We live in an age of
remakes and remasters. It seems as though every few months we're hearing about
another remake of a classic game coming to modern consoles. As someone who has
yet to find a limit to the sheer quantity of nostalgia they are willing to tolerate
I personally cant get enough of these games. Halo, Fable, Shadow of the
Colossus, it was really just a matter of time until the Original PlayStation's
two biggest Mascots got their fifteen minutes in the spotlight. In 2017 a
ground up remake of the first three Crash Bandicoot games was released and it
was developed by a studio that was more familiar with Crash than most people
realized. When we look back on the Crash Bandicoot games the original four that
were made by Naughty Dog are the ones that spring to everyone's mind, after
that it all becomes a blur of indistinguishable shovelware on a downward
trajectory; but if we sift through that shovelware there are a few gems that
prove that Vicarious Visions has been the true Naughty Dog successor for nearly
two decades.
Welcome welcome
welcome everyone welcome back to LegalSpeak a ColdNorth production. I'm
TheLawMorris and this is the video essay series in which I get to talk about
the games I've been playing and what I think of the medium as a whole. Having
been born in 1990 I was the perfect age to dive deep into the original Crash
Bandicoot trilogy and having always been big into handhelds I was eagerly
awaiting the day when Crash would make his big debut on the Game Boy Advance.
This week I played through Crash Bandicoot: The Huge Adventure again for the
first time since it was originally released in February of 2002. So it's time
to talk about Crash Bandicoot: The Huge Adventure.
When Sony was making
their first foray into the video game industry and attempting to go toe to toe
with their own countrymen who had stabbed them in the back just a few years
earlier it was clear that they would need a mascot to unite behind. Cue Naughty
Dog and the jean short wearing orange bandicoot. The first three Crash games
were honestly fantastic and in my opinion have held up better than games
starring a certain mustached plumber. Platforming was precise and very
difficult at times, music was extremely memorable, the art style was so
perfectly nineties but still holds just oozes cool today, and the character
design was unique. The original crash games offered a perfect level of cool
that was clearly meant for an older crowd than Mario without feeling to try
hard like Sonic. They were a technical marvel at the time and proved to be one
of the many silver bullets Sony would need to take on Nintendo.
Vicarious Visions remade the games from the
ground up and released all three on one disc in 2017. While the art style feels
a bit more on the family friendly side than the originals edge it still
captures the essence of what Crash was supposed to look like. If the remakes
prove anything it's that while they are a bit simplistic by modern standards
they absolutely hold up as timeless platformers. And those first three games
plus the 1999 cart racer Crash Team Racing are the ones that everyone thinks of
when they think back on the golden years of Crash Bandicoot. But Vicarious
Visions' Huge Adventure should absolutely be held in the same regard.
Crash Bandicoot: The
Huge Adventure is a shockingly accurate approximation of its home console
counterparts. As it turns out 2017 wasn’t the first time Vicarious Visions had
demonstrated that they were capable of nearly perfectly capturing the essence
of Crash. The studio took everything that was essential in making a Crash game
and scaled it all down to fit on a Game Boy Advance. The sprite art looks so
good that it could be a passable lie to tell someone that the sprites came
first and were later converted to polygons for the 3D capabilities of the
PlayStation 1. Environments look incredible, animations are spot on and the
music is pitch perfect. But where The Huge Adventure really nails the Crash
Bandicoot brand is in how it feels. Movement feels weighty and significant
while not feeling to fast. All of Crash's go to powerup moves earned throughout
each game are present and effectively implemented into levels. The game does a
fantastic job of emulating the feeling of momentum carrying through from a
running jump into the landing. When combined with the stellar visuals adapted
for the less powerful hardware and the feeling of the gameplay The Huge
Adventure could easily pass as the original Crash game that was released on
some non existent 16bit generation of PlayStation that preceded the PlayStation
1.
While all the
elements of an excellent Crash game are present there are some points where
Vicarious Visions had to make some obvious concessions to pack the game onto a
32 megabyte cartridge. Crash games have never shyed away from recycling
environments to save space and development time but The Huge Adventure is
easily the worst offender of the actually good Crash games. I felt as though I
was seeing the same space station, ice cavern, and jungle landscape on repeat
throughout the entire game. Another place where The Huge Adventure struggles to
keep pace with its console counterparts is in level variation. Despite
Vicarious Visions doing an excellent job in scaling everything down there are
some level types that simply don’t work on the Game Boy Advance. Crash started
off code named "Sonic's ass" as a reference to the perspective
Naughty Dog was pursuing, and that "Sonic's ass" perspective became a
major differentiator for the series. But that iconic perspective is almost
entirely absent in The Huge Adventure. The limitations forced upon Vicarious
Visions by the hardware they were developing for meant that almost every level
is either side scrolling while running, side scrolling while swimming, or
running toward the camera (a perspective that is unanimously praised by players
everywhere.) From time to time there would be a bullet hell plane based level
but those were more frustrating than they were relieving. The Huge Adventure
was Vicarious Visions proving that the cracks in the armor were a product of
the hardware not the creators.
After Naughty Dog
and Universal parted ways the Crash Bandicoot IP stayed with Universal and was
later acquired by Activision. In the years since that departure there have been
many developers that have taken a crack at recreating the magic of those first
four Naughty Dog games. Traveller's Tales had their chance in the early 2000's,
Radical took over in the late 2000's, Eurocom and Dimps were both responsible
for some spin off party games, and even Toys for Bob had a chance at
implementing crash into their popular toys to life Skylanders series. But of
everyone who has tried nobody but Vicarious Visions has been able to even come
close to the high water mark set by Naughty Dog. Not only were they responsible
for the GBA games but they were the ones that brought Crash back from the dead
with the N-Sane trilogy AND they added to that with their own original level
via a free update that if you didn’t know was original you would have thought
was just one you didn’t remember as well as others. Vicarious Visions is
obviously the single developer that has the best understanding of what Crash
should be in the 2020's and the most capable of making a good crash game. So
please Activision, please! Just put Vicarious Visions on an all new Crash game
and call it Crash Bandicoot 4!
So while the vast
majority of people remember there being four really great Crash games there's a
small group of us that loved that damn Bandicoot on the little purple portable
as well. And while those games were excellent they're more relevant than ever
as the case for Vicarious Visions to take over and revive the mainline Crash
Bandicoot series. Vicarious didn’t invent Crash but 18 years ago they proved to
us all that they really understand Crash.
So what do you
think? Are you in favor of a Crash Bandicoot 4 or am I just shouting into the
void? Let me know in the comments down below. And while you're down there don’t
forget to subscribe for a new video every week! You can see everything we do
including both of our podcasts all in one spot over at ColdNorthPro.com. I'll
be back next week talking about something else entirely I havent really decided
yet so until then just go play some games.
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