You know, it's really hard to motivate myself to finish shit when I know that it's well... shit. So with much masochism, swearing, controller-throwing, frustration, and a dream to get it the hell out of my house, I sat down with the Crash Action Pack.
"But Screw!", you say. "Crash Bandicoot is a good series, how could you hate it?"
Allow me to explain.
The last great Crash was The Wrath of Cortex. While I wasn't fond of some of the changes made to that entry, I could still see that at its core, it was still the Crash Bandicoot I had grown fond of. However, after that, Naughty Dog said they'd done all they had wanted to do with the crazy marsupial, and handed over the franchise to anybody who wanted it. And that's really the problem here.
The three games in the pack are Crash Nitro Kart, Crash Twinsanity, and Crash Tag Team Racing, all three made after the series was given up for grabs. Let's tackle them one at a time.
Crash Nitro Kart attempts to be a follow-up to Naughty Dog's original Crash Team Racing, and does a terrible job at it. It does a horrible terrible job at it. While it was the game I was most excited to play when I picked up the three-pack, I soon found out that it was the most disappointing. I played CTR to death, getting all the characters and trophies and unlocking arenas and absolutely destroying my friends in Battle mode. Crash Nitro Kart attempts to do the same thing with more features (characters, arenas, etc.), but Universal Interactive botched it bigtime. To summarize: Between the two, the karts in Nitro Kart move slower, the tracks are much more narrow (making it far easier to crash into a wall- and that frequently screws me in a race), there are fewer race tracks, the shortcuts for each track require herculean effort to get into (making them decidedly not worth the effort it takes), the original game balance has been thrown completely out the window (Coco as a beginner character with poor speed, mediocre acceleration, and ludicrous turn capacity... wtf?) and Adventure Mode... I'll cover that later.
That's an absolutely unforgivable amount of problems for a sequel. Game sequels aren't usually inferior to their original counterparts, that's movies! Why are there less tracks in the PS2 racing title than there were in the technologically hindered PS1 title? Why do karts move slower? Why did the designers make it so much easier to crash into a wall? And then there's the matter of starting up. Naturally, with everybody lined up at the start line, there's going to be a bit of bumping into others when the race starts. But with a narrower track to consider, the bumping goes on for a few yards before the clusters of racers break up. Seriously? This wasn't a problem before! The designers can't claim naivety either- They obviously played the original. There are tracks that are, shall we say, extremely reminiscent of the ones in Crash Team Racing. Now, I'm not against borrowing ideas, but stealing entire sections of tracks from CTR, with minor tweaks, just pushes it. There's a level that is Cortex Castle, minus the spiders and with a couple interesting traps. There's a level where they obviously took notes from N.Gin Labs. The first track even feels like a crappier version of Insanity Beach, the first track from CTR! Is this homage or plagarism?
Now Adventure Mode is a whole other pile of shit. It's the same deal from the first- go around to collect trophies, race bosses, get keys, lather rinse repeat until you can meet with the big bad final boss and kick his sorry cheating hide by racing fair. You can revisit races to complete theCTR CNK challenge, where you have to collect the letters C, N, and K hidden around the track and come in first to get CNK tokens, which you can then take to a championship for the chance at a shiny gem and a new playable character; or, if that doesn't float your boat, you can compete in a time trial to see how fast you can rip across a track for the chance to win a Relic. I always preferred the CTR challenge. Now, remember when I said that shortcuts are bastardous to get into? Well, guess what. Invariably, in the CNK challenge, there will be at least two of the tokens hidden on those shortcuts. The shortcuts, which go out of their way to be damned impossible to get into. In one level, you can't jump directly into the entrance because it hovers directly over the nearest high point, and the sides are fenced off. So guess what? You have to make a jump that carries you over the side and onto the shortcut. What's the point of that?! Another shortcut in the same level is the high ledge, carried over from Papu's Pyramid. Except now it's placed ever so slightly farther, so that if you try and mount it like you would the shortcut in Papu's, you'd fall short and drive directly into the wall. Genius. You know what's bullcrap? Needing a turbo to effectively utilize every shortcut in the game. Which is what the designers seem to have done.
