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Crash Bandicoot Trilogy - U R Not Red E

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Re: Crash Bandicoot Trilogy - U R Not Red E

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Re: Crash Bandicoot Trilogy - U R Not Red E

Post by ano0maly »

I think this was my favorite of the Crash 3 videos so far. I enjoy the future settings and its music. The boss fight is pretty cool. And although I don't think there needed to be two tomb levels in the same world

for a total of four in the game

(I know world 4 is Egypt-themed but the world background doesn't mean much in this game), Tomb Wader stands out as something unique.

Other games like Super Mario World would have used something like a moving layer of lava or something, but this game used water layer, with additional height to take drowning into account. And the funny thing is that if Crash ducks down while at a safe height and gets submerged that way, he seems to be fine, but as soon as his feet go in too deep he just drowns without being able to do anything, even if there's something right next to him that he can use to come up to the surface. There's no concept of an air meter for him.

Since the water doesn't kill you until you go too deep, it's a fun challenge to try to exploit objects to stay high enough, including boxes, the wood slabs that try to push you into pits, and the shields raised by the lab assistants. Maybe you can slide to defeat the shield carriers, too?

For the boss fight, was the source of troubles with the controls the inverted vertical movement? When I played the game I flipped the vertical in the options so that up means going up and down means down. That made it intuitive and more convenient to handle.
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Re: Crash Bandicoot Trilogy - U R Not Red E

Post by The Hero Hartmut »

It's easy to miss that, in the second phase of the N. Gin battle, Pura links up with Coco's spaceship to increase her firepower. It's made more explicit in the remake.
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Re: Crash Bandicoot Trilogy - U R Not Red E

Post by ano0maly »

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The future levels have pretty dangerous obstacles, but Gone Tomorrow seems actually easier than Future Frenzy since you now have the bazooka. The exception is the robot that shoots three missiles, which you can't shoot right away. I'm surprised you dodged the missiles on the first try (and on all the encounters). You don't need to use the bazooka on it necessarily - a spin will do.

The racing level was funny when watching but wow is it janky. Weird ramp interaction, size of pit not being clear, car driver pushing you away midair.
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Re: Crash Bandicoot Trilogy - U R Not Red E

Post by tirakai »

I really don't know how we managed to get so many of those terrible bike levels. They feel awful to play, controlling more like the warthog from the first game than the vastly improved Polar and Pura levels, feel really awkward to get the gem on, and don't do anything different enough to justify having more than one.

The decision to have half the game be vehicle levels after 2 games popular for great platforming is an odd decision in itself but including so many slightly different versions of the same bad level with regressed controls is just baffling. They're my (second) least favourite levels of the whole classic trilogy.
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Re: Crash Bandicoot Trilogy - U R Not Red E

Post by CharlesSchulz »

This is the best crash game if you're not going for 100%. If you are going 100%, it becomes as much of a tedious mess as the previous two games, and the frequency with which vehicle levels appear and hinder your ability to get boxes makes crash 3 perhaps the most frustrating experience of the trilogy. If I were tasked with fixing this I don't know what I'd do, because box collecting is also kinda where the meat of the game is, and removing that leaves some bare bones platforming. But they could have at least made the box placement more tolerable in some of these vehicle levels and/or made it possible to turn your bike around, at the very least.
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Re: Crash Bandicoot Trilogy - U R Not Red E

Post by Blivsey »

At least the jetski is fun to speedrun. And you can turn around if you miss a box. And you don't have to beat an arbitrary goal just to progress in the game.

Honestly, I think that's my biggest issue with the bike levels. You have to get 1st to win the crystal and move on with the game, else it's back to the start of the level until you make it. Meaning you have to deal with the janky vehicle pathing and cycles galore and you HAVE to get really good at it because these levels are juuust hard enough.

I wonder if these levels could have been better designed as some kind of obstacle course with checkpoints and actual dying / losing lives. Like the tiger levels, but on a bike.
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Re: Crash Bandicoot Trilogy - U R Not Red E

Post by RobinLSL »

CharlesSchulz wrote: 4 years ago This is the best crash game if you're not going for 100%. If you are going 100%, it becomes as much of a tedious mess as the previous two games, and the frequency with which vehicle levels appear and hinder your ability to get boxes makes crash 3 perhaps the most frustrating experience of the trilogy. If I were tasked with fixing this I don't know what I'd do, because box collecting is also kinda where the meat of the game is, and removing that leaves some bare bones platforming. But they could have at least made the box placement more tolerable in some of these vehicle levels and/or made it possible to turn your bike around, at the very least.
Making the vehicle levels gemless would be a great start I think.
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Re: Crash Bandicoot Trilogy - U R Not Red E

Post by BobisOnlyBob »

So I was having a chat with a friend about just how many levels there are, how many "gimmicky" levels there are various other things, but I didn't have any concrete numbers so I went through and tallied them all up by theme, mechanics and so on...

