Crash Bandicoot is officially back!
Vicarious Vision gave us a tentative release date for The Crash Bandicoot N Sane Trilogy at the recent Playstation Experience, and with it came a beautiful new look at a classic.
The comeback of the infamous marsupial was announced way back at E3 with a teasing shadow walk, but fans received no hard evidence of what was to come. Now the information released on the PS Blog shows it’s been an uphill battle for the studio, but they have a fantastic looking “remaster plus” slated for release in 2017.
However, as brilliant as the game is shaping up to look, to call this a true remaster would be dubious. VV revealed that much of the original code used by the Naughty Dog team 20 years ago was verging on unusable – but this allowed them to take a unique approach to rebuilding the game. According to the team, they spent a good portion of time breaking down the essence of Crash Bandicoot:
“The first step in our remaster plus was to truly understand what made the Naughty Dog games special and why fans still love them to this day. The best way to understand a game is to play it, and boy, did we play the Crash games. We played them to the point that we broke controllers from mashing the jump button too much…”
They also stated a desire to remain true to the level design, and took their experiences playing the game to the next level.
“With all of that in mind, we started our work. Using the original level geometry from Naughty Dog as a guide, we rebuilt the Crash gameplay from scratch, capturing its simplicity and precision. As the levels began to take shape, we layered in our own lush and zany art, animation, and audio.”
Overall, I feel fairly impressed with the effort being spent on this remaster. Crash Bandicoot was an integral piece of my early gaming life. The levels were difficult for my age at the time, and the game was lovable and engaging. Looks like Vicarious Vision is trying to bring us the Crash Bandicoot of our past with the graphics of our present. A tall order to be sure — here is hoping they pull it off.