Now, they also changed Adventure mode a bit so that instead of getting your pick of eight characters like last time, you pick from two teams of three (Crash team and Cortex team). The purpose of this is that while racing, you will always have at least one teammate on the track. The more crates (and racers) your team smashes, the more a certain gauge fills up, and when it's full, you can tap a button and go into "Frenzy" mode, which allows you to use item after item after item for a short time, without needing to drive into any item crates. Additionally, you don't have to come in first place every single race, so long as your teammate is in first place. Which doubles your chances of winning. And you can choose who you want to race as from your team of three before a race starts, which means you effectively have three playable characters available to you at any given time in Adventure mode. Not bad at all. However... comparing the cutscenes from Crash Team's story, and the cutscenes from Cortex Team's story, they're virtually identical. Except in places where each respective team responds. Otherwise, the dialogue of both Emperor Velo and the boss he's forcing you to race is generally reused word-for-word from one story to another, which makes me wonder... why even bother with two sets of cutscenes, when they obviously only put in the effort for one? The difficulty spike for the final race is nuts too- after figuring out Geary, the 4th (and next to last) boss, it was just a matter of getting ahead of him. And then I challenged Velo, who is a cheating bastard with two other racers, who throws bowling bombs backwards at impossible angles, has his minions drop traps behind them, and uses homing missiles the moment you get ahead of him. The race is possible to beat, but at this point I was feeling more than a bit disenchanted with the whole thing and decided that I couldn't be assed to finish a game that goes out of its way to throw its players the middle finger the moment they find a hope spot.
As if you couldn't tell, Crash Nitro Kart was the most of my frustration with this pack. It's an okay racer, but it's not the phenomenally fun experience that its predecessor was. For people unfamiliar with CTR or Mario Kart or any other kart racer out there, it's probably a good place to start in the genre. However, it really lacks the feel of the very game it tries its damnedest to imitate, and that hurts it. A lot.
I could write an essay about how much I disliked CNK, and I'm already halfway there, but there are two other games to cover. The second game in the pack is Crash Twinsanity, and it's the only non-racing title of the three, returning instead to platform action. Three years after their final humiliation in The Wrath of Cortex, Cortex and his evil mask Uka Uka, frozen solid in a block of ice, surface back on Crash's island, where they gather all of his old nemeses to try and destroy him once again. The plan backfires, however, sending Crash and Cortex plummeting down into a cave system. Enraged, Cortex lunges at Crash and the two brawl, until they unwittingly discover a sinister plot by aliens to destroy the Earth. The two are forced to work together to stop their new mutual foe- but they'll be fighting each other the entire way.
The focus in Twinsanity is that you're now controlling two characters instead of one, where each 'twin move' (lolwut?) involves slapstick humor. For example, in Rollerbrawl, the two combine into one of those clouds-of-violence you see in cartoons, and proceed to roll around according to your control. Crash can use Cortex as a skateboard and a hammer, and throw him to reach switches across a large gap.
What I will say for the game is that it has a really good sense of humor about it. Not so much in the twin moves, but the goofy, oddball things that happen during the story and the wonderfully silly music. And how wonderfully silly it is, with goofy arrangements of classical music, hummed a capella.
Unfortunately, my original save file was lost, and I really can't bring myself to care about finishing the game. I didn't back then, and I don't now. For how gloriously silly Twinsanity is, it's also flawed. For one thing, there seems to be no level select, the game simply drags you from level to level with no break. Which is more than irritating when I know that each level has five crystals hidden around it. What do they do? Hell if I know, I've never gotten the chance to collect them all! And I don't know how to return to previous levels, either, unless you get that option at the end of the game. Which would be stupid. And pointless. Twinsanity also sees fit to drag you through a tutorial at the beginning of the game, which is... well, I guess it's fine for newer players, but chances are that a lot of the player base is going to be veterans of the series, who know how to play already. Which brings me to my next irritation with it: It's committed one of the Seven Deadly Sins of Game Design.
And over.
And over.
And over again.
Because no matter what you press to try and interrupt it, the game will ignore it completely and make you wait until it's finished.
This is an absolutely terrible thing to do to any player. Most games these days let you skip past story segments so that you can get back to the meat of the game, whether that's splattering things or solving puzzles or dancing in a tutu. It's not quite game-breaking, but it's certainly cringe-worthy. Sure, a scene may be funny the first time, but what about the fifth? Or the tenth?
It's not a bad game, and it tries to be fresh and original- which it succeeds with, to a point. But forcing Crash and Cortex to work together almost makes it feel gimmicky- which is the exact reason I didn't care about the game when I first saw it hit shelves. However, I'll admit I'm not being entirely fair with this one- After all, I didn't really finish it because I was just so frustrated at the time that I couldn't see past its flaws. I might not have given it an entirely fair shake, so I apologize- I'll reserve judgment on it until I've gotten a chance to borrow it again. Moving on...
The last game in the pack is Crash Tag-Team Racing, which, when I first saw it, I thought, "Oh, hey, Mario Kart: Double Dash clone."
It's not.
Instead, Tag-Team Racing manages to do what Nitro Kart couldn't: manages to be extremely fun. Yes. Fun. It's not a word I use often, unless I'm being sarcastic, but Tag-Team Racing is actually a really, really good game. The plot's a bit of an excuse; a stupidly rich cyborg named Von Clutch has spent his vast riches to build a racing-themed amusement park, but the Power Gems that power the park have all been stolen and then hidden, along with the special Dark Gem that powers him. He's in the process of shutting down when lo and behold, Crash, Cortex, and co. come barrelling into the park on their karts, trying to destroy each other once more. On the spot, Von Clutch announces to them his final contest- The first person to find all the crystals and restore power to the park, as well as catch the thief, inherits the entire thing.
Now, when I say that the game isn't Double Dash, I mean it. Yes, it's possible to have one character doing the driving and one on offense, but it works much differently. For starters, every racer starts separate. By pressing a certain button and crashing into another separate kart, the two can combine. By pressing the button again, the two can separate again, often rocketing the driver ahead. This of course means that if your partner separates at the last second, you can get screwed and lose the race.
Also, the amount of ammunition available to the character manning the turret in the back is limited, which means that if you run out of the special ammo for both characters, it's probably best to part ways.
Since it's set in an amusement park, you can run and jump and climb on things between races, which is really refreshing. There's a whole pile load of stuff to do in each section of the park. And while Tag-Team Racing also constricts itself to 'three races per world', there are five sections of the park and each track has six different variants you can play, including the main race, a wonderfully visceral game called Run N' Gun where you are given an unlimited amount of ammo to lay waste to as many racers as you can in a single lap, a time trial of sorts where you have to complete three laps as quickly as possible, a variant that plays out like a rail shooter (with targets plastered all over the track, or floating above it)... So even if you're not fond of just racing, there's still a whole lot of other ways to get what you need to progress in the game. And then there are all the minigames scattered over the park, including a shooting gallery, a minigame that combines bowling with the unusual courses of miniature golf, and the stunt arenas, where you can, uninterrupted, run rampant over a specially designed track and do flips and spins in midair. Needless to say, I had a lot of fun there. And I almost forgot to mention- if you explore around the park a bit, you may also run across switches that can open up shortcuts in some of the tracks. Way cool!
The number of character voices the game uses is also staggering. Droopy Dog, Mr. T, and a whole lot of others are all waiting inside, and some of the dialogue they bring to the experience is absolutely hilarious. And the character quotes... the voice actors had to have a blast portraying their respective characters.
Tag Team Racing is easily the strongest title in the pack, for the sheer amount of stuff you can do. It's easy to tell that this game was a labor of love, with everything carefully crafted to be as silly and entertaining as possible. There are visual and character gags all over the place (Crunch has a teddy bear?!), and if you know where to go looking, you can find all sorts of fun additional cutscenes and gags. It's... well... a better follow-up to CTR than the official sequel to CTR. And it doesn't even follow the same formula.
That's impressive.
All in all, your mileage is going to vary on the pack as a whole. To summarize, my thoughts are:
-CNK is okay. It's definitely not phenomenal, but I was also addicted to its predecessor for a few years of my life, so I'm partial.
-Twinsanity is all right. My understanding is that it's generally well-liked, so I'll try and give it a proper review later. The humor's pretty spot on, even if the gameplay does feel a bit gimmicky.
-Tag-Team Racing is amazing. I can't recommend it enough. Go play. Now.
Scores:
CNK- 6/10
CTs- ??
CTTR- 9/10
"But Screw!", you say. "Crash Bandicoot is a good series, how could you hate it?"
Allow me to explain.
The last great Crash was The Wrath of Cortex. While I wasn't fond of some of the changes made to that entry, I could still see that at its core, it was still the Crash Bandicoot I had grown fond of. However, after that, Naughty Dog said they'd done all they had wanted to do with the crazy marsupial, and handed over the franchise to anybody who wanted it. And that's really the problem here.
The three games in the pack are Crash Nitro Kart, Crash Twinsanity, and Crash Tag Team Racing, all three made after the series was given up for grabs. Let's tackle them one at a time.
Crash Nitro Kart attempts to be a follow-up to Naughty Dog's original Crash Team Racing, and does a terrible job at it. It does a horrible terrible job at it. While it was the game I was most excited to play when I picked up the three-pack, I soon found out that it was the most disappointing. I played CTR to death, getting all the characters and trophies and unlocking arenas and absolutely destroying my friends in Battle mode. Crash Nitro Kart attempts to do the same thing with more features (characters, arenas, etc.), but Universal Interactive botched it bigtime. To summarize: Between the two, the karts in Nitro Kart move slower, the tracks are much more narrow (making it far easier to crash into a wall- and that frequently screws me in a race), there are fewer race tracks, the shortcuts for each track require herculean effort to get into (making them decidedly not worth the effort it takes), the original game balance has been thrown completely out the window (Coco as a beginner character with poor speed, mediocre acceleration, and ludicrous turn capacity... wtf?) and Adventure Mode... I'll cover that later.
That's an absolutely unforgivable amount of problems for a sequel. Game sequels aren't usually inferior to their original counterparts, that's movies! Why are there less tracks in the PS2 racing title than there were in the technologically hindered PS1 title? Why do karts move slower? Why did the designers make it so much easier to crash into a wall? And then there's the matter of starting up. Naturally, with everybody lined up at the start line, there's going to be a bit of bumping into others when the race starts. But with a narrower track to consider, the bumping goes on for a few yards before the clusters of racers break up. Seriously? This wasn't a problem before! The designers can't claim naivety either- They obviously played the original. There are tracks that are, shall we say, extremely reminiscent of the ones in Crash Team Racing. Now, I'm not against borrowing ideas, but stealing entire sections of tracks from CTR, with minor tweaks, just pushes it. There's a level that is Cortex Castle, minus the spiders and with a couple interesting traps. There's a level where they obviously took notes from N.Gin Labs. The first track even feels like a crappier version of Insanity Beach, the first track from CTR! Is this homage or plagarism?
Now Adventure Mode is a whole other pile of shit. It's the same deal from the first- go around to collect trophies, race bosses, get keys, lather rinse repeat until you can meet with the big bad final boss and kick his sorry cheating hide by racing fair. You can revisit races to complete the
Now, they also changed Adventure mode a bit so that instead of getting your pick of eight characters like last time, you pick from two teams of three (Crash team and Cortex team). The purpose of this is that while racing, you will always have at least one teammate on the track. The more crates (and racers) your team smashes, the more a certain gauge fills up, and when it's full, you can tap a button and go into "Frenzy" mode, which allows you to use item after item after item for a short time, without needing to drive into any item crates. Additionally, you don't have to come in first place every single race, so long as your teammate is in first place. Which doubles your chances of winning. And you can choose who you want to race as from your team of three before a race starts, which means you effectively have three playable characters available to you at any given time in Adventure mode. Not bad at all. However... comparing the cutscenes from Crash Team's story, and the cutscenes from Cortex Team's story, they're virtually identical. Except in places where each respective team responds. Otherwise, the dialogue of both Emperor Velo and the boss he's forcing you to race is generally reused word-for-word from one story to another, which makes me wonder... why even bother with two sets of cutscenes, when they obviously only put in the effort for one? The difficulty spike for the final race is nuts too- after figuring out Geary, the 4th (and next to last) boss, it was just a matter of getting ahead of him. And then I challenged Velo, who is a cheating bastard with two other racers, who throws bowling bombs backwards at impossible angles, has his minions drop traps behind them, and uses homing missiles the moment you get ahead of him. The race is possible to beat, but at this point I was feeling more than a bit disenchanted with the whole thing and decided that I couldn't be assed to finish a game that goes out of its way to throw its players the middle finger the moment they find a hope spot.
As if you couldn't tell, Crash Nitro Kart was the most of my frustration with this pack. It's an okay racer, but it's not the phenomenally fun experience that its predecessor was. For people unfamiliar with CTR or Mario Kart or any other kart racer out there, it's probably a good place to start in the genre. However, it really lacks the feel of the very game it tries its damnedest to imitate, and that hurts it. A lot.
I could write an essay about how much I disliked CNK, and I'm already halfway there, but there are two other games to cover. The second game in the pack is Crash Twinsanity, and it's the only non-racing title of the three, returning instead to platform action. Three years after their final humiliation in The Wrath of Cortex, Cortex and his evil mask Uka Uka, frozen solid in a block of ice, surface back on Crash's island, where they gather all of his old nemeses to try and destroy him once again. The plan backfires, however, sending Crash and Cortex plummeting down into a cave system. Enraged, Cortex lunges at Crash and the two brawl, until they unwittingly discover a sinister plot by aliens to destroy the Earth. The two are forced to work together to stop their new mutual foe- but they'll be fighting each other the entire way.
The focus in Twinsanity is that you're now controlling two characters instead of one, where each 'twin move' (lolwut?) involves slapstick humor. For example, in Rollerbrawl, the two combine into one of those clouds-of-violence you see in cartoons, and proceed to roll around according to your control. Crash can use Cortex as a skateboard and a hammer, and throw him to reach switches across a large gap.
What I will say for the game is that it has a really good sense of humor about it. Not so much in the twin moves, but the goofy, oddball things that happen during the story and the wonderfully silly music. And how wonderfully silly it is, with goofy arrangements of classical music, hummed a capella.
Unfortunately, my original save file was lost, and I really can't bring myself to care about finishing the game. I didn't back then, and I don't now. For how gloriously silly Twinsanity is, it's also flawed. For one thing, there seems to be no level select, the game simply drags you from level to level with no break. Which is more than irritating when I know that each level has five crystals hidden around it. What do they do? Hell if I know, I've never gotten the chance to collect them all! And I don't know how to return to previous levels, either, unless you get that option at the end of the game. Which would be stupid. And pointless. Twinsanity also sees fit to drag you through a tutorial at the beginning of the game, which is... well, I guess it's fine for newer players, but chances are that a lot of the player base is going to be veterans of the series, who know how to play already. Which brings me to my next irritation with it: It's committed one of the Seven Deadly Sins of Game Design.
Unskippable cutscenes.
Unskippable cutscenes are absolutely horrible in a game where you only get one hit point to try and dash from checkpoint to checkpoint with. If you've hit a snag, and are having a hard time finishing a section that immediately proceeds a cutscene, guess what? Each time you die, you get to watch it over.And over.
And over.
And over again.
Because no matter what you press to try and interrupt it, the game will ignore it completely and make you wait until it's finished.
This is an absolutely terrible thing to do to any player. Most games these days let you skip past story segments so that you can get back to the meat of the game, whether that's splattering things or solving puzzles or dancing in a tutu. It's not quite game-breaking, but it's certainly cringe-worthy. Sure, a scene may be funny the first time, but what about the fifth? Or the tenth?
