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Crash Bandicoot: An oral history

polygon.com

41–42 of 42 posts

Re: Crash Bandicoot: An oral history

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me you are implying that somebody put extended crunch time on Andy Gavin and he had to put up wit it? Please look up who is he.

Not really the point. Read the section OP quoted, "YOU JUST DIDN'T LEAVE". Do any of those people sound like crunch was fun to them? They liked working on the game, and some of them reminisce about the crunch time like old soldiers telling war stories, but I don't see any positive adjectives in there. About the nicest thing anybody said was "when you're young you don't feel it that much," which is pretty faint praise…

I replied to the comment quoting Andy specifically. Other people might be having different opinions. I am sure there are people who hate crunch and some at the Naughty Dog might be them. There are tons of such people in EA or working on the Aplle's factory in China for sure but I am not discussing their opinions, which were not mentioned in this thread.

Re: Crash Bandicoot: An oral history

#42
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd agree to some extent - there was far too much focus on "frustration" based gameplay for my liking. Some of the levels are simply much too difficult for more casual players. I don't think I personally finished the game without using one of those cheat memory cards that gave you 99 lives etc, which was never the case with any Mario instalment. I still remember it fondly though, and visually it's aged incredibly wel…

Most of the frustration I remember had to do with the lack of depth perception, especially in Warped (which I remember best). It was certainly a fun game - I'd spend hours on end playing it - but it was also frustrating to be unable to properly judge exactly how far Crash needs to jump lest he plummet into a bottomless pit (or a stack of nitro boxes).

Probably accurate. And based on the quip from the article where the original nickname for the game was "Sonic's Ass" the rest falls into place.

Basically, I remember the main character kind of just hovering in place, and performing slow levitating jumps, while the scenery flies by.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xK-h4M4Aetg

Looks like my memory is halfway correct, since I forgot about the side-scrolling levels, which I thought were from one of the follow-up sequels, and not the original game.

Ugh, the music and sound effects. Still horrible.

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