Full level spoilers below.
Hub 1 (Medieval theme)
Toad Village - Normal, Medieval
Under Pressure - Dive
Orient Express - Tiger Ride
Bone Yard - Normal, Prehistory
Makin' Waves - Jetski
Tiny Tiger - Boss, Roman Colosseum

Hub 2 (Arabia theme)
Gee Wiz - Normal, Medieval
Hang 'em High - Normal, Arabia
Hog Ride - Driving
Tomb Time - Normal, Egypt
Midnight Run - Tiger Ride
Dingodile - Boss, Ice Age

Hub 3 (China theme)
Dino Might! - Normal, Prehistory (Chase Gimmick)
Deep trouble - Dive
High Time - Normal, Arabia
Road Crash - Driving
Double Header - Normal, Medieval
N. Tropy - Boss, Clockwork temple

Hub 4 (Egypt theme)
Sphynxinator - Normal, Egypt (Flood Gimmick)
Bye Bye Blimps - Flight
Tell No Tales - Jetski
Future Frenzy - Normal, Future
Tomb Wader - Normal, Egypt
N. Gin - Boss, Space

Hub 5 (Future theme)
Gone Tomorrow - Normal, Future
Orange Asphalt - Driving
Flaming Passion - Normal, Arabia
Mad Bombers - Flight
Bug Lite - Normal, Egypt (Dark Gimmick)
Neo Cortex - Boss, Time Twister

Secret hub (Computer theme)
Ski Crazed - Jetski
Area 51? - Driving
Rings Of Power - Flying/Driving Hybrid

Secret levels
Hot Coco - Jetski
Eggipus Rex - Normal, Prehistory (Horse Gimmick)

30 Levels Total:
15 Normal levels (1 Secret)
2 Dive levels
2 Tiger Ride levels
4 Jetski levels (1 Secret)
4 Driving levels
3 Flight levels (1 Driving hybrid)

5 Bosses

Normal level themes:
3 Medieval
3 Prehistory
3 Arabia
4 Egypt
2 Future

Special level themes:
Dive - Underwater
Tiger Ride - Great Wall of China
Jetski - Age of Sail
Driving - 60s Highways of America
Flight - World War I Flying Aces

Literally half of all 30 stages in the game are special stages!

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Re: Crash Bandicoot Trilogy - U R Not Red E

Post by Crow »

there are only 5 normal level themes? Damn this game was blatantly a rush job
i've honestly never played a video game in my life
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ano0maly
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Re: Crash Bandicoot Trilogy - U R Not Red E

Post by ano0maly »

Cyril wrote: 4 years ago
there are only 5 normal level themes? Damn this game was blatantly a rush job
I don't follow. People might talk about how the game is too gimmicky, but creating a bunch of unique mechanics does not fit into "rushed". It would be easier and faster to make more platforming levels with the same mechanics.
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Re: Crash Bandicoot Trilogy - U R Not Red E

Post by Crow »

But do any of those mechanics, like, actually feel good. Did they take the time to polish any of them? Like okay tiger running is just hog and polar again so let's ignore it. Diving looks... slow and mostly functional, I guess. The jet ski looks like an absolute mess. The bike mechanics look kinda jank. And rao couldn't shut up about how bad the plane/ship felt.
i've honestly never played a video game in my life
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Re: Crash Bandicoot Trilogy - U R Not Red E

Post by MonkeyShrapnel »

There's something unintentionally hilarious about raocow checking his box count in the plane level, and seeing the number 9/11 pop up.
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Re: Crash Bandicoot Trilogy - U R Not Red E

Post by Leet »

I don't understand why raocow keeps saying stuff like "oh haha the crystals aren't even at the end now!" when they've been in the middle of the levels since they first appeared????? ._.
Well it is a decent hack but sometime its just too repetitif there no level that actually pop in your face and your like oh yeah that level they all ressemble themselves and just monster along the way.
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Re: Crash Bandicoot Trilogy - U R Not Red E

Post by Ditocoaf »

The fruitzooka would make more sense if it actually cost fruit to fire. 1 per shot to discourage spam? 5 per shot so using it means earning slightly fewer lives? 10 per shot, so you often can only take a few shots before running out? My gut says 5. (And you can't turn lives back into fruit, so if you get that 100th fruit you're temporarily out of ammo.)
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Re: Crash Bandicoot Trilogy - U R Not Red E

Post by strongbadman »

I wonder if an idea like that was considered but ultimately discarded, since they required the bazooka for some box collection in a few areas, and not being able to guarantee you have ammo would've made that aspect kind of miserable. So now the current drawback of the bazooka is fhat it's slow and a little unweildly, but the fact that it's 100 percent safe and trivializes a lot of obstacles vasty outweighs that.
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Re: Crash Bandicoot Trilogy - U R Not Red E

Post by BobisOnlyBob »

ano0maly wrote: 4 years ago It would be easier and faster to make more platforming levels with the same mechanics.
I was talking about themes more than mechanics, but the two are always grouped so that's kind of a moot point (firebombs are only on Arabia stages etc). I agree that this isn't lazy, but it does still feel off somehow. In particular I find it interesting that all five bosses use completely unique environments that aren't seen in any level, normal or special. Dingodile's ice cave looks like it belongs in the polar stages of Crash 2, Tiny's Colosseum doesn't fit anywhere, and the other three bosses are all different flavours of sci-fi according to their character theme but all of them are unique - and also not compatible with the sci-fi/future level theme either! That's a lot of effort to avoid repetition of designs, but the special stages being literally half the game and only having one theme per stage type definitely unbalances things in favour of the game feeling repetitive.
MonkeyShrapnel wrote: 4 years ago There's something unintentionally hilarious about raocow checking his box count in the plane level, and seeing the number 9/11 pop up.
I wish I felt remorse at making this
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Re: Crash Bandicoot Trilogy - U R Not Red E

