With the highly successful release of Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, many gamers have gotten a chance to revisit some beloved childhood favorites in HD, while many more gamers got a taste of some old school 3D platforming for the first time. Many of these gamers have also discovered something else: video games used to be really hard. Many gamers have vented their frustrations with the remaster online, going so far as to liken it to the infamous Dark Souls series.
However, its not just new gamers that are having a hard time. Some who remember playing the original games on the first PlayStation claim that the games have gotten even harder. Is it possible that maybe these gamers have just gone soft from the relatively easier modern games? According to a recent blog post from the publisher Activision, its not just gamers’ imaginations.
In the blog post, the developers at Vicarious Visions address the point that many gamers made that Crash’s jump isn’t the same as it was in the original first game. Due to this being a remake of all three games from the ground up, Vicarious Visions decided to give Crash the same jump handling throughout all three to unify the titles (specifically, the jump mechanic from Crash Bandicoot: Warped). However, there ended up being some unintended extra challenge from this decision, as the developers noted that players “fall more quickly upon release of the X button than you did in the original first game.”
The remake also features a new collision system and physics that weren’t present in the originals, requiring more precision from certain jumps.
Of course, not all of the differences were made to make the game harder. The developers pointed out that they added the dynamic difficulty adjustment (DDA) from the sequels to the first Crash Bandicoot, which gives players Aku Aku masks and checkpoints after dying too many times in a level.
The extra difficulty hasn’t stopped Crash Bandicoot from quickly becoming one of the most popular games this year. No doubt many fans are eager to see what Activision has planned for the crazy marsupial in the future.