I dont like to talk about common games, but sometimes i do an exception. Thats why i also skip some important aspects in my reviews because i want to talk about things most dont. If i dont do that, it would just be a copy paste. The first Crash game is also pretty much criticized these days for not aged very well, and while i agree that its the weakest in the trilogy, i feel like people doesnt give the credit it really deserves, but lets calm down a bit.
For one, i think it manages to be, to my knowledge, to be the first 3d game in history to match or even surprass the graphics made by prerender stuff (like Donkey Kong Country) or even tech demos made in super computers. Most people may know all of the clever programming that made this game possible on the first place. I feel people dont give enough credit to how ahead of its time the PS1 Crash games looked. You had everything, z buffer and texture jittering almost fixed, dynamic lightning, facial animation, a great amount of polygonal density present at all time, basically thanks to the fixed camera and focusing all of the poly count available in a reduced space, plus some of the best optimization ever made for a videogame would make some graphical techniques unthinkable to be possible even on a console not made for that, on real time at 30 fps on a 2mb ram machine... Crazy. In comparison, the best looking game on the most powerful platform at the time, which was obviously PC, was arguably Quake 1, which needed at least 8 mb of ram, a decent graphics card and a Pentium, miles more powerful than the PS1 MIPS, and all of that for a game that had blurry brown textures and characters that walk in slow motion and zero expression. Dont get me wrong, i think Quake 1 still is very impressive for 1996, and a top 3 in terms of graphics, but Crash 1 was just in another level. Honestly, if nowadays a game could do photorealism by doing fixed cameras and run on something as old as a pentium 4, by all means do it.
Obviously all of those miracles wouldnt be anything without a good gameplay, because i swear, the amount of times i played an impressive trash game is to write a book, but fortunately Naughty Dog did know how to make the gameplay addictive. It may seem less revolutionary that something like Mario 64 at first glance, but you should treat Crash 1 like an evolution to old 2d platformers. The 3d in Crash is used in a different way. Not to give you exploration (even though sometimes you have more than one path to go), but to give you a new layer of gameplay. Of course we all know this game has different camera perspectives for each level, but how important is that? Well, a lot. The boulder levels for example kind of reminds me to a scripted sequence in a modern game. Different perspectives can make a level to look better in the right hands. The boxes also makes the gameplay very stimulating by making you control your jumps or your spins at times. Yeah, we all know they screw the save system and the one life one run is still unfair, but honestly... the game isnt that hard? I mean, it still is very challenging for a first playthrough, but is nowhere near as hard as many games of that era or before. Accessibility was always a thing for Naughty Dog, and Crash 1, while not perfect, i think still gives a good margin of error in most levels.
I honestly could talk about more things... but... it would be repeating what people did for years and i would be lying if i say that i made this review to talk about something more than the graphics. Nowadays a bunch of polygons on screen may not seem much, but i think this game still looks very impressive thanks to the unique artstyle, inspired by a lot of sources (seriously, Zembillas is a genius and if you were an artist you should feel inspired by its art), and its optimization techniques that could theoretically be used in a modern game in the right hands. Making those enviroments divided in multiple pieces was probably a headache, i couldnt imagine how much the devs were suffering by making this game. But something no one could deny is that, it doesnt look like a PS1 game. I mean, is so impressive that even the 3d renders made to promote the game arent too different from the true thing, thats how good it is. The first time i saw where an actual game, could be used as a tech demo to showcase the power of a console. Go away T-Rex and Batoidea, Crash Bandicoot will be packaged on your disk along with you.
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