ranks as you'll mostly get items to harm other players, but so will players around you as well. Coupled with the fact that there's not a lot of counterplay to them and the harsh penalty for getting it with most of them (the classic "spin-out" of kart racers can even randomly make you face BACKWARD even, and since turning around is difficult in that game, sometimes a simple hit can cost a LOT of time) makes this game fairly punishing to less experienced players and is a tough title to recommend in multiplayer. Such a title is hard to recommend, not only is the final difficulty brutal with it's heavy usage of rubberbanding coupled with the tricky tracks and kind of unfun item play but the game is pretty glitchy as well! Sometimes it's a bit fun like how you can skip a section of the last track of the game but other times, it's less fun, like your racer being stuck inside a wall and you'll have to return to the main menu to continue playing. The game feels kinda like playing with a toy that isn't working as it's suppose to and that could break if you're not careful but playing with a broken toy can still be fun and I feel like it could be a nice game to pop-up from time to time. It has some lil bonus features as well like time trials, a weird "relay" mode where you play 1v1 (technically 3v3) and passing from one racer to another each turn or a bonus game after getting farther in the game. The GBA version, while being less glitchy, is more-so a mix of this game and Mario Kart: Super Circuit and of course it follows the same difficulty logic, having the last cup composed of tracks that would make Rainbow Road look like child's play. Once again, hard to recommend but if you really love the Mode 7 Mario Kart titles and would like to play a more technical version of the concept, this is also not a bad idea and since this game also includes the possibility to break while drifting, I'd say it makes it more fair with movement options which I enjoy a lot (and is definitely required to play the tracks "cleanly" and beat the hard difficulty CPU). The GBC version is moreso an uneventful top-down racer that feels more like a tech demo on how to even make a racer on GBC than anything. I wouldn't play it for long periods of time, but I respect the attempt by the developpers. In the end, this is a really bizarre game and while heavily flawed in some aspect, it can still be pretty fun in short bursts just to have fun with the wacky jumpy movement of that game. Jumping all around the tracks is a lot of fun and I don't regret my time with this game but it's not a game I'd recommend unless you really want a wacky nostalgic yet difficult kart racer, because there's way better out there, even for Nickelodeon.