Post by Blivsey »

Kinda sad that we didn't get your live reaction to "literally a tower of rutabagas" but i can assume it was along the lines of "o-oh. so that's just a free rutabaga? okay [laughter leading into a bunch of cheerful commentary]"
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Re: Crash Bandicoot Trilogy - U R Not Red E

Post by tirakai »

The final boss here is a bit awkward but it's by far the best of the 3 games' final bosses, The first was okay but mostly just a tennis boss which we'd kind of already had a better version of with N Brio, and crash 2 wasn't even a boss at all, just a dumb jetpack chase level. This one however was a fairly interesting fight with a few different parts to it.

Also

is now the time to tell raocow how to find the 2 secret levels, or right at the end once he's got all the other relics? Because they're not things he's going to find on his own.

Also should we say about the secret Spyro demo?

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Re: Crash Bandicoot Trilogy - U R Not Red E

Post by Leet »

Ok raocow, now imagine you've been getting all the relics throughout the game only to find out that if you waited you were gonna be given the ability to straight up run. This is the experience I had and that you would've had if you had been getting them
Well it is a decent hack but sometime its just too repetitif there no level that actually pop in your face and your like oh yeah that level they all ressemble themselves and just monster along the way.
Blood Ghoul wrote:Sometimes it seems my blood spurts out in gobs, as if it were a fountain's pulsing sobs. I clearly hear it mutter as it goes yet cannot find the wound from which it flows. Before I met you, baby, I didn't know what I was missing.
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Re: Crash Bandicoot Trilogy - U R Not Red E

Post by kitikami »

raocow said something earlier in the LP about whether the gimmick levels would really be something a kid wanting Crash Bandicoot would want to play. As an adult, i would definitely rather play a proper platforming/racing/shmup/etc game that does one thing well and sticks to it, but as kids our family really liked the variety in Crash 3. Games were expensive and we didn't get to own that many of them, so having one game we loved that let you do a lot of different things was great. The jet ski levels felt especially cool because they seemed like open world levels even though they're actually just as much on rails as the rest of the game. We also played the same games over and over rather than just trying to beat them and move on, so we'd load up the game and play a certain type of level when we felt like it, whether that was replaying the platforming levels or doing one of the gimmick levels, so that it didn't really feel like the flow of the game was being interrupted by making you do different things. I think that also helped with the gems, because getting all the boxes can definitely be a chore, but it's not so bad when they are a long-term project and not something you feel like you have to do when you just want to do something else.

It's one of those things were my opinion would be different now having more access to a wider variety of games, but i think studios were at least in part targetting kids with limited options with these games that try to be a little of everything, and it worked pretty well for us in the case of Crash 3.
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Re: Crash Bandicoot Trilogy - U R Not Red E

Post by ano0maly »

Good point. And I do appreciate the continued quality-of-life improvements in the third game, from more significant (having a total box counter for both level and bonus in addition to current box count) to more minor (the box of 10 wumpa fruits no longer needs to be bopped ten times, it's reduced to five with 2 fruits per). And if you get another mask while you're invincible, I think the timer resets. In Crash 2 I believe the extra mask just gets wasted.

And I should've mentioned this earlier, regarding how when a boss is unlocked, that's your only option for that world. If you enter the boss fight and then just quit to warp room in the pause menu, you get the full selection of levels + boss. You don't actually need to wait until the boss is beaten.

But I don't know if this holds true for the Cortex refight that happens when you find all gems, when all levels get locked away.

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Re: Crash Bandicoot Trilogy - U R Not Red E

Post by Crow »

Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped is a game about Coco Bandicoot, who participates in extreme sports such as jetskiing and tiger riding.
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Re: Crash Bandicoot Trilogy - U R Not Red E

Post by tirakai »

Is there a bonus time reduction for getting all time boxes in this game, or is that only in CTR? I don't remember.

Also regarding the variety, personally Crash 2 was always my favourite as a kid because the platforming was my favourite bit, I really didn't like the bike levels due to being hard to control, and I found the plane and swimming levels boring since they're really slow. The Pura levels I liked (since they're still platforming, just auto-running) and I liked the Coco levels too, but I definitely preferred having almost all platforming levels to half vehicles (even if Crash 2 had the awkward jetpack bits).
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Re: Crash Bandicoot Trilogy - U R Not Red E

Post by CharlesSchulz »

Cyril wrote: 4 years ago Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped is a game about Coco Bandicoot, who participates in extreme sports such as jetskiing and tiger riding.
Nevertheless, ski crazed still features crash's face on the warp room hud. He wants to play so badly but coco won't even let him. Starting to think the big bad isn't cortex or uka uka at all 🤔
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