N Sane Trilogy Crash 2 Pt1 - Cortex and His Crystals!

Special thanks to user "Amupam K Singh" for gifting me this set! I played the original trilogy of Crash games on my PS1, back on my old Zenith CRT TV, too poor for memory cards and on an old Playstation controller that didn't have analog sticks! After a decade and a half, I never thought I'd be trekking through the games again!

Are you afraid of the developers dumbing down the difficulty? Worry not, the difficulty's all there, with only "convenience of life" improvements being made to the game! You don't need to beat all the levels in Crash 1 in only 1 life like the old games, for example.

Strangely though, I find the games much, much easier to beat and platinum as an adult - I feel like when the Internet was dial-up and unavailable to me back in the late 90's, I'd spend actual months looking through levels trying to figure out how to get the coloured gems and revisiting old levels. As a stupid kid, there was nothing worse than trying to get all the boxes smashed in a level, only to find out that you needed a gem, OR, that you needed to access the level from a secret hideout instead!

Now with a nice copper coaxial (don't have fibre yet here) Internet connection I can easily consult a table to see which levels need which coloured gems, and how to easily access the secret levels. And damn, it's amazing seeing secret levels - nowadays all you get is DLC - secret levels in gaming nowadays is a concept unbenownst to me.

You're going to see a lot of time trial fails, though, and that's where the real challenge of the games is! Now added to Crash 1 and 2, you can do the time trials, but you need to beat the levels in one shot! I managed to snag the three platinum trophies pretty easily, with only a few select levels giving me trouble.

My only REAL complaint is that they changed the physics, so it's now possible to slip off of platforms (in old games you could have one foot on a platform and be fine, but I guess the developers think that looks unprofessional) AND Crash needs a few milliseconds to accelerate to full speed (in old games Crash would immediately move at full speed). This is not an issue at all, BUT it does cause problems when jumping on turtles in a particular level due to the turtles' hitboxes being so small and easy to fall off of AND due to the fact that you need to keep momentum due to not having enough space for Crash to fully accelerate.