VV were pretty faithful to the ND games, like pretty close. They even got the original artists Charles Zembillas and Joe Pearson to work with them.
Check out CNK, it's kinda clunky but the resemblance to the ND style is uncanny.
I was playing CNK the other night on Dolphin 5.0. Holds up well (and nothing wrong with emulating it. Looks really nice.) The major difference CNK has is the speed is too slow. I also think there is rubber-band AI for your "teammate" (Crash Nitro Kart and Crash Team Racing really should swap names...). I never noticed how detailed they were in trying to make it feel like CTR. Look at the font choices especially. Sure they use the "BANDICOOT" font that all of the entries used, but the small font for larger strings of text is almost identical to CTR. Completely unnecessary, but a nice touch to show their respects in trying to update CTR completely. I wasn't a fan of reusing track concepts, though.
There are bits and pieces of old track ideas that were brought over. Inferno Beach is Crash Cove. You have a Tiger Temple rip-off soon after with Jungle Boogie, then Polar Pass and Blizzard Bluff clones (same number of snow levels in CTR and CNK, too). The Deep Sea Driving track feels like the Dragon Mines track merged with Roo's Tubes. Clockwork Wumpa is a clone of Cortex Castle. Out of Time is Dingo Canyon. Electron Avenue has parts of N. Gin's Lab. Hot Air Skyway is Tornado Alley. I find this to be the game's downfall. By doing this, CNK caused itself to become painfully unoriginal.
It's like they played it too safe, but couldn't even compare in terms of gameplay. CTR is faster. Even though CNK has you boosting every few seconds, it never feels right. Everything is sluggish, the characters are floaty and lack any weight. The jumping is nerfed, and it feels more work went into the art than anything. (Can I also complain that the game forces a cutscene to load after pressing Start instead of just starting at the main menu?) I have tried to play this with friends, but most just prefer to go to CTR after, and I don't blame them.
Where CTR shines is it's the best-looking Crash game. It follows the idea of Crash design with a lush and organic environment. There's details everywhere in this game that most kart racers take for granted. It has very few areas where the tracks aren't adding more to the environment. The character models look and animate beautifully. The CG cutscenes are especially nice, and it would be nice to see them use a similar concept for the characters in the remake. The loading screen art shows how much love they poured into making the game, and that the team was happy to be making a follow-up to an amazing classic. I may criticize them for being too close to the original game, but I can tell the team didn't care and was gladly putting all they could into it, even if it needed to be tweaked for balancing, which I think is a result of deadlines and worrying about making five versions of the game (PS2, Xbox, GC, GBA, N-Gage).
CNK also had a cut online mode that would have been one of the first games to be playable online. It's a shame it never came through, but I could see the game being held back and losing months of progress by the mode if they needed to make a deadline of November 2003. They probably still lost months of progress when the mode was cut anyway.
Now, if we took the game at face-value and ignored CTR, then sure. It's an excellent kart racing game. Far greater than Double Dash, though that doesn't take much. If VV could have been the game more responsive and a bit more original (small things like text is fine, but not the majority of tracks), then I have confidence in them remaking the original games. They've grown since then, and I'm sure with their blatant understanding of Crash, as evident of how faithfully they brought what felt like Crash 2/3/WoC to the GBA as solid 2D side-scrolling platformers, that they can crank out a faithful recreation of the originals. However, I also fear that a majority of the team has split since their last Crash game, Crash Purple in 2004 (I feel old). If enough veterans exist from VV, then maybe their passion for Crash will still show next year.
(((
