So, here I finally am. Face-to-face with THE childhood game, the one that I have so much nostalgia for, it should speak enough to how completely skeeved this review could turn out to be. As much as I did always wish to get my hands on a copy of Crash 2 or 3 as a kid, at the time I could only ever experience those games at a friend's house, or via a short-lived rental. My game collection as a whole, was poor and miserable compared to my friends. I had approximately 20 games I could not give a single shit about, a copy of Final Fantasy 8 that froze on the CG opening, Spyro 2 & Rayman 2 were fun until they mysteriously disappeared from my house, Crash Bash was a thing until I tried putting it into my pocket and effectively crumpled the disc... oh, and one day, I got super excited to find a copy of Tekken 3 hiding behind one of the drawers! Only to be underwhelmed when I found out it was just the demo. Also, no memory card for any of this. At least I still had my PS2- oops, my sibling gave it to a friend who then literally ran off with it and never gave it back. Hm, I guess that only leaves Rayman 1... and this game as the two remaining things I could play for months upon months. Hey, at least those had the password system.
So, I've been thinking about who do I actually want to write this review for, and from what sort of perspective. I mean, just because I've amassed triple digits worth of playthroughs on Crash Bandicoot 1, that doesn't mean I wanna blindly defend it as the best platformer ever made, or whatever the fuck. Even with my bias, I wanna try looking at this from an objective viewpoint. And for most newcomers, the objective viewpoint of Crash 1 is gonna likely be "the Super Mario 64 competitor that is nowhere near as impressive." Despite this criticism, the PS1 trilogy of Crash games still ended up being highly profitable. They were a major cornerstone of the console, and even deemed to be the unofficial mascot of PlayStation for its 64-bit tenure. Why? What do people see in this basic run-of-the-mill platformer that goes beyond just blind nostalgia goggles? Let's figure this out first.
Personally, the first Crash was put in a rather unfair position by its own marketing team, and to a certain extent, by its own creators. Which might not've felt like it at the time, but it certainly feels more poorly aged now. Crash Bandicoot strolling up to Nintendo's HQ with a megaphone, cementing himself as "the moustache man's worst nightmare," also cemented himself as a revolutionary. With the PlayStation succesfully swooping in and establishing a lucrative playerbase, the internet was pining for a war. The elusive Mario killer, the people's craving for a 3D PlayStation platformer properly satisfied, and one that would give them a reason to shittalk Nintendo fans for "still playing those baby Mario games." The burden of all that fell to Crash.
But the matter of the fact is, Crash was never going to live up to those expectations. Naughty Dog was a team of like 8 to 9 people, the main leaders of which have never even created a 2D platformer before. By '94, Nintendo have exhausted everything they wanted to do with the 2D Mario formula. They had the experience, and were ready to design a wholly new type of game. Naughty Dog meanwhile, had to stay behind, and play catch-up on what even makes a platformer fun at all. Whereas Nintendo was ready to ask themselves "How do we design a 3D platformer," Naughty Dog was over there figuring out how to design a 2D one. And then they simply adapted that design into a 3D space. The ambitions were there, but they were more humble. Yet, they were needlessly blown out of proportion to be on the same level as fuckin' Mario, I mean, come on. It's no wonder newcomers expect more out of Crash than what they actually get.
Now, the thing is, Crash 1 did not have the open-endedness of Mario 64, nor did it have the huge moveset. The most that could be argued is that Crash looked pretty damn good for its age, and looks appealing even today thanks to prioritizing cartoonism over realism. So, is that it, then? Did people only like Crash just because it "looked" good? Just a bunch of style over substance? And here's where my defense comes in: It's worth noting that I did not grow up with Crash Bandicoot 1 back in 1996. I didn't exist back then. Really, my era of playing video games came around 2007 or 2008. And our family was ALWAYS several console generations behind. My cool friend with the sweetest, kindest mother you could imagine, he owned an Xbox 360 and GTA4. I pictured him as the god of the neighbourhood, because me and the rest were stuck with consoles like the NES, the Gameboy, and the PS1. I had the comparison point, so I was firmly aware that Crash 1 was not the pinnacle of graphical prowess, nor innovation by the time I started playing it. So then, if I wasn't impressed by its sheer novelty, then what was it actually about Crash 1 that stuck with me to this day? And, it's really not that complicated: It's not about nostalgia. The game is simply fun.
