(Note: Sorry for my absence. Not that you care anyway.)
Oh this game... Oh.. this game. Most people my game have endured the frustration of trying to complete this game. 100% was god damn impossible and I hated how hard it was. Was it a bad game though? Hell no! Well.. It was good although I played Crash Bandicoot: Warped. So the controls were a little stiff, but for 1995. This game was the absolute shit, but why was this game the shit? or at least "meh" for me as a kid. Well we will find out. So put on your orange hats and blue shorts as we go into the depths of the first 1995 Crash Bandicoot.
As you were told a paragraph ago; This game was released in 1995. Quite an early PS1 game which I'm surprised that I owned since I was born that young. Wow. This game is 19 years old.. making you feel old and depressed yet? Good, because that's what I'm here for. Anyway The series, originally exclusive to the Sony, was created by some amazing people called Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin during their stay at the drooling piece of fantastic game company, Naughty Dog. Naughty Dog was great in the old years and it's sad to say that since they left this orange monster, The series just went downhill (Although Crash and Bash wasn't that bad of a game for a first go)
As with all games in the same era; The story was simple and easy to understand. The end goal: save your girlfriend, because we are a faithful Bandicoot. In the prologue. It is shown with the evil Dr Cortex as he experiments with a bandicoot but it goes wrong and Crash escapes, leaving him to save the girlfriend he left behind. The setting at the first few levels is the Wumpa islands, where you must travel to various environments to find Dr Cortex and save your girlfriend. It's a fairly simple goal to grasp and even with the lack of speech with Crash. The visuals are shown clearly what we are aiming to achieve.
Like Spyro. It's hard to grasp the visuals and graphics with a positive outlook as I am a little biased as I have been around more modern games with higher quality. Crash Bandicoot wasn't a bad looking game at it's time. Heck, it was more than that if you compare them with other games of that year. The infamous polygons are there but don't ruin the game in anyway, and there are moments in the game where the old PS1 look shines through. It wasn't as good as the 2nd one and the 3rd one, but it still had a comedic charm to the graphics. The music was the thing that was great. It was bouncy, energetic and really felt like part of the Bandicoot experience.
Now this is where the I have a few problems with the first Crash Bandicoot which the sequels did a little bit better. Crash had the basic move set for all platformers, give or take some control differences between other games. You could spin and jump onto boxes, and move about with the D-pad, and there was no Analog. You were restricted to using the d-pad. For you youngsters, here's a little PS1 trivia for you. Back in the day of retro gaming, there were older controllers that didn't even have an analog stick. This was due to the old age of the game and it was extremely hard to get used to after years and years of using the analog. This wasn't the game's fault so I won't reduce marks for it. Next issue I had with this game was not being able to save at a regular basis. You had to either collect all the boxes in one level (in one go) or complete a bonus challenge. This was horridly tedious for me as a kid and it was so frustrating having all your work wasted away by a cheap death then finding yourself miles away from your previous level. Yes: It does work with adding to the challenge of the game, but I feel as if this was purposely planned then it's quite a cheap way of making you play a long ago to make up for those deaths. I can also see how this also helps players learn to value their lives but if you die from a cheap death then it sucks to be you (considering that you can only get hit once). It was fairly easy to die, although you could pick up useful "Aku Aku" masks to let you take an extra hit, if you collect three of them then you are invulnerable for a few seconds or so, which was a VERY important item to collect.
This game was a good game with a bad way of saving and primal controls. I guess simple is better but the other two games are just better in saving and controls. I can't say this game was bad because it was from 1995. It was amazing at it's time but the primal controls make it age horribly. If you're a fan then I can't blame you for loving this game, and even to me this game brought back so many good memories of screaming at my television and throwing my controller at the wall. If you want a real challenge and you're a hardcore gamer, then try beating this game, since I know I won't.
No comments:
Post a Comment