Review: Crystalis

Of late I've found myself kind of obsesed with the idea of top down 8-bit RPGs, and nothing really scratched that urge for me in quite the same way as Crystalis for the NES.

The experience of the game was at times straining but I found myself captivated. The music is a notch above what you usually hear from even the best 8-bit soundtracks, the writing is strong and the gameplay has its weak points but it also flourishes when it works.

The things that age Crystalis the most is the lack of checkpointing and its sometimes indecipherable logic. More than once was I sent to a guide to find the path to progression, only to find that I needed to equip the glasses item to look at an inconspicuous wall to find a secret entrance, or I needed to use a lamp on a broken statue and place that statue in a shrine in order to remove the whirlpools blocking me in the sea. I also found myself grinding more than I would have liked to. While grinding isn't strictly necessary, you risk putting yourself at such a severe disadvantage in some sections that it'd almost be silly not to.

Still, the ending of the game is what made it all worth it.

There are few NES games I would classify as having particularly strong stories, it's something inherent to the era, coming from the arcades and without much space to store text in a still developing medium, NES games just weren't as narratively capable for the most part.

Crystalis shattered that conception for me in its entirety.

The story is that good.

I have some experience with the Gameboy Color port but I'd say that despite its improvements, the noticeable screen crunch will make mazelike dungeons even harder to navigate and triple the difficulty of the combat.

Crystalis can be a hard sell, it can be a weird game and it can be obtuse but it can be an intensely rewarding game. It earns my recommendation.

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Review: Crash Bandicoot (Playstation 1)

I was a playstation kid through and through but the PS1 just barely missed me. What can I say, the PS2 was my era. It's only later in life that I even got to play the original Crash Bandicoot trilogy and now the N. Sane Trilogy has basically made those games obsulete. But I think knowing what came before is important to improve what comes after. And to that end, I think it's about time I dug into Crash Bandicoot and analyze for myself its merits and its flaws.

So for the uninitiated, Crash Bandicoot is 3D platformer on the original playstation which served as playstation's unofficial mascot at the time. The story does its job, Crash is an escaped science experiment gone wrong and Dr Neo Cortex is experimenting further on his female friend, so Crash sets out to rescue her and stop Cortex's nefarious plans. Enough context to get you going and put you into the gameplay and that's where the Bandicoot shines.

Most platformers sink or swim based on their level design and this game surprised me with a bunch of really solid levels. The hallway level design works as an adaptation of linear 2D obstacle courses in the third dimension and the crates are a thing of beauty. It's a solid core gameplay loop, run down corridors, jump over pits, break boxes, spin into or jump onto enemies, repeat until done. The visuals also look great for the time, and you can see 3D models and animation starting to mature greatly on the Playstation. Musically it isn't my favourite Crash Bandicoot soundtrack, I'm very partial to Twinsanity's acapella tunes, but it's iconic Crash music. The game can be difficult, there have definitely been areas that have eaten upwards of 15 lives and sometimes the checkpoint placement could be a bit sparse but I found myself enjoying the challenge more often than not.

What I'm not so hot on is the lack of analogue control support. This is more the fault of Sony than Crash, considering the Dualshock 1 wasn't the first controller for the playstation, despite the N64 launching with a controller that had an analogue stick. Without that analogue control, the left stick can be used for movement but it simulates the d-pad, and it does not feel good to use. I ended up ignoring the left stick and played exclusively with the D-pad, but man, if that didn't end up hurting me. I'm not much of a completionist but the tedium of getting 100% put me off even trying on most levels, some I'd get 3 or 4 boxes shy of earning a gem but honestly, I wasn't going to go back. The save system is something that's also pretty unforgiving, we'd had perfectly functional save systems by that point and hiding the save points in bonus levels is pretty infuriating. Worse still, save points only save your progress towards the final level and gems, and not your lives tally, and booting the game up only to go from 26 lives to 4 was almost as big a disappointment as I am to my parents. Sometimes the hitboxes can trip you up, and there are some enemies which will murder you by entering your air space. A lot of the enemy design in general is kind of lackluster, not in the simplicity but the pure lack of imagination. The skunks that walk into the screen and then immediately die come to mind. And while videogame reviews stend to stay away from politics, the depiction of native island in the game can charitably be described as a bad look. The first boss, Papu Papu is like, just a fat islander trying to murder Crash for seemingly no reason. Also some of the level names are just like, woof. There had to be a better name than Native Fortress. And this might be a nitpick, but levels can start without any fanfare. Choose a level, hard cut to a loading screen, hard cut to the start of the level.

The overall experience could be frustrating at times and while there are a lot of missteps or missed opportunities, I'd generally recommend playing at least some of Crash Bandicoot on the playstation if you ever get the chance to. It's not the best platformer on the system, it might even be the worst game in the original trilogy but I'd be lying if I said that I didn't have a good time.

Just take some of the quirks with a pinch of salt and you'll probably get through just fine.

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