Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back

Soon after i’ve finished Crash Bandicoot, i’ve started playing Crash Bandicoot 2. Too soon. Playing the same thing again just doesn’t work for me, it was the same with Metroid Prime 2. At least it didn’t at the time, but i’ve noticed that the older person i become the easier it for me to wallow in dementiad repetition.

So i was doing something in Steam and ended up in the Crash Bandicoot™ N. Sane Trilogy community hub. Which got stuck in my head, especially with the new content, so i installed it again and gave it another shot. And hated it all over again.

There’re unskippable intros screaming at you at every launch. There’re no subtitles in this 2017 game. The new voices are way worse, and even if they’re re-recorded for clarity, i still can’t understand what they are saying sometimes. At least one cutscene explains how to change floors better.

And wait, wasn’t “N” a tattoo? According to authorized Wrath of Cortex strategy guide at least. Now it’s a metal plate. Crash looks skinnier, closer to the sequels everyone pretends do not exist, and he looks like an angry caucasian. You can play as Coco in all the games now, but her design is mid. Not as loosely fitting as the original, not as bad as Crash 6, but not as awesome incredible one of the best ever from “4“. She has a way darker lighting than Crash or than the environment and she looks very toothy. She doesn’t close her mouth despite having a cat face as opposed to cartoon cone of crash (and bandicoots), her teeth glow, which with glowing pink lipstick makes her look weird. She gets revenge for Crash falling in the third game, now she lands on her bum for the Crash-only levels. The apples look worse. The roulette boxes are way better. The font of “?” boxes looks really bad. Like Crash 6. A lot of interactions and animations are just missing, like when you escape the boulder narrowly.

The Trilogy doesn’t work with DualSense. And using Steam‘s gamepad emulator is super wonky. If you disconnect a gamepad, the game basically dies. It was offering keyboard prompts just a second ago and then it displays a splash screen demanding you to connect the gamepad. Which doesn’t work through Steam. I had to [Alt]+[F4].

Trilogy is a weird re-imagining. They’ve made all three games to run on Crash 3 ruleset (stronger gravity, low inertia, proper save instead of CB1 nightmare, multi-boxes take 5 jumps instead of 10), made bear and tiger levels significantly easier (less-defective), added some hints for some run-to-the-camera levels. But the hitboxes are crappy. Like, significantly worse. I launched the original game with DuckStation and the game is proper easier, even the pro-routes. And, well, there’re quicksaves. They didn’t get rid of the terrible lives system which was a waste of time even on the release. They didn’t add an easy mode. But they did add achievements 2.8% of approximately 588000 players did. 14% finished the second game. 15% finished the first game. Yet somehow 21% finished the first game which is way harder. All are “not-true” endings, of course. They’ve added the stupid time-attacks for the first two games, and demand a gold times for every level, including the secret hard ones. The timed challenges just suck, extremely. It’s a pure accumulation of imperfections that rob you of the victory, despite a proper no death one-try run.

Not purist, not enjoyable, not fun.

After being disappointed with that thing all over again, i just got myself a ROM called Crash Bandicoot 2 – Cortex Strikes Back (USA).iso

Paying for art is literally immoral, and i’ve already paid dollar price for the Crash Bandicoot™ N. Sane Trilogy, the first three games literally never came out in this “country” (you can try to prove me wrong with sources) until the trilogy. I paid for this crap, i don’t care, copyright is a crime, DMCA kills literal people.

Last time i’ve played this game on ePSXe, but friendship ended with ePSXe, now DuckStation 0.1-6461-g359678a1 (dev) is my best friend.

The original voice acting is way better. But it’s less intelligible and there are no subtitles in this 1997 game.

Back in the 00s Crash 2 was obviously superior to the original — one game you can play, the other has no real saves in 1996 on PlayStation, almost as if it’s FamiCom in 1983. But if we remove the save system entirely from the equation with an emulator — now it’s a different result, innit?

Gameplay-wise the second game is not really different. Is it even a “second game”, or a “content pack”? From what is written on the internet — they tweaked the gravity a bit, and added the slide jump. My cousin owned the three games and a PS one, so this is my first time actually playing the game from start to finish. And when i loaned the system and the 5-games Crash disk, i’ve beated Crash Bash instead. I didn’t even knew slide jump existed until this time. And Crash Bandicoot 2 does over-rely on a slide jump, especially over the bottomless pits, where it has all chances to just kill you. Some other small changes to the formula were done just for the sake of change.

