I always kind of looked at Crash Bandicoot as the game the Playstation owners where stuck with while the rest of the kids played Super Mario 64. I mean, if you were there back in the days you would see how Sony pushed so hard for Crash to be the face of the console, not only the og trilogy but also racing games, party games ala Mario Party, like come on man, really? Anyway, I have very rarely play any of the Crash games on one or two instances, so here we are. Did my opinion change about? No, it didn't but at leats now I have finally played all three original trilogy games.
First we have Crash Bandicoot, obviously. Never really digged the character that much. Crash feels like one of those second rate desperate anthromorphic platform mascots everyone was trying to do back in the early 90's, and I guess that's because it is right? It's a Bandicoot... that's kinda crazy... somewhat edgy I guess. But what the hell, weren't all platformer protagonists this way? Bugsy? Aero the Acrobat? Boogerman?
But whatever, it was the 90's, so regardless of your opinion about it, how does it fair in gameplay?
Well here's the thing, even for a '96 game I think it was somewhat dated. I have played Crash once or twice in my lifetime and I always had the same impression about it. I don't know what people saw in it. I guess it was the fact that this was the first or one of the first platformers to come out on the Playstation, 3D platformer no less, but Super Mario 64 came out the same year and revolutionized the industry. Granted this one came out a little bit earlier but still.
Look, the thing with Crash is how it's gameplay it's predicated. I guess we all have played it at least once at this point, but you don't have free movement in the game. It is an ON RAILS platformera with everything that entails. And when it is not on rails and constantly moving foward it becomes a 3D side-scroller. My biggest beef with CB has always been this. Crash is a challenging, hard game, and for all the wrong reasons. I have fallen to the abyss and lost so many lives for the dumbest reasons possible in a platform game I have ever seen. It's hard to tell how far you can or should jump, depth perception is very confusing, and I gotta take it they realised this at some point during the development cause I guess that's the reason why there are so many bonuses and it's so easy to get free lives in game. And it only gets worse the further you get obviously, it all comes crashing down in one particular nightmare inducing level tho: The High Road. I kept seeing this level in Hardest Levels list all over the internet and kept thinking to myself: come on. how hard can it be? Well, pretty ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hard let me tell you. Trying to tell where you gonna jump in this one is insane. So you know, I liked Crash 1 but there were so many much better platformers to come to the Playstation that I;m kind of surprised at the nostalgia people have for it, I mean I get it, really, I do, but come on man, this is so far from perfect its insane. 3.5/5.
Now for Crash 2 the whole thing was re-worked, which is also why both the sequels are so substantially easier. I mean, you can breeze throught this two games in like 2 hours, but they are also better and not really unfair as their first entry. I do see these two closer to best platformers on PSone, specially because they added so much more into both games it made them way more dynamic and fun. Specially considering that Crash 2 came out just a year after the first one. I do think that Warped is the one where the formula got perfected. 4/5 and 4.5/5 consecutively.
All in all I think Crash Bandicoot definitively earned his place in videogame history and we have three great remasters for the classics that everybody should play at least once bro.
4.5/5
