Friday, June 30, 2017

Crash Bandicoot: N-Sane Trilogy (PS4)

EYEBROW POWER
My thumb hurts. This game's been out for 16 hours and my thumb hurts.


Crash Bandicoot has always had it's claws deep, deep into my brain. I dabbled with consoles prior to the Playstation, but the Playstation was really when I made the transition from computer gamer to console gamer, and a big part of that was the Crash Bandicoot trilogy.

Crash Bandicoot made me a platformer guy. Years later, my weird, abusive love for challenging-but-fair platformers that make me try the same things over and over until I get it right was born of crudely 3-D modeled eyebrows and sneakers.

So there was no fucking way I wasn't going to pick up the PS4 remake of the Crash Bandicoot Trilogy when it dropped this morning. Hell, I preordered it by a day or so, and installed the free theme that came with it, and it included the main theme music, and that theme music instantly locked into the grooves it wore into my brain over 20 years ago.

Anyway, you get the games, remade from the ground up to be exactly how you remember them, which means much nicer and prettier and full resolution, not how they actually were. There are a few nods to modern convenience, like a nice autosaving system and analog controls for the games that didn't really have them, and new time trials for the games that didn't have them originally, and that kind of thing.

The game is difficult. Not impossible, and not unfair, but pretty difficult. About three levels after the first boss of the first game, it started kicking my ass in earnest. About 15-20% of the time, I blame the game - or at least the difficulty in judging distances in the game and/or the responsiveness of the game's controls. The rest of the time, I blame myself, which is a startlingly good ratio ofr a game that old.

Loading times are a little longer than I'd prefer, but what matters is, it feels like my memories of Crash Bandicoot, and I loved Crash Bandicoot.

No comments:

Post a Comment