The game start with a semi-interactive intro, which introduces his sister. There’s no Tawna in this one, there’s yes Coco. She is kinda dull-looking — the same way Tawna is a stereotypical girlfriend, Coco is a stereotypical little sister, especially from TV of that era. Compare that to the unique look of Crash — jock shorts, sneakers, naked nipples, biker gloves, no neck. His basically a psycho from Boredlands. And, well, Coco’s entire role is to “jack in” and be the hackerman. She’s just a cutscene. Wait, if she can talk, when did Cortex capture her?

Then you are sent to find a battery in a jungle and not-magically teleported in a hub full of teleports. Crash is told by the villain to help him. Why would Crash work for Cortex? Like, they do explain, but later, and this basically says that the character is actually very dumb. So you are just in a hub that leads to other portals. There’s no geographical cohesion, there’s no thematical cohesion. Similar assets-sets are diced, and spread through the different storeys vertically. There’s no sense of time or sense of a place. You ride polar bears, run through sewers, and the go to the one place that hasn’t been corrupted by capitalism. Space!

The first game starts with Crash falling out of a window, he ends up washed out on a beach on a nearby island, and then he goes back for his girlfriend. The levels match the environment, there’s a clear progression. The level assets make sense, and there is a story, for what it is.

Crash Bandicoot gameplay, unless you are a galaxy brain like me is just a pseudo 3D platformer*, allowing you to play as legally distinct Taz from Tasmania. Yes, literally from Tasmania. The good parts of the IP are the sound, the voice acting (especially Cortex), the designs, the music, the animations and the cool jungle setting with an evil layer on top of it.

And the second game has has more of the same gameplay, and less of the good parts. And well, Crash does his stupid rape the air dance every time you get anything from a level.

There’s the Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment™®℠© which is not very dynamic or adjustable. Before it kick in you have to lose a lot of lives. And to get a lot of lives you have to replay the first level over and over until your eyes pop. The live system was extremely outdated since always. It was created as a premium currency for arcade machines. In elite machines which are sure of their desirability one life costed one coin. In less ambitions arcade machines they were exchanging one coin for several lives, offer thrice the product for the same cost. You literally can save your game in the 80s PCs. And this game came out after UFO, for example.

If you beat the game it shows you the fake ending, and it says it’s fake. If the ending of the first game was final and canonical, you have to see the true ending here, to start the story of the third game. And to do that you need to collect the boxes again. Including on the running levels. And some of the special gems are proper unfindable. Even starting with the first one — the blue gem is shown on the gates of the first level but there are no hints. The goal is to not hit a single box, in a game that punishes and reprimands you for missing even one box. This literally demands a walkthrough, Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back The Official Strategy Guide B0071MIA70. Conveniently sold to you for $14.99

The past was the worst.

With the new graphics Crash Dash has an entirely different tone in the Trilogy. Bear It has a terrible box placement and the hitboxes are whack. You can smash into a stack of crates and destroy only the lower one. There’s no coming back, and it runs at excessive speeds. Crash Crush has a strongbox near the end. It is a cumulative scam. The level is made way easier in the Trilogy. In Sewer or Later the yellow gem path has garbage hitboxes. And all sewer levels in general feel like they use 2D hitboxes applied to 3D space. You can kill some things from afar, just because of overlapping images. Un-Bearable is really not a good level. It is combining running into camera with wonky riding and it shows they you are not a friend of bears but a kid napper. You throw the bear under the bus, and this context accentuates that Crash takes the alive bear into the underworld in the sky when he dies. At best it will fall and die, at worst it will become Bearsus dead alive. And the boxes you miss in this level are inside the death pit in a game where you die to death in the death pits.

Diggin’ It bees suck. The second you see them you are already dead. And if you try to react to the sound — it stops changing the pitch for some time before the will damage you. I was waiting for them to hide explosives in a stack of the boxes, so you will belly flop them. And here you are, in the second entrance to Road to Ruin they did just that. Also on that path nitro and flames are off-axis. In Cold Hard Crash the box gem and the second gem are mutually exclusive, unless you want to kilometres per second. Piston It Away introduces new ugly mobs. And that’s another thing with this game — most of the enemies are repetitive. Especially two games in a row. They look different but it’s always either universal monsters, or kick them or jump on them. Rock It introduces a jetpacks. Which always should be a cool gimmick. But they broke it with terrible controls that don’t match the rest of the game. And then they inverted them.

This game has rather challenging medium rare levels, very really hard gem requirements, and then the Bosses are simplistic pushovers. The last boss is that bad falling into a fake-pipe gameplay. It’s primitive and boring. And also the camera is constantly changing its perspective which makes this a mess.

Taking all this bullshit from an original new exciting game is one thing. But taking the same crap from a sequel which is just a level-pack with very minor additions — is not as fun. Back in the day it was a cool mindless game. But these days it’s incomparable to the first game, be it with fixed saves in the Trilogy, or with quick-saves and internet walkthrough on an emulator.

*Well, akchually, Crash gameplay is genius in minute details you don’t think about. If you take in consideration the time the game has come out, the hardware it was running on, and the genre conventionalities — they circumvented all the unsolvable inherent problems of that dead-end combo. Some genius programmers made PCs to catch up to “console” graphical performance, and then instantly leapfrog it with graphical fidelity. Which made PC gaming a more lucrative market. When pre-IBM compatible PC players were looking at Xanadu slide-show in 1985, Famicom players had smooth scrolling in Super Mario Bros. Casual players don’t care that one is a primitive platformer and the other is a giant complex and hardcore RPG. They don’t even care about finishing games. But they do care about “feels good”, and they do drive sales. So when the PC market was standardized around IBM, and it started to offer “feels good”, and better performance, and better gameplay, and insanely fashionable 3D graphics at EVGA or even giant SXGA, “console” makers scampered in an attempt to mimic even a fraction of that power. But the problem of the “consoles” not only in their pathetic computing power due to them selling at a loss and having to hit the specific price tag, while also being wary of the competition, they also are locked to the gamepads — a peripheral created for 2D platformers and nothing else. You need a full analogue input for a fully-3D space. Not some one-dimensional knobs that are, in practice, not any different from the 8-directional D-pads.

The first solution was to make hacky 2,5D games combining some limited 3D geometry with 2D gameplay and a lot of sprites instead of models. Something like Klonoa. Then there were honest fully 3D games with 2D gameplay something like Spider and Pandemonium. (I can’t give chronologically appropriate examples because internet is dead, there are no search engines, and the only source i have is my experience. So my examples are all tardy strugglers. The only other choice is to do what i did with RTS games — play every single one i could find for an original research. Out of all meanings of “2,5D graphics” Wikipedia entirely ignores the most common still popular variant.)

So. The fifth generation of “consoles” enters the scene. And they all need to have a flagman fully 3D proper real game to be relevant.

Nintoomba needs to slap Mario‘s name on anything to sell their alien merch stolen from alpha centauri, where everyone has a third arm instead of a dick. As the solution for the true 3D question they released their in-house Mario 64 and hit an absolute jackpot of terribleness — no analogue controls in 3D space, terrible FoV, terrible controls, insufferable camera, and Superman 64 gameplay. People pretend that that game is terrible, when in fact all true-3D console game are Superman 64. Even something recent like Lego Batman 2 has the same controls and camera issues in flight as Mario 64 and Superman 64.

Sega‘s answer to the true 3D quest was not. Sonic Adventure is late to the party and it came out in Anno Half-Lifei. Even if there are sanik fans, it’s plain not a good game. It is the “modern sonic” and it is the “modern sonic”. They had to solve the riddle of steel true 3D, but they decided to answer it with an IP that already was struggling to match it’s own marketing. Consoles struggled to control the characters in 3D space, and Sega decided to struggle at the speeds at which nintendon’t.

PlayStation was a new player on the market, born as a result of raep by nintoomba. It had no established first party development and had no flagship games. You can say Twisted Metal was the first true-3D game, but it’s the stupid cars, again, barely running at 5 FPS. The market had 3D cars for years, and running at realer framerates. Meanwhile fast and easy to pick-up Crash Bandicoot beat to the market the slow, methodical, simulatory, and awkward Tomb Raider. Ask someone to pick up the first Tomb Raider today and they will start screaming after the second minute, struggle to pick up the medkit that is right there for the next five minutes, and by the eighth minute they ill be eaten by one tiny bat to death. Not only crash is east to pick up and play, it also circumvented all the console shortcomings. It’s a true 3D game. But the gameplay is limited to corridors. You can run in every direction, but you can progress only one one direction, with rare changes of perspective. And since the developers usually know where you will be, the can almost always put the camera into a good position. And the game usually has an alright FoV for the scene. But the final genius comes from the fact, that they’ve allowed 3D solutions to 2D gameplay challenges. Not everything is closed with invisible walls. You can actually go around the obstacles and challenges in many places. You can jump on the ledges to the sides and walk across a pit, instead of waiting for a transport platform. The hated rope bridges? Jump on the rope and just slowly walk across the entire level. The pits and moving platforms in the last levels? Just jump around the entire section on the ledges. Even in the dark.