With the whole Yuzu thing going on I decided it'd be a great time to acquire some more Switch games and finally tried the CTR remake after hoping for years a PC port would come out. Thank you Nintendo for allowing my PC dreams to come true 
I don't know why but they completely fucked up the difficulty. I started playing Classic Adventure mode and spent over an hour trying to beat the second race in the game. I could swear the original wasn't this difficult so I jumped into that really quick and proceeded to beat the first three races in one try. Classic my ass 
As you can probably guess, the podium girls did not make it into the remake, which I remember hearing caused a lot of 
at the time.
They were instead toned down and turned into unlockable racers. Turns out that they and the VAST majority of the game's other new characters are only available through some bullshit online shop which means they will become unattainable in a year or two. Luckily this was easily fixed with a couple of cheat files.
I never played it after I heard about the in-game purchases lol. Loved the PS1 game, though!
I think it's on Switch. Might be worth trying!
In CTR's case I believe they weren't even strictly gated behind microtransactions, being also "earnable" but still requiring you to interact with an online component. Though I think the game also had a Battle Pass system which means some of the content was probably vaulted because that FOMO has to be leveraged.