Sometimes, you don't need a game to reinvent the wheel. Sometimes, what you want is something familiar, something that has been done before, something simple that you can figure out how to play within 20 seconds. Leading industry publishers keep trying to tell me how linearity is an antiquated concept that nobody wants anymore, and I think that's genuinely insulting and ignorant to say. Sure, I like squeezing in an open world into my docket every now and then, but I can't deal with that sort of scope ALL the god damn time, it's an exhausting commitment. There is still room for 5-hour hallway platformers out there. These are my palette cleansers between longer titles, this is my comfort food. There was room for this sort of platformer even back then. Have you seen how people played that Mario 64 beta booth? They were utterly befuzzled by the game, because half the challenge was learning a new, daunting control scheme, a new type of analog controller, all within a completely new and unfamiliar dimension. Crash 1 was criticized for a lack of innovation, but that doesn't mean it didn't have a place back in 1996. Because Crash 1 was capable of offering comfort and familiarity, that in turn gave it something that Mario 64 did not have. The ability to ease into this new era of 3D gaming.
The only condition left is that the game has to flow. And, I don't know about everybody else, but to me? Crash 1 absolutely flows. A big mistake that many failed attempts at mascot platformers committed at the time, often fell to the level designers having next to no grasp of what makes a platformer flow. Their solution was to either make everything a maze, to create a needless amount of open space, make their levels three or four times as long than they needed to be, or, worst case scenario: Copy and paste. It's a relief then to say that Crash 1 avoids just about every single one of these trappings, albeit I can think of at least two levels that go on for maybe twice as long as they should. Yes, hello, I see you, Sunset Vista. Aside from this, I do think that the highly streamlined nature of each level allowed Naughty Dog to gain a solid grasp on how to escalate the challenge, starting off from the first stage that takes you through a simple and cozy variety of setpieces, before slowly ramping up the precision required from you over the course of time. The game is notorious for getting pretty difficult in its 2nd half. Unfair, though? Not at all. Everything comes together with practice. Part of what helps make this practice possible is that that extra lifes are extremely abundant throughout. So abundant, that part of the fun of Crash 1 is seeing just how quickly I can get up to 99 lifes, which generally, I max out about 40% through the game.
In the end, all you're doing is walking, jumping, and spin attacking enemies and crates alike. It's a horrendously basic gameplay loop, but it's made engaging through the skill and reaction timing it demands out of you. There is no such thing as going through the motions here. The stages are constantly testing you to stop and think about the right positioning and timing. This is coupled with a strong amount of level variety - far stronger than games like Crash 2 or 3 even - where level themes are at most repeated only once, but as you start getting closer to the end of the game, plenty of stages start introducing level themes that are unique to themselves, and never repeated anywhere else. Each level theme introduces you to a new set of obstacles, enemies, and at times changes the camera perspective to shake things up. Some levels are 3D only, some are 2.5D, one's a top-down exploratory stage, and of couse there's the iconic boulder chase stages. Though graphics may not be everything, visual variety is important to keep aspects of the gameplay fresh, and considering Crash 1's simplicity, these are highly important additions to retain engagement in what sort of challenge awaits you next.
Alright, now let's balance things out here. The criticisms. Crash 1 sports two stages themed around riding a hog. A neat way to keep in line with the goal of variety, but the hitboxes on these seriously needed another pass. You know the fucking bit I'm talking about if you've played Crash 1, the obstacle with the rotating pole thing? The one where everytime you jump over it, you clench your ass over the 50% chance that it might just kill you no matter how precisely you timed your jump? Yeah, that, and the one part where you gotta zig-zag left and right to break open all the crates, but god is just begging for you to somehow miss one of them so that way he finds us too amusing to be deemed a mistake. The silver lining is that though these sequences were spiritually brought back in Crash 2, they were vastly improved on.
Speaking of "breaking open the crates" and "mistakes", let's get into Crash 1's biggest mistake, the one that pertains to completionists. So, there are all these crates scattered across every stage. You bounce or you break them open so you can get the wumpa fruit, you collect 100 wumpa fruit, you earn a life. The act of breaking the crates is pretty satisfying in itself, but get this: if you break ALL the crates in a stage (not counting the ones found in the bonus levels), you get a gem at the end of it. Get all gems in every stage, you unlock an alternate ending. Ooh, it's a collect-a-thon now! How fun! What's more, there are certain stages you won't be able to immediately do a 100% crate run on... but there are these special Colored Gems, which unlock new paths in previous stages. Sometimes it's just these very small rooms that contain the remaining crates you need, but other times they're total extensions of the level, about 1-3 more minutes of platforming that you wouldn't be able to see otherwise. In the end, the game is still pretty short in spite of these additions, so this all sounds like a pretty nice way to appeal to collectible fans, right?
Okay, now imagine if they fucking hated you though, and made it so aside from having to obtain all crates in a level, you also have to perform a no-death run. Die once in a stage, and all those crates you collected won't mean anything, the game will simply not grant you the gem. Why????? Well, I know why. It was to prevent rentals. This sort of needless artificial difficulty was the justification to pad out game length. If you're just playing the game casually without worrying about the gems, you will objectively have a better time! Otherwise however, going for the gems effectively means that you will be abolishing all checkpoints. Every death will be followed by the two loading screens required to restart each stage. I have gotten good enough at Crash Bandicoot 1 to be perfectly capable of clearing a 100% run. I do not expect many people will have the patience to do the same. The no-death requirement makes this a stupidly stressful ordeal.
Which is why... I'm tempted to recommend that newcomers should play the remake version of Crash 1, found in the N.Sane Trilogy. They've done some very commendable things to streamline the 100%ing of the first game, primarily by removing the no-death requirement almost completely. The only exception is that you still have to do a no-death run for the 6 levels that contain the Colored Gems, but that's a way more reasonable compromise over having to do a no-death run over the whole goddamn game. There's just one catch... the remake is infamously known for its questionable hitboxes, which make certain levels that demand precision far harder to beat than they are in the original. I've gotten used to these physics myself personally, but far too many horror tales are told about the bridge level.
This all leads to the following conundrum: There is no definitive way to play Crash Bandicoot 1. The original is tight and precise to play, but its 100% requirements are awful. The remake makes these 100% requirements much better, but the gameplay loses the tightness and precision in the process. As a long-time fan, my personal recommendation is that you should do a casual run of the original Crash 1. But that's only if you're really interested in a chronological look in the series. If you're willing to go out of order, then I wholeheartedly recommend the original Crash 2. If you thought Crash 1 was too simple for your tastes, Crash 2 expands on the moveset in some very fun ways, makes its difficulty more accessible, and its 100% requirements considerably more doable. Worst case scenario if you can't emulate, the remake is generally fine for what it does, though it does require some adjusting.
Regardless, I have a lot of thoughts about the other games, but... I think this is where I'll wrap it up for now. Crash 1 is not incredible. I was so swept up in writing the rest of this review, I didn't even mention the native american stereotyping going on here, which yeah, I could certainly fuckin' do without. It is not the Mario killer and it sure as shit ain't gonna get anywhere close to the level of Mario 64. But it doesn't need to. It never, ever needed to. It is the simplicity of Crash 1 that I adore. That total confidence in delivering a platformer that everybody just gets instantly, was Crash 1's biggest strength in an era where companies tried to deliver unfamiliar experiences all the time. A lot of it must've been really overwhelming to people who had a harder time adapting. And it's thanks to Crash that there was still some speck of appreciation for the older era of gaming to be found. Innovation is a great thing. But there are times when I just wanna go backwards, to see that 3 hours is all I need to feel completely satisfied with a game.
Just as long as, y'know, you price it accordingly.
So, I've been thinking about who do I actually want to write this review for, and from what sort of perspective. I mean, just because I've amassed triple digits worth of playthroughs on Crash Bandicoot 1, that doesn't mean I wanna blindly defend it as the best platformer ever made, or whatever the fuck. Even with my bias, I wanna try looking at this from an objective viewpoint. And for most newcomers, the objective viewpoint of Crash 1 is gonna likely be "the Super Mario 64 competitor that is nowhere near as impressive." Despite this criticism, the PS1 trilogy of Crash games still ended up being highly profitable. They were a major cornerstone of the console, and even deemed to be the unofficial mascot of PlayStation for its 64-bit tenure. Why? What do people see in this basic run-of-the-mill platformer that goes beyond just blind nostalgia goggles? Let's figure this out first.
Personally, the first Crash was put in a rather unfair position by its own marketing team, and to a certain extent, by its own creators. Which might not've felt like it at the time, but it certainly feels more poorly aged now. Crash Bandicoot strolling up to Nintendo's HQ with a megaphone, cementing himself as "the moustache man's worst nightmare," also cemented himself as a revolutionary. With the PlayStation succesfully swooping in and establishing a lucrative playerbase, the internet was pining for a war. The elusive Mario killer, the people's craving for a 3D PlayStation platformer properly satisfied, and one that would give them a reason to shittalk Nintendo fans for "still playing those baby Mario games." The burden of all that fell to Crash.
But the matter of the fact is, Crash was never going to live up to those expectations. Naughty Dog was a team of like 8 to 9 people, the main leaders of which have never even created a 2D platformer before. By '94, Nintendo have exhausted everything they wanted to do with the 2D Mario formula. They had the experience, and were ready to design a wholly new type of game. Naughty Dog meanwhile, had to stay behind, and play catch-up on what even makes a platformer fun at all. Whereas Nintendo was ready to ask themselves "How do we design a 3D platformer," Naughty Dog was over there figuring out how to design a 2D one. And then they simply adapted that design into a 3D space. The ambitions were there, but they were more humble. Yet, they were needlessly blown out of proportion to be on the same level as fuckin' Mario, I mean, come on. It's no wonder newcomers expect more out of Crash than what they actually get.
Now, the thing is, Crash 1 did not have the open-endedness of Mario 64, nor did it have the huge moveset. The most that could be argued is that Crash looked pretty damn good for its age, and looks appealing even today thanks to prioritizing cartoonism over realism. So, is that it, then? Did people only like Crash just because it "looked" good? Just a bunch of style over substance? And here's where my defense comes in: It's worth noting that I did not grow up with Crash Bandicoot 1 back in 1996. I didn't exist back then. Really, my era of playing video games came around 2007 or 2008. And our family was ALWAYS several console generations behind. My cool friend with the sweetest, kindest mother you could imagine, he owned an Xbox 360 and GTA4. I pictured him as the god of the neighbourhood, because me and the rest were stuck with consoles like the NES, the Gameboy, and the PS1. I had the comparison point, so I was firmly aware that Crash 1 was not the pinnacle of graphical prowess, nor innovation by the time I started playing it. So then, if I wasn't impressed by its sheer novelty, then what was it actually about Crash 1 that stuck with me to this day? And, it's really not that complicated: It's not about nostalgia. The game is simply fun.
Sometimes, you don't need a game to reinvent the wheel. Sometimes, what you want is something familiar, something that has been done before, something simple that you can figure out how to play within 20 seconds. Leading industry publishers keep trying to tell me how linearity is an antiquated concept that nobody wants anymore, and I think that's genuinely insulting and ignorant to say. Sure, I like squeezing in an open world into my docket every now and then, but I can't deal with that sort of scope ALL the god damn time, it's an exhausting commitment. There is still room for 5-hour hallway platformers out there. These are my palette cleansers between longer titles, this is my comfort food. There was room for this sort of platformer even back then. Have you seen how people played that Mario 64 beta booth? They were utterly befuzzled by the game, because half the challenge was learning a new, daunting control scheme, a new type of analog controller, all within a completely new and unfamiliar dimension. Crash 1 was criticized for a lack of innovation, but that doesn't mean it didn't have a place back in 1996. Because Crash 1 was capable of offering comfort and familiarity, that in turn gave it something that Mario 64 did not have. The ability to ease into this new era of 3D gaming.
The only condition left is that the game has to flow. And, I don't know about everybody else, but to me? Crash 1 absolutely flows. A big mistake that many failed attempts at mascot platformers committed at the time, often fell to the level designers having next to no grasp of what makes a platformer flow. Their solution was to either make everything a maze, to create a needless amount of open space, make their levels three or four times as long than they needed to be, or, worst case scenario: Copy and paste. It's a relief then to say that Crash 1 avoids just about every single one of these trappings, albeit I can think of at least two levels that go on for maybe twice as long as they should. Yes, hello, I see you, Sunset Vista. Aside from this, I do think that the highly streamlined nature of each level allowed Naughty Dog to gain a solid grasp on how to escalate the challenge, starting off from the first stage that takes you through a simple and cozy variety of setpieces, before slowly ramping up the precision required from you over the course of time. The game is notorious for getting pretty difficult in its 2nd half. Unfair, though? Not at all. Everything comes together with practice. Part of what helps make this practice possible is that that extra lifes are extremely abundant throughout. So abundant, that part of the fun of Crash 1 is seeing just how quickly I can get up to 99 lifes, which generally, I max out about 40% through the game.
In the end, all you're doing is walking, jumping, and spin attacking enemies and crates alike. It's a horrendously basic gameplay loop, but it's made engaging through the skill and reaction timing it demands out of you. There is no such thing as going through the motions here. The stages are constantly testing you to stop and think about the right positioning and timing. This is coupled with a strong amount of level variety - far stronger than games like Crash 2 or 3 even - where level themes are at most repeated only once, but as you start getting closer to the end of the game, plenty of stages start introducing level themes that are unique to themselves, and never repeated anywhere else. Each level theme introduces you to a new set of obstacles, enemies, and at times changes the camera perspective to shake things up. Some levels are 3D only, some are 2.5D, one's a top-down exploratory stage, and of couse there's the iconic boulder chase stages. Though graphics may not be everything, visual variety is important to keep aspects of the gameplay fresh, and considering Crash 1's simplicity, these are highly important additions to retain engagement in what sort of challenge awaits you next.
Alright, now let's balance things out here. The criticisms. Crash 1 sports two stages themed around riding a hog. A neat way to keep in line with the goal of variety, but the hitboxes on these seriously needed another pass. You know the fucking bit I'm talking about if you've played Crash 1, the obstacle with the rotating pole thing? The one where everytime you jump over it, you clench your ass over the 50% chance that it might just kill you no matter how precisely you timed your jump? Yeah, that, and the one part where you gotta zig-zag left and right to break open all the crates, but god is just begging for you to somehow miss one of them so that way he finds us too amusing to be deemed a mistake. The silver lining is that though these sequences were spiritually brought back in Crash 2, they were vastly improved on.
Speaking of "breaking open the crates" and "mistakes", let's get into Crash 1's biggest mistake, the one that pertains to completionists. So, there are all these crates scattered across every stage. You bounce or you break them open so you can get the wumpa fruit, you collect 100 wumpa fruit, you earn a life. The act of breaking the crates is pretty satisfying in itself, but get this: if you break ALL the crates in a stage (not counting the ones found in the bonus levels), you get a gem at the end of it. Get all gems in every stage, you unlock an alternate ending. Ooh, it's a collect-a-thon now! How fun! What's more, there are certain stages you won't be able to immediately do a 100% crate run on... but there are these special Colored Gems, which unlock new paths in previous stages. Sometimes it's just these very small rooms that contain the remaining crates you need, but other times they're total extensions of the level, about 1-3 more minutes of platforming that you wouldn't be able to see otherwise. In the end, the game is still pretty short in spite of these additions, so this all sounds like a pretty nice way to appeal to collectible fans, right?
Okay, now imagine if they fucking hated you though, and made it so aside from having to obtain all crates in a level, you also have to perform a no-death run. Die once in a stage, and all those crates you collected won't mean anything, the game will simply not grant you the gem. Why????? Well, I know why. It was to prevent rentals. This sort of needless artificial difficulty was the justification to pad out game length. If you're just playing the game casually without worrying about the gems, you will objectively have a better time! Otherwise however, going for the gems effectively means that you will be abolishing all checkpoints. Every death will be followed by the two loading screens required to restart each stage. I have gotten good enough at Crash Bandicoot 1 to be perfectly capable of clearing a 100% run. I do not expect many people will have the patience to do the same. The no-death requirement makes this a stupidly stressful ordeal.
Which is why... I'm tempted to recommend that newcomers should play the remake version of Crash 1, found in the N.Sane Trilogy. They've done some very commendable things to streamline the 100%ing of the first game, primarily by removing the no-death requirement almost completely. The only exception is that you still have to do a no-death run for the 6 levels that contain the Colored Gems, but that's a way more reasonable compromise over having to do a no-death run over the whole goddamn game. There's just one catch... the remake is infamously known for its questionable hitboxes, which make certain levels that demand precision far harder to beat than they are in the original. I've gotten used to these physics myself personally, but far too many horror tales are told about the bridge level.
This all leads to the following conundrum: There is no definitive way to play Crash Bandicoot 1. The original is tight and precise to play, but its 100% requirements are awful. The remake makes these 100% requirements much better, but the gameplay loses the tightness and precision in the process. As a long-time fan, my personal recommendation is that you should do a casual run of the original Crash 1. But that's only if you're really interested in a chronological look in the series. If you're willing to go out of order, then I wholeheartedly recommend the original Crash 2. If you thought Crash 1 was too simple for your tastes, Crash 2 expands on the moveset in some very fun ways, makes its difficulty more accessible, and its 100% requirements considerably more doable. Worst case scenario if you can't emulate, the remake is generally fine for what it does, though it does require some adjusting.
Regardless, I have a lot of thoughts about the other games, but... I think this is where I'll wrap it up for now. Crash 1 is not incredible. I was so swept up in writing the rest of this review, I didn't even mention the native american stereotyping going on here, which yeah, I could certainly fuckin' do without. It is not the Mario killer and it sure as shit ain't gonna get anywhere close to the level of Mario 64. But it doesn't need to. It never, ever needed to. It is the simplicity of Crash 1 that I adore. That total confidence in delivering a platformer that everybody just gets instantly, was Crash 1's biggest strength in an era where companies tried to deliver unfamiliar experiences all the time. A lot of it must've been really overwhelming to people who had a harder time adapting. And it's thanks to Crash that there was still some speck of appreciation for the older era of gaming to be found. Innovation is a great thing. But there are times when I just wanna go backwards, to see that 3 hours is all I need to feel completely satisfied with a game.
Just as long as, y'know, you price it accordingly.
cowboyjosh
1 month ago