If your friends all have scalers then you would probably have more fun with one of those. Scalers are super capable, but unfortunately can't do some of the same things that a comp-style crawler can. $350 is a pretty decent budget to get started, but it's pushing it in terms of getting batteries and things also. My advice is to check out some of the Axial RTR's and go with the one you like best. Now they're coming with 2.4ghz radios and a castle creations built ESC (quite the decent little ESC).