MULTI Crash Bandicoot 4 coming to PS5, Switch, Xbox Series X in March

[manigamer]

Toys for Bob is making the next Crash — It’s About Time

[h=1]Fallout’s Vault Boy joins Super Smash Bros. as a Mii I[/h]t’sIt’s been 22 years since Crash Bandicoot: Warped, the third entry in the original Crash Bandicoot trilogy, and 10 years since the last original Crash Bandicoot game. In other words, Crash fans have been waiting a long time for today’s news: Toys for Bob has a new Crash Bandicootgame in the works, fittingly titled Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time.
Toys for Bob previously worked on the Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, which was a remaster of the original Crash trilogy, as well as the Spyro Reignited Trilogy. The team’s latest project isn’t a remaster, though. Crash Bandicoot 4 is a brand-new game in the Crash series that will pick up immediately after the events ofWarped, which left villains Neo Cortex, Dr. N. Tropy, and Uka Uka stranded on a far-off planet. In Crash 4, the antagonists escape and once again threaten to take over the multiverse; players will inhabit Crash or Coco, as well as Neo Cortex, who will have his own special levels along the way.
Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time will be released on Oct. 2 on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
Polygon spoke to Paul Yan, co-studio head at Toys for Bob, about the upcoming game. “We deliberately called this game Crash 4,” Yan said, “because we want to position this as a true sequel to the original three games, which were developed by Naughty Dog. There’s something really, really special about those first three games, and you could see that reflected both critically and commercially.”
Crash Bandicoot 4’s story will involve Neo Cortex, Dr. N. Tropy, and Uka Uka ripping a hole in the fabric of space-time in order to escape from their remote planet. Coco and Crash will push back against that villainy “with the help of four new quantum masks,” according to Yan. “These are the guardians of the universe. They’re going to be able to restore balance to this multiverse, this fractured time that’s now taking place in this universe. And these quantum masks are going to also be introducing completely new ways of platforming.”

Image: Toys for Bob/Activision​

One of these quantum masks is time-themed, giving the wearer “the ability to slow down time, to get past impossible timing obstacles, to get past what were formerly completely deadly Nitro crates by slowing time down.” Another one is gravity-themed, which Yan said will “give Crash the ability to flip gravity and control it so that he can walk upside down on platforms.” These new mechanics will allow for some puzzle variety, with different sections of the game designed to take advantage of different tools.
“That’s something that was really important for us, is that when we’re thinking about that original trilogy, about what Crash brought to the scene back in the ’90s, is that Crash Bandicootis a precision platformer,” said Yan. “In a world where other platformers are more about exploration and taking your time leisurely about the world, Crash is asking very focused design challenges of the player.”
Players who look back with fondness on the difficulty of the original Crash games will be happy to learn that Toys for Bob hopes to continue that level of challenge — within reason, of course.

Image: Toys for Bob/Activision​

“Yes, the original games were hard,” Yan said. “They were very, very challenging. And I think one thing that was really important for us was to make sure that we preserve that level of challenge without watering it down in such a way that we lose that authentic Crash gameplay that’s all about precision platforming. The way that we think about that is in making sure that it’s a subtle way of rolling out the challenges. [...] We’ll layer on that challenge very specifically and ramp those across the levels further down the road in a linear fashion. We want to make sure that those challenges rely on lessons that you’ve learned before.”
Part of that design ethos is reflected in the fact that Crash 4 will proceed in a linear fashion, similar to the first Crash Bandicoot, with a hub world and levels that must be completed in a specific sequence.
“One of the big advantages coming out of that is that now we can tell a more structured, focused story,” said Yan. “But also, to the point of difficulty, is that we know precisely when you’ve completed one level, and those lessons can apply and onboard you to the next in a very focused way.”

