Awesome Music: All the tracks in Rush 2049 especially the arcade and Dreamcast versions, too bad on the N64 version you have to use an expansion pack to hear music in races.
"Headthumpin'" "Amiga-ish", "Doin' Time", and "High Roll" from Rush 2, and "The Rock" from the arcade Updated Re-release of the first game.
"What's Your Name?", the music that plays in Rush's 1 and 2 when entering your name on the high scores list.
"Zethno" from the original. Say what you will about the rest of the game's soundtrack, but that particular song kicked ass!
The Rock (Alcatraz) course. Originally appearing in the N64 port of the original game, albeit in what appears to be a "beta" version of it, before debuting proper in Rush: The Rock, it's a high-speed course with banked turns, loops, and a corkscrew, all around the iconic prison island. Whereas courses in the series tend to be one-game affairs, the Rock is popular enough that it would appear again in Rush 2 and Rush 2049.
The Midway course in Rush 2. What better way to celebrate a victory in Circuit Mode than to drive through an upscaled version of Midway's headquarters?
Catharsis Factor: Rush 2. Turn on the Suicide cheat (causes any contact with another car to be lethal) and the invincibility cheat (which overrides Suicide for player cars). Proceed to laugh as the entire starting grid minus yourself explodes as they try to cross the starting line. Even better, turn on Death Mode and make a first-place finish at your own pace.
Contested Sequel: L.A. Rush was seen as a step down because it focused more on reality than insane stunts. Reviews were mixed.
Track 5 of N64 San Francisco Rush (Track 6 of Rush: The Rock) features a tunnel shortcut with an inexplicable pit of magma and spikes that will kill you if you don't expect it and angle your car properly to make the jump. A similar trap, though without the spikes, awaits you in Rush 2's Hawaii course; it involves a shortcut tunnel through the Diamond Head volcano with a bigger jump over lava.
The fog color cheat offers some very eerie color options. Want to enjoy a drive through San Francisco with its signature fog turned blood-red?
For environment-conscious players, the Los Angeles track in Rush 2 replaces the fog with smog.
The "Killer Rats" cheat in Rush 2, which turns the otherwise-harmless mice in the New York subway shortcuts into ferocious (though thankfully stationary) entities that blow your car up on contact.
The notoriously bad PSX version of the first game. Really long load times (as much as 30-45 seconds between races), low framerates, ugly textures, only four tracks instead of six from the arcade and N64, questionable physics changes (most importantly, the cars had too much gravity, meaning the long air time from the arcade and N64 versions was significantly reduced), and completely replaced music.
Rush: The Rock suffered from this twice. The version included in Midway Arcade Treasures 3 has mostly every sound replaced with something more annoying, including the soundtrack (the PS2 version's sound is also very glitchy - being played back a quarter step lower than the Xbox version, while sometimes clipping songs short and playing random songs in their place). There was also a native PC version (which you'll really have to look around for), but it has very awkward controls and its draw distance is screwy to the point that it displays both high and low LOD models for certain track props. That, and your opponents are always similar. The worst part is that these two ports are the only non-arcade versions of the game.
The PC version of L.A. Rushis an absolute trainwreck of a port. It's riddled with graphical glitches including botched lighting (with overly bright and washed out visuals), low quality reflections that somehow move depending on your car's movement, worse engine sound design, bugged damage model (which is a spikey mess and somehow while the "crash camera" is triggered, the proper damage model is shown for a couple of seconds), 30 FPS cap (while forcing the game to run at 60 FPS may cause some instability within the physics), missing the "Acquire" missions and certain sound effects (while some are either broken or out-of-sync), weak controller support, the HUD ends up becoming too small if you set the screen resolution higher than 480p (or 4:3 aspect ratio) AND comes with StarForce DRM which is notorious for bricking your PC if you try to run it without removing the said DRM with a certain tool first.
Suspiciously Similar Song: The port of the first game on Midway Arcade Treasures 3 used a similar-sounding track to "STL".
That One Level: Track 5 in 2049 can be summed up as "right-angle hell". It's not an unfair course, but it requires a lot of technique and slowing down compared to other courses. Once mastered, it's easily one of the most fun tracks in the game.
...Unfortunately thanks to this video people think this game actually is this glitchy.