The problem that faced the wunderkinds at Naughty Dog, as well as their contemporaries, was one that gaming has yet to see again. A new dimension had come into the mix, and no one was quite sure how to approach a 3D rendered game. Super Mario 64, which would beat the original Crash Bandicoot by a few months in Japan, and follow by a few days in America, had made its own statement. Controlled cameras - even in such a rudimentary state - was the preferred way to go. That was because, and entirely because, Super Mario 64 went for open(ish) world exploration to great results. Crash Bandicoot tried something different, something that wouldn't really be tried again to any such success: why not keep doing what works, but with a twist?
Crash Bandicoot took the classic sidescroller and modified it for the third dimension. You could run forward, backward, or sideways, but with one direction in focus at a time. This solved one of the most notorious questions of early 3D game design, which was what to do with the camera. Crash decided to use an "on rails" design, where the camera would move on a programmed track depending on where Crash was along the path. What was left now was how Crash played.
Crash's success, for all three of the original games by Naughty Dog, was in their platforming gauntlets and the simple pleasure of smashing stuff. Much like his name, Crash likes to break into crates, giving the game a secondary objective. If you break every crate on a level (without dying in the first game, making it much harder), you earn a grey gem, used to unlock the secret ending of any given game. Likewise, you can find colored gems on certain levels to unlock secret paths to other gems on other levels. The general goal of the original Crash was just to beat the levels in their linear sequence until getting to the final boss, with other bosses marking significant chapters along the way. For the two followups, Crash had pockets of five or so levels to tackle in any order, each with a purple crystal to collect somewhere along the main path. Collecting all of the crystals for a given section would unlock the boss, and the boss would unlock the next section. The purple crystals were a meaningless addition, since they required no effort other than making it to the halfway point of the level, but the nonlinear approach to the latter games was much appreciated.
Crash's moveset also saw improvement across the games. The second game added a slide and belly flop, the former of which adds some much needed verbs to Crash's repertoire, the latter of which doesn't really add that much except for a new type of box. The third game introduces unlockable moves, attained after beating a boss, and they are largely a waste. Double jump, super slam, and the extra spin attack are rarely tested throughout the game, and do little else except make the game easier superficially.
Crash Bandicoot 3 in particular seems to be a step down from the other two in a lot of ways, an opinion that can be easily obfuscated by the many visual and environmental improvements on the game. The new plot device that allows a level to be set all across time is a great idea, one that lets us play levels in interesting and varied locales, far more so than any other Crash game. But with that came another kind of variety: the "gimmick" level. Crash has always had levels that intentionally deviated from the normal walk-and-jump levels, whether it be a level where you ride a warthog or polar bear, or a level where you run away from a giant boulder. In Crash 3, they turn this up to an annoying degree. Racing levels never quite feel as good as you think they are supposed to, usually halting the pace once they become the bottleneck required to reach the stage's boss. Naughty Dog would later prove their chops at racing games with Crash Team Racing, the Bandicoot rendition of Mario Kart, and maybe the best Mario Kart rip-off you can find, but here it feels undercooked. The swimming levels suffer a bit as well from pacing, but control fine and are above average on the whole for water levels in a platformer. Crash Bandicoot 3is particularly disappointing because of how much it feels they were trying to prove something, when the formula had largely been perfected in Crash Bandicoot 2.
The Playstation's roster of platformers is rather good, and even among great company such as the Spyro series or Rayman, Crash stands rather tall. But that fact may be a bit hard to swallow if you are experiencing these games for the first time in the N Sane Trilogy. The remasters have received a lot of flak since release, and though I went in with a skeptical mind toward some of these criticisms (the internet loves to complain, especially the gaming culture), it is unfortunately true. Hit boxes are wrong, and although I cannot prove myself the "pill shape" hit box theory, it makes sense both in that 3D game engines default to this usually (Unity, for example, uses a pill shaped hit boxes, even when a square one is selected when making a 2D game, requiring programmed raycasting in order to properly simulate a square hit box - from experience), and in my experience with the game. You seem to slip off of objects you shouldn't, especially in the first game, which has bouncing turtles required for some levels that never feel like you can hit it square on consistently. The hit box, however, I can almost live with. What killed me more than any other thing was the particle effects system. It looked pretty good overall, but I found it obscured the hit boxes more often than not. Lasers on the ground would bloom, but the edge of their hit boxes wouldn't be accurate to how they looked. The same could be said for Cortex's phaser-gun, which would look as though it was passing by me but I'd still be turned to ash. Problems like these did exist in the original, but not nearly to this difficult to discern degree. The game as it is is a poor representation of one of the tightest platformers on the original Playstation, one of the primary reasons the game is so well thought of today. The point of a remaster, not to belabor the point, should be to at least preserve what made the original great, it's core elements, but here the remaster falls flat.
N Sane Trilogy is a good looking game, though. With the exception of some of the bosses' fur effects, which looked a bit sloppy, the game looks good. There are moments here and there, annoyances more than criticisms, where the games have been made a little cartoonier, and they can build up over a playthrough. One notable example would be the monitors of Dr. Cortex near the middle of the original Crash, which would look ominous and eerie in the original game, but now look like an almost nondescript loop of Dr. Cortex moving his hands. There's the impression that perhaps the developers were trying to create consistency throughout the games that wasn't there in the original, as Dr. Cortex is more of a comedic foil than anything intimidating in the latter two games, but it may be giving the developers too much credit. There was a lot of work put into this remaster, but it was work with a somewhat shallow goal. The games do not retain the magic the original games put forth, mostly because of mechanical issues throughout that make the games far more frustrating and unresponsive than they used to be. It did its job allowing me to play Crash on Steam, but sometimes I think I can stomach a lot of my grievances more than most in order to play a game where I want to (as proof: I have 40 plus hours of Ark on Switch, debatably the worst port I've ever played). It may not be worth it to you.
Crash Bandicoot
8.5
Crash Bandicoot 2: Wrath of Cortex
9.0
Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped
7.5
Crash Bandicoot N Sane Trilogy
6.0
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