Image: Toys for Bob/Activision​

Yan also revealed that the game will include “a couple different new playable characters,” including the villainous Neo Cortex. “Of course, he’s the nemesis of the game, but you’re going to be able to play as him, and experience certain timelines but from his perspective,” said Yan. “That’s completely new locations, completely new gameplay that add color to the main path of what’s going on. So you may experience a level from Crash’s perspective and come across a junction point, and you’re going to be able to play as Dr. Neo Cortex in the events that lead up to that same exact point from a different timeline.”
Neo Cortex will have a different set of abilities than Crash or Coco, and that’ll be reflected in the design challenges of his levels.
“In place of his double jump, he’s got a dash,” Yan explained. “He’s also got this special ray gun where he can convert enemies and hazards into different platforms, and he can convert them into a solid platform or a bouncing platform. And so with those two tools alone, the levels that are designed specifically for him are going to be a little bit more puzzle-y. It’s a completely different flavor than what you’re going to be playing as with Crash and Coco.”



t’s been a long time since the original trilogy, with lots of hardware and software advancements along the way. Because of that, Crash and his friends are going to look a little different this time around.
“One thing that I’m really proud about is that Crash 4 has a brand-new, distinct art style,” said Yan. “We’ve learned a lot coming out of Spyro Reignited Trilogy. How do we be reverent to the original designs that came before us, but adding a new spin to things?”
For Yan and the rest of the team, that “new spin” meant the worlds of Crash 4would be “way bigger, and there’s much deeper vistas. [...] That was something that was really charming about the original games on the PS1, was that most games of that era were pretty sparse, and it was really shocking to see how dense those levels were. We’re bringing that in a modern context as well. So we’ve actually pulled the camera back out, it’s a little bit wider, and you’re going to see so much more color.”

 

[manigamer]

Crash Bandicoot is getting a new mobile game too



Candy Crush developer reveals Crash Bandicoot: On the Run





Crash Bandicoot is having a busy year. In addition to a new numbered sequel (Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time), the onetime PlayStation mascot is heading to Android and iOS devices later this year with Crash Bandicoot: On the Run from King, the Activision-owned company behind Candy Crush Saga.

Crash Bandicoot: On the Run is, as one might expect, a runner-style game that pits Crash and Coco against Dr. Neo Cortex and his henchmen. Gameplay, which shows up about 70 seconds into the mobile game’s debut trailer, appears to involve plenty of running and platforming that’s not too dissimilar from classic Crash Bandicoot mechanics. The mobile game will rework game locations from other Crash games, such as Turtle Woods, Lost City, and Temple Ruins, as well as bosses, including Scorporilla and Nitrus Brio.

King did not announce a release date. Interested Crash fans can pre-register for the game, which will be available from Apple’s App Store and the Google Play Store, at the Crash Bandicoot: On the Run website. For a more traditional Crash experience, Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time will be released Oct. 2 on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

 

[its Me]

 

[Necrokiller]

86 on both Metacritic and Opencritic for now

Toys for Bob does what Naughty Don't!

Good to see it's getting solid reviews.

 

[manigamer]

Crash Bandicoot 4 feels like it’s from the ’90s, but not in a good way


Toys for Bob’s modern Crash game looks great but feels bad



rashCrash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time is a brand-new game that’s already hopelessly out of date.

Despite the 18 spinoffs and reboots that have come out since the original trilogy of Crash Bandicoot games, Crash 4 is the first true sequel to 1998’s Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped. In terms of advancing the story, it’s the first official entry in the franchise in 22 years. Unfortunately, instead of updating the series and bringing the iconic orange bandicoot into the future, developer Toys for Bob made a sequel that should have been left in the past.

This time around, Crash and his sister Coco (you can switch between the two at any time, and they play exactly alike) are tasked with finding four ultra-powerful Quantum Masks that control the universe in order to save it from the machinations of their regular cast of villains, like Neo Cortex and Doctor Nefarious Tropy. (N. Tropy is the joke here, just so we’re clear.) Beyond that initial premise, the story doesn’t factor into the game much, other than as a way to get Crash and his friends — including some visitors from other dimensions — from one setting to the next in search of the Quantum Masks.

Image: Toys for Bob/Activision
Crash 4 controls and plays exactly like its predecessors, in that it’s a linear 3D platformer where players guide Crash through levels full of deadly obstacles and enemies. Crash has a double jump, a spin move, and a body slam, and that’s about the extent of his abilities. In the fashion of classic platformers, if Crash gets hit by the game’s enemies even once, he’ll die instantly — unless he has a magic Aku Aku power-up that will absorb the hit for him. Of course, if you fall into one of the game’s thousands of pits, you’ll die no matter which power-ups you have.

