Crash team racing > Mario kart
I didnt have the game, but my friend did, this brought me to Jack and Dexter and Ratchet and Clank, best solo memories.
Psst... Rip Ya a New One...
Can't remember if I've played with it, anyway there were so many weapons and cool armor.
Yeah the R.Y.N.O was always absurdly powerful, but it had that absurd price tag to match. It got better in the later games, but man, I remember in the first one, I had to keep going back to levels and replaying them to get 150,000 bolts...
There's a developer commentary series done by two of the guys who worked on R&C on youtube which is awesome. One was a programmer and the other a level designer IIRC, it's quite cool to hear about all the things they went through during the dev cycle