The Crash Bandicoot N Sane Trilogy is nostalgia done right – and that includes the irritations
This one comes at you in waves. On first loading the Crash Bandicoot N Sane Trilogy, my initial thought was: Oh, this is definitely how they should reissue old games. N Sane Trilogy, which bundles the first three Crash Bandicoot games into one package, adding quality of life stuff like a decent save and checkpoint system alongside time trials, online leaderboards and the chance to play most levels as Coco, has had a lot of work put into it. The soundtrack’s been remastered, the cinematics have been entirely redone, the whole thing cruises by at 30fps. The elbowy channels of this trench platformer are still rather poky, but they’re fringed with glorious wildlife and delightful texturing as a complete art overhaul has taken place. Ice is gemlike and wonderfully glossy, tar pits are filled with thick black goop, and the jungles! You never saw such jungles! Big fat rubbery leaves, the fraying trunks of palms, the ruffle of a breeze as you race past, smashing crates and collecting fruit.
That’s the first wave. The second is quite different. After initially firing the collection up, I poked around in the original game for an hour or so. It’s cludgy and fiddly and rather unforgiving. Years after making this, Naughty Dog would perfect the unmissable ledge: the ledge that you leap towards and absolutely cannot avoid connecting with, as Nathan Drake is drawn towards cinematic just-made-it safety as irresistibly as dust bunnies disappearing down the spout of a Dyson DC32 (The Animal – never bettered IMHO). Here, though, if you misjudge a jump by a millimeter, Crash falls into the abyss. No mantling. No hedging. It’s actually kind of reassuring: games used to demand this kind of perfection. Through its overuse, the unmissable ledge is one of the more annoying artefacts of modern gaming, but away from the odd pitfall the supremely missable platform of the first Crash game is also kind of annoying. N Sane Trilogy swaps out the graphics but seems to retain the original geometry and the original of the controls – even though it now supports analogue sticks. This means you get a lavish looking game that often plays in a very rickety manner. Race a tiger over the Great Wall in Warped, for example, and the whole scene is so bright and crisp and lively-looking that it’s just weird the way the camera bucks and stumbles behind you, the way you move in humpty, weighty lurches, the way that dragons, who will swoop across the map as you pass, are visibly waiting in the wings as you approach, like soap actors having one last cigarette before nailing their walk-on. Reworking the surface of these games so laboriously but leaving the sometimes-jumbled guts intact feels a little like cruelty on occasion.
But there is a third wave, thankfully, and the third wave crested slowly as something kind of amazing happened to me. As I played through the Crash games on the big 4K telly in the office, the PS4 Pro whirring nobly underneath, people started to gather behind me. This almost never happens. “Oh man, I Crash,” said someone who shall remain nameless. And then another person said: “Go back a few steps, there’s a secret crate you missed.”
Crash Bandicoot Remaster Gameplay – New Crash Bandicoot Gameplay on PS4 Watch on YouTube
Pretty soon I was getting a granular level of advice that was, to tell the truth, not always that useful. Did I know that if I wanted to take both branching paths one after the other at this particular intersection I would be allowed to double back after the first one and collect all the crates on offer? Did I know that if I bounced on a multi-fruit crate rather than just spin-smashing it, it would magically contain even more juicy bounty for me to collect? Did I know how to visually identify the spars of stone that would support me and the spars of stone that would sink into the ground after a few seconds? Did I know that Crash Racing, or whatever it’s called, is secretly the best game ever and its omission from the N Sane Trilogy is tantamount to a minor felony?