Besides Crash’s signature abilities, It’s About Time also introduces new powers courtesy of the masks that Crash has to rescue. Once he’s found them, they’ll periodically show up in levels and provide the character with a new reality-bending power, like flipping gravity upside down, slowing down time, traveling to an alternate dimension, or unleashing a wild new spin that practically lets the bandicoot fly. These powers are some of the few truly new things about Crash 4, and they’re also the best part of the game.


LEVELS OF INTEREST
Just like some of the previous games in the series, Crash 4 is separated into levels that players will select on a world map. These levels take players to various settings, from a bright space future to the days of dinosaurs to ancient civilizations.

All these levels and settings look gorgeous, using the same bright, vibrant colors the series has always had, except transported 20 years forward in time and brought all the way into high definition. Unfortunately, no matter how good they look, each of the game’s dozens of levels feels more or less the same to play, just with different combinations of floating platforms, enemies, and endless pits for Crash to jump over. The few exceptions to this come in a few surprise levels that let you take control of characters other than the main two bandicoots, but these levels are too few and far between to make for more than a nice change of pace.

Image: Toys for Bob/Activision
While some levels are built on their own ideas, like a certain type of platform or their own unique enemies, these differences are rarely memorable. Most of the levels have one or two fun platforming sections, but these moments are generally connected by uninteresting hallways filled with the same obstacles and enemies you’ve cleared a hundred times already.

What makes the bland level design worse is the gameplay itself. The controls for maneuvering Crash around a level are loose and imprecise, which is a problem, since the game is so relentlessly unforgiving. If you miss a jump by a few pixels, or you happen to get just one of Crash’s feet on a platform instead of both, you’re going to die.

NEW GAME, SAME OLD PROBLEMS
The Crash Bandicoot series has always had a reputation for being difficult, and Toys for Bob co-studio head Paul Yan told Polygon that the team wanted to live up to that in Crash 4. But the studio seems to have mistaken difficulty for frustration. While the idea of creating a true sequel to Crash 3 is perfectly appealing on paper, Crash Bandicoot is a series that needed to be brought out of the ’90s, not one that needed to try to re-create the games of that era.


In the years since Crash’s last numbered sequel, dozens of demanding titles, from Super Meat Boy to Dark Souls, have shown the ways in which difficult games can be rewarding. Almost all difficult modern games have incredibly tight controls to ensure that when you die, it feels like you had the power to prevent it. Another modern addition is letting players try to quickly correct their mistakes. But Crash 4 doesn’t have strong enough mechanics to ever feel fair.

Crash 4 requires perfect jumps. I wish the game had tighter, more precise controls that would make me feel like I was always in control of the exact spot that Crash would land. Instead, I constantly felt lucky when Crash landed where I wanted, or I’d feel cheated when he missed a platform by mere inches and I got sent back to the last checkpoint. Speaking of checkpoints, they’re almost always placed a very long way from the game’s most difficult obstacles, forcing me to jump through plenty of monotonous and easy areas just to get another shot at the challenge that killed me. If you struggle on certain sections for too long, the game occasionally creates new checkpoints for you that are further along, but making them the default would help alleviate a bit of the tediousness of replaying sections.

Image: Toys for Bob/Activision
Getting through Crash 4’s most “difficult” segments always felt more like a relief than an accomplishment. Rather than leaving a section thinking back on how fun or rewarding it was, or how much I liked the design, most areas just left me thankful that I’d never have to return.

Compounding all of this is the fact that for most of the game, the biggest threat to my survival and success was the game’s fixed third-person camera, rather than any of the actual obstacles in a level. I’d often jump toward a platform, only to discover that it was larger or smaller than I had thought, simply because of the camera’s strange perspective and the warped depth perception that resulted from it. Other times I would die because an enemy’s attack range wasn’t quite clear, thanks to the camera being situated at an odd angle.