It's not a bad game, and it tries to be fresh and original- which it succeeds with, to a point. But forcing Crash and Cortex to work together almost makes it feel gimmicky- which is the exact reason I didn't care about the game when I first saw it hit shelves. However, I'll admit I'm not being entirely fair with this one- After all, I didn't really finish it because I was just so frustrated at the time that I couldn't see past its flaws. I might not have given it an entirely fair shake, so I apologize- I'll reserve judgment on it until I've gotten a chance to borrow it again. Moving on...
The last game in the pack is Crash Tag-Team Racing, which, when I first saw it, I thought, "Oh, hey, Mario Kart: Double Dash clone."
It's not.
Instead, Tag-Team Racing manages to do what Nitro Kart couldn't: manages to be extremely fun. Yes. Fun. It's not a word I use often, unless I'm being sarcastic, but Tag-Team Racing is actually a really, really good game. The plot's a bit of an excuse; a stupidly rich cyborg named Von Clutch has spent his vast riches to build a racing-themed amusement park, but the Power Gems that power the park have all been stolen and then hidden, along with the special Dark Gem that powers him. He's in the process of shutting down when lo and behold, Crash, Cortex, and co. come barrelling into the park on their karts, trying to destroy each other once more. On the spot, Von Clutch announces to them his final contest- The first person to find all the crystals and restore power to the park, as well as catch the thief, inherits the entire thing.
Now, when I say that the game isn't Double Dash, I mean it. Yes, it's possible to have one character doing the driving and one on offense, but it works much differently. For starters, every racer starts separate. By pressing a certain button and crashing into another separate kart, the two can combine. By pressing the button again, the two can separate again, often rocketing the driver ahead. This of course means that if your partner separates at the last second, you can get screwed and lose the race.
Also, the amount of ammunition available to the character manning the turret in the back is limited, which means that if you run out of the special ammo for both characters, it's probably best to part ways.
Since it's set in an amusement park, you can run and jump and climb on things between races, which is really refreshing. There's a whole pile load of stuff to do in each section of the park. And while Tag-Team Racing also constricts itself to 'three races per world', there are five sections of the park and each track has six different variants you can play, including the main race, a wonderfully visceral game called Run N' Gun where you are given an unlimited amount of ammo to lay waste to as many racers as you can in a single lap, a time trial of sorts where you have to complete three laps as quickly as possible, a variant that plays out like a rail shooter (with targets plastered all over the track, or floating above it)... So even if you're not fond of just racing, there's still a whole lot of other ways to get what you need to progress in the game. And then there are all the minigames scattered over the park, including a shooting gallery, a minigame that combines bowling with the unusual courses of miniature golf, and the stunt arenas, where you can, uninterrupted, run rampant over a specially designed track and do flips and spins in midair. Needless to say, I had a lot of fun there. And I almost forgot to mention- if you explore around the park a bit, you may also run across switches that can open up shortcuts in some of the tracks. Way cool!
The number of character voices the game uses is also staggering. Droopy Dog, Mr. T, and a whole lot of others are all waiting inside, and some of the dialogue they bring to the experience is absolutely hilarious. And the character quotes... the voice actors had to have a blast portraying their respective characters.
Tag Team Racing is easily the strongest title in the pack, for the sheer amount of stuff you can do. It's easy to tell that this game was a labor of love, with everything carefully crafted to be as silly and entertaining as possible. There are visual and character gags all over the place (Crunch has a teddy bear?!), and if you know where to go looking, you can find all sorts of fun additional cutscenes and gags. It's... well... a better follow-up to CTR than the official sequel to CTR. And it doesn't even follow the same formula.
That's impressive.
All in all, your mileage is going to vary on the pack as a whole. To summarize, my thoughts are:
-CNK is okay. It's definitely not phenomenal, but I was also addicted to its predecessor for a few years of my life, so I'm partial.
-Twinsanity is all right. My understanding is that it's generally well-liked, so I'll try and give it a proper review later. The humor's pretty spot on, even if the gameplay does feel a bit gimmicky.
-Tag-Team Racing is amazing. I can't recommend it enough. Go play. Now.
Scores:
CNK- 6/10
CTs- ??
CTTR- 9/10
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