An extremely formative game for me, so of course I love it so. This was one of my first 3D platformers, and since I wouldn't own any home consoles until Christmas of '04, this ended up being one of the few 3D platformers I had regular access to. I can't say this single-handedly formed my understanding of what a 3D platformer was, but it was a big part of it. Moreover, it was the first game I ever cleared in its entirety. No cheats or nothin', just fought tooth and nail to the end.

It's common knowledge these days that Croc was to be Argonaut Software's take on Yoshi, which Argonaut turned into their own thing after Nintendo turned them down. With that in mind, I actually do see a lot of Yoshi's Island influence here, at least in how the game presents itself. The different islands and the map screen progression through them feel very evocative of the slow ascent and descent through Yoshi's Island, and Baron Dante feels somewhere between Bowser and Kamek in terms of his impact throughout the game. It's not a one-to-one comparison (there was no possible way an early 3D game could communicate the visual artistry of a 2D game late in its golden era), and you could just as easily make comparisons with other platformer contemporaries - the Gobbos are like Rayman's Electoons, Birdie is (accidentally) evocative of Kazooie, etc - but the lineage isn't hard to see.

I think the game's hard for people to appreciate these days due to the tank controls, but, like, I never had an issue with it. Even ignoring that this is of an era where people were trying to figure out what a 3D platformer was, the game's clearly built around tank controls as the core to its challenge. Late-game levels like 'The Tower of Power' and 'Panic at Platform Pete's Lair' are obnoxious as can be if you're not confident with the game's controls and physics, I have no illusions about that. But I don't think that makes the game's design bad, just reliant on a skill that did not become the standard. There's actually a good rhythm you fall into feathering some of those diagonal jumps and using Croc's ground-pound to extend jumps. It's never not nerve-wracking, but that's the fun of it.

This is a game I revisit every so often, but I owe this particular replay to Ragey's excellent long-form Croc analysis. Be sure to give that a read if you want to see a very thorough take on all this: https://randomhoohaas.flyingomelette.com/gw/croc/