Perspective shifting and a fixed third-person camera have always been hallmarks of the Crash Bandicoot series, and in the past, there were issues with that. The camera in old Crash games often felt like it was playing tricks on you, but that never felt like a feature — just a problem that dozens of PlayStation 1 games dealt with, thanks to the lack of a right analog stick to control your view. Even with a fixed camera, there’s no reason in 2020 for Crash 4’s obstacles and enemies to be purposely obscured. But this is all part of the apparent larger decision to make Crash 4 feel like an original PlayStation game.

I’m not here to disparage the old Crash games, either. Crash 3: Warped was one of my favorite games as a kid, and it’s one I’ve revisited multiple times since. But there’s a difference between playing a game that was actually made in 1998 and playing a game from 2020 that’s simply aiming for PlayStation 1 cosplay. In a sense, Crash 4 is a fascinating experiment in game design, and phenomenal proof of how much developers have learned in the last two decades. Crash 3, for all its fun moments and great design, is a fundamentally unfriendly game. It is still good, in part because it was working within the limited powers of the PlayStation 1. Where Crash 4 goes wrong is in mistaking that old-game unfriendliness for an important feature.

Image: Toys for Bob/Activision
When you’re playing a game from 1998, the rough edges are part of the charm. I still feel nostalgia for those rough edges when I play a game from that time period. But when those same edges crop up in a game designed in 2020, they start to feel actively hostile. A lot has happened in 20 years, and a lot of game development lessons have been learned about how to make games more enjoyable for players.

However, it is worth noting that Crash 4 does add one big update from previous games in the series in the form of a difficulty selector. The game lets players choose “Modern,” which lets you respawn at checkpoints every time you die, with no concern for lives, and “Retro,” which gives Crash a limited number of lives, and when you run out you have to start the whole level over again. The game itself recommends the Modern option, and I definitely agree. Finishing it on Retro would have made the whole experience even more frustrating than it already was. But even with the Modern mode, the checkpoints still involve a frustrating amount of backtracking through obstacles you’ve already cleared.

THE POWER OF MASKS
Despite all this frustration, there’s still fun to be had with Crash 4, particularly if you have a nostalgic soft spot for the previous games. When the game’s level design and camera aren’t actively sabotaging you, it can be a fun experience that offers a type of quasi-3D platforming that you really can’t find anywhere else.


Most of the moments when Crash 4 really starts to hum are a direct result of the game’s new Quantum Masks. The mask’s unique powers let the game introduce new mechanics to the series, and allow Toys for Bob to experiment a little more with the tricks and challenges of level design.

Unfortunately, these masks and their powers show up far too sparingly in the main game to alleviate the frequent monotony of its regular level design. However, they do all get used in an outstanding final level that feels like a brief glimpse at a much better game. In the final level (spoilers?) you have to guide Crash through challenges that force you to make perfect use of each mask’s powers, then combine them, using one right after another without missing a beat. It’s precise, it features a camera angle that makes all the facts and nuances of each area visible at once, and it feels like it’s challenging you to play the game to the best of your ability. It’s easily the most fun I had in the entire game. It’s just a shame that more of the experience couldn’t live up to this level’s standards.

The masks, alongside Crash’s mask companion from the other games, Aku Aku, provide Crash 4’s best moments in cutscenes, thanks in large part to the talent Toys for Bob has brought in to voice them. The cast includes animated TV show veterans like Richard Steven Horvitz (Invader Zim) and Greg Eagles (The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy), who are always fun to listen to. They both do an admirable job of selling jokes that aren’t quite funny.

Image: Toys for Bob/Activision
Another place where Crash 4 shines is during its few boss fights. These were always highlights of the Crash series, and It’s About Time is no exception. The battles make interesting use of the game’s mask powers, and feature unique and challenging designs that never last long enough to wear out their welcome. One feels like a cross between a platformer and a rhythm game — an interesting update for a series whose previous entries essentially predate the entire rhythm game genre — and all of them have more creativity than the levels that precede them.

It’s impossible not to at least respect the experiment of Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time. It’s a sequel that’s 20 years late, and to honor that idea, Toys for Bob seems to have made the best-looking HD PlayStation 1 platformer of all time, complete with all the frustrations that gaming has outgrown in the last two decades. Who knows — perhaps in one of the other dimensions that Crash travels to in the game, there’s a world where Crash Bandicoot gets a modernized update that brings the series into the present. But in our world, