Crash Bandicoot is crashing to the PS4

Crash Bandicoot is back, and he’s looking good!

Crash Bandicoot The N. Sane Trilogy features sparkly new versions of Crash Bandicoot, Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back, and Crash Bandicoot: Warped. It was revealed back in July that Activision would be celebrating the 20th anniversary of Crash Bandicoot in a big way, by releasing remastered versions of the first three games on PS4.

According to the info to come out of today’s PlayStation Experience keynote, as well as their follow-up post on the PlayStation Blog, with the original developer Naughty Dog busily working away on the upcoming Last of Us 2, Activision subsidiary Vicarious Visions is taking the reigns on this remaster, or what they are choosing to call a  ‘remaster plus‘.  Having developed Crash Bandicoot: The Huge Adventure for the Gameboy Advance, the team at Vicious Visions aren’t novices in this field, and have rebuilt the classic Crash levels from the ground up, being sure to add some new elements along the way.

It’s been a process which has taken time, dedication, and a lot of work; after all, these are 20 year old games, and technology has advanced somewhat since then.  But the team at Vicious Visions had a clear strategy in bringing the beloved PSX hero into the latest generation.

“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. We studied original concept art and commercials for inspiration. And we went even further back to understand the material that originally inspired Naughty Dog, including Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Looney Tunes. 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.”

According to Vicarious Visions, it wouldn’t be a remaster plus though without some fancy new features being added into the mix, and honestly the examples they have listed sound like pretty good ones if you’ve ever played the original games.

• Unified checkpoint & save game system. This includes manual and auto-saving. (Yes, the first game now has a proper save game system!)
• Unified menu system. An example below of the updated pause menu
• Time Trials for all three games!

But this doesn’t sound like all they have planned for us in Crash Bandicoot The N. Sane Trilogy,  and I for one can’t wait to find out what else might be in this remaster plus.