Crashing The PS4 Party

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 – 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 Pro-powered spectacle. Pad in hand, we eagerly chase those famous blue board shorts 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.