Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy

Traveller’s Tales Oxford intended for Twinsanity to be Nina Cortex’s debut. When a preview screenshot for Crash Bandicoot Purple: Ripto’s Rampage showed Nina Cortex, they were surprised, as Vicarious Visions had used the character without informing them.

I already wrote about it before, because i decided that it’s terrible and i don’t want to play it. But just like with Age of Empires 2 HD it was premature.

N. Sane Trilogy is a weird re-imagining of the first three games in the series. They’ve made all three games to run on Crash 3 ruleset (stronger gravity, low inertia, proper saves instead of CB1 nightmare, multi-boxes take 5 jumps instead of 10). And they accidentality and not played with the balance, making some levels easier, while others an unplayable nightmare. The bear and tiger levels were not good. The design paradigm of the geocentric camera, instead of character-centric is good for the on-foot levels. But the auto-ride levels are way faster, way more curvy and no one play-tested them enough to avoid bad camera swings and bad hitboxes, with weird perspective shifts. The new auto-ride levels are usually significantly easier (less-defective). They’ve added some hints for some of the 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. They’ve tried to preserve the original distances, but made all the hit-boxes shrink-wrap the visual models. Where the original were (metaphorically) cubes on top of cubes, these new hitboxes are more representative of the real life instead of the a cartoony platformer game where flat belly-flopping on a pile of metal-reinforced crates from 4 metres high will break them with no consequences. Also as it uses modern physics calculations — nitro crates jump all the time and often they and other boxes jump to the sky. The camera-controls continuum is worse, pressing hard right on a gamepad sometimes sends you towards or away from the camera during the faux-2D sections.

And, well, there’re quicksaves on emulators. They didn’t get rid of the terrible obsolete lives system, which was a waste of time even on the release. If some paying customers loonies like to memember the times with lives systems, more racism and more misogyny, they could offer a choice between the classic racism mode and a modern easy mode. But they did add achievements 2.8% of approximately 588000 players achieved. 14% finished the second game. 15% finished the third game. Yet somehow 21% finished the first game which is way harder. All number for the “not-true” endings, of course. They’ve added the stupid time-attacks for the first two games, and demand 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. But they didn’t add a restart level button to the game, so you have to manually juggle the save slots.

Updating the graphics they’ve added a lot of effects and detailed textures. But when they made all these new graphics they forgot that old graphics had readability. You will be literally dying to things that are visually camouflaged and can be hardly seen.

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.

They also redesigned and updated the characters. Cortex has a new voice. 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, which is a great addition for me. She even has some custom animations, but the amount is not on par with Crash. Crash gets revenge for falling in the third game in Coco levels, now she lands on her bum for the Crash-only levels. And her design is mid. It’s not as loosely fitting the art-style as the original, and it’s not as primitive as Crash 6, but it’s not as awesome incredible one of the best ever designs from “4“. She has a way darker lighting than Crash or than the environments, 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. Adding pink lipstick and eyeshadows to an orange tween (?) character was a terrible call. Pink on orange? Seriously? And, well, she now often acts exactly as idiotic as the notoriously demented failed experiment Crash.
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].

Crash Bandicoot

Ripper Roo is a terrible boss. I’ve wasted 15 lives on falling through the boxes or falling because of the terrible camera placed at a terrible angle. When i finally won the cutscene interrupted me mid-jump and drowned me after the victory animation, restarting the whole fight. But this release didn’t ruin Crash entirely. I went to the mid lane and then hid on the left ledge. I was just triggering the same box for 15-30-60 minutes until the timings and the stars aligned. Doing that is way easier than trying to jump with these new sucky hitboxes.

N. Brio Boss is literally broken. You can jump on his head and nothing happens. And, well, the bad perspective and new visual clutter made everything harder to see.

The “new” stormy ascent is impossible plain and simple. The timings are all wrong. There are 8 000 000 000 people on earth, and what is the % of human population that finished that crap even once? While the game demands a gold relic. The last boss fight is too dark with broken lighting. And the hitboxes are absolutely terrible. You can see on your giant screen exactly how the projectile wasn’t even remotely close to hitting you, literally 30% of the screen away, and yet you died.

Quick saves on emulation and collecting all the boxes make Crash Bandicoot great. N. Sane Trilogy makes it terrible, despite fixing its broken save system.

Crash Bandicoot: Warped

The tiger auto-run level is made easier. The terrible plane levels are also easier. The last boss is easier. The
new Future Tense level is completable.

The third game literally has no story whatsoever. Damn, Warped is just so much half-arsed.

Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back

The sewer levels were not good in the original even with saves, now they just suck. Trial and error memorization. They combine sewer hitbox problems from the original with new N. Sane Trilogy hitbox gigaproblems. Bad camera, bad visibility, blind attacks, 0 reaction time. Combined with the new graphics many people outright miss the crystal in Hangin’ Out and have to replay it. Sometimes several times.

In Diggin’ It and Bee-Having the stupid bees are nerfed. But the hammer dudes are buffed. The plants are bugged and now instead of you killing them, they kill you 60% of times. The diggable land looks worse than in PS1 game, and you can be stuck inside with no way out. You still can farm multi-bees, tho.

Night Fight is still prolonged and boring.

The tentacle robots in Piston It Away look better, but there’s a lot of room for improvement. Yet with the new hitboxes there’s 50% chance to still die, even if you do everything right. The pushers are buffed, and you usually fall with them.

Re-making the game they had a chance to fix the jetpack. But no, you can’t rebind those insufferably insane control to anything human.

In Spaced Out even sides of presses still hurt you. WTH? And there’s semi-unavoidable damage. You have to look that section on YouTube and see that crash can spin away this specific laserblast, but not any other in the whole game.

Going in this order, especially after already finishing 2 and 3 in straight order, you can see just how bad is the storytelling in the third game. Even Crash 2 holograms are literally much longer than those stupid floating head quips. And these new ones are way more animated and emotive. In the first game the gems are secret, and the secret ending is a joke. Gems are more tightly integrated into the sequels. But where in the third game they just rob you of your victory without being a part of the story, in the second game N. Brio directly asks you to collect them for story reasons. Also this was the only game at the time where the secret ending is canon. It picks up after the normal ending of the fist game, and its ending is canon in Warped. Crash 6 uses the normal ending of Crash 3. Only later Crash 7 uses the secret ending of 6, and Crash “4” splits the timeline picking the secret ending of Crash 3.

— / • / —

Collecting all the boxes is kinda half of the gameplay, and doing that on the original hardware was a waste of time, but here it’s a waste of time inside of a waste of time. Playing with quick-saves on an emulator allows you to actually engage with the content. The first game fixed by quicksaves is actually great even today. That greatness was culled in the sequels, though. I don’t care about the graphics, because it’s a game, not a movie. And an emulator running the originals at 4k is already pretty enough.

Playable Coco is a good addition.

I beat all three Crash games, in both versions, five of them in less than a month. I declare with full authority that N. Sane Trilogy sucks arse.