CRASH BANDICOOT N. SANE TRILOGY
PlayStation’s original icon is almost ready to meet the world – again. Ian Dean gets to grips with Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy
The Sonic Ass Game’ was the name scrawled on scraps of paper around Naughty Dog’s offices back when Crash was a glint in the eye of creators Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin. It was a gag – a game where you spend all your time looking at Sonic’s cheeks
“CRASH HAS US HOOKED… YOU DON’T COMPLETE CRASH BANDICOOT, YOU BEAT IT.”
Bringing Crash back has proved a technical challenge for the team at Vicarious Visions. Director, designer and writer Dan Tanguay explains: “The only things we’re technically reusing are the original level geometry. We use those to decide the level layouts, the placement of objects and a basic form of collision. We’ve also been able to reuse some basic camera splines but we’ve had to recreate those, too.” – that would come to define PlayStation as the home of 3D games. The moment Crash dragged his blocky backside off N. Sanity Beach and ran into the TV screen changed everything. And it still impresses us today.
Remade in 4K, every inch of that famous beach and beyond is now a beautiful, fur-coated, PS4 Propowered spectacle. Pad in hand, we eagerly chase those famous blue boardshorts into the jungle on the promise of wumpa fruit and good times. Woolly memories are soon becoming new experiences once more. This is a faster, smoother game, and yet it’s how our aging brain always remembered playing Crash Bandicoot, as a lively, living Looney Tune.
Then something happens that takes us aback. We’re 20 minutes into our umpteenth attempt to 100% Heavy Machinery’s Tawna Bonus stage, a side-on polygon-perfect feat of platforming that challenges us to bounce across a chasm using breakable crates as a bridge. We’ve cracked crates, bounced back and forth, timed jumps… and fallen to our death, too many times to count. “Stupid game,” is muttered under our breath, shortly followed by “one more go”. Crash has us hooked. And then it happens: the words ‘GAME OVER’ fade onto the screen. We haven’t seen those words in a long time.
Dan Tanguay, director, designer and writer at Vicarious Visions chuckles at our marsupial misfortune, saying: “We really wanted it to be challenging. Crash Bandicoot games certainly weren’t easy games, but within that challenge they were still very compelling.” The draw of Crash was the desire to keep playing, collecting and exploring. You don’t complete Crash Bandicoot, you beat it. And if you couldn’t beat it, the pad was passed to a friend’s waiting hands, sticky with anticipation.
“On the other side,” interjects Tanguay, “we need to make sure that it is very easy for players to pick up and play this game.”
Thanks to Vicarious Visions’ striving for balance, many fans will notice some subtle changes to the three Crash Bandicoot games being offered in the N. Sane Trilogy remake. As they unpicked the code and level design of the games, the devs could see clearly how Naughty Dog had developed the series from an exceptional yet uncompromising debut to the impeccable Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped. Over time Naughty Dog grew into its games,
making boss battles more readable and challenges more accessible. So why not make some changes? Why
not bring Crash Bandicoot: Cortex Strikes Back in line with Warped?
“The largest number of tweaks we’ve made is to the notion of making the game easier to understand,” explains Tanguay. “While I think some of the bosses are fairly easy once you’ve figured them out, there’s a certain learning curve to some of them, I think they aren’t as readable as more modern bosses. If you look at some of the bosses from the first game, Crash Bandicoot, compared to the third game, Warped, the boss designs themselves are much easier to understand than in Warped than they are in the first game. So the notion of readability and pick-upand-play has been a really big focus, and we’ve actually tried to take lessons that Naughty Dog learned
OPM: What are your personal memories of the first Crash Bandicoot game? DT:
The game, at release, was a technological marvel but beyond that it was just a beautiful game to look at. I feel bad saying this for other PS1 games, but hardly any other PS1 games could compete when Crash came out. It was just stunning to look at, and when you picked up and played it, it felt as if you were playing a cartoon. Really, I don’t know if that had truly been achieved before.
It was very important to us that this game would also feel very impressive. From a visual point of view, from an audio point of view, certainly it won’t ever recapture that technological marvel standing that the original Crash had but we can’t scrimp and scrape in any sort of form, we need to put our best artists on the game and really capture the beauty and the lushness of those original games.
OPM: Are you surprised how excited gamers are for the return of these games? DT:
I’m not surprised, I know there are a number of folks out there who are huge fans of Crash – we have a number of them on our team. What has been surprising is just the amount of people, I think that people forget how much of an impact Crash Bandicoot had back in the day. These games had a reach that I think a lot of people these days underestimate.
OPM: What does Naughty Dog think of the N. Sane Trilogy? DT:
When we actually had a demo we wanted to show, we went to Naughty Dog first. This is a game that’s near and dear to them and we wanted to make sure that we had their blessing before we released it to the public. Sony took it to Naughty Dog, and Naughty Dog sat down and played it and they were blown away. A lot of them said it was like a great trip down memory lane and it was just as if they were playing a new version of something that they themselves had created.
over the course of making those three games, and apply them universally to everything.”
The decision to tamper with the DNA of some of the most-loved games in PlayStation’s canon, and to take on Naughty Dog, is a brave one, but Vicarious Visions is doing it from a place of respect. Tanguay says Crash Bandicoot was “an inspiration” to him. “I started my career in the games industry in 1997, which is about the same time as the second game came out,” he says. “I found it fun to play but I also found it, and Naughty Dog’s work, to be incredibly inspiring for my career, so I have a very nostalgic view on Crash.”
With this at the forefront of all decisions, the aim is to make “simple modifications that really don’t change the overall dynamic of the gameplay, so much as make it a little truer to what the intent of the gameplay was originally,” explains Tanguay. Crash himself will always shine. Whether on PS1 or PS4, the Warner Bros animation style and bushy Marx Brothers eyebrows can’t fail to make you smile. Crash’s grin hints at a devilish attitude behind the cartoon facade; he’s a naughty child caught with his hand in the wumpa jam jar. And on PS4 he shines. We’re told the game has ‘been rebuilt from the ground up’. We imagine Crash raising a furry brow; this is videogame marketing talk almost as old as the marsupial himself. Yet for once we can see the work, and the dev team’s sheer love for the character, up on screen. You can see the fur bristle on Crash as he flips and slides and scratches himself. There’s a new weight to the animation too, which makes every jump feel satisfying – Crash can now land on platforms with tiptoe-perfect precision.
“I think the biggest challenge up to this point has been recapturing that original feel of the gameplay itself,” says Tanguay, adding that the team has taken an unorthodox approach with these remakes: “We don’t actually have the original code to work from, and even if we did it would be hard to port into our engine. So we’re really just working from the original level geometry at this point, and thankfully we have that, as that’s really been kind of our guiding star.”
THE EXTRA SMILE
Practically, this has meant recreating all three games’ assets, from characters to environments, with only the merest of guides. The result is a beautiful game. Levels such as Cortex Strikes Back’s Hang Eight practically glow on PS4. There’s a subtle ripple of water beneath Crash’s jet board, and we can make out his white, wide-eyed excitement mid-spin and splash as we hit a ramp and send the orange furball soaring in a blur of texture and colour. There are tiny things too: the smooth swoosh of the wumpa fruit collection as it gathers pace across the screen, bumping up our tally with a satisfying ping. The sound demands we collect more.
Controls are perfectly poised, too. We can go original-flavour Crash and use the D-pad, or opt for the new DualShock stick controls, bringing the game up to date. Crash can now
“CRASH CAN NOW JUMP AND LAND ON PLATFORMS WITH TIPTOE-PERFECT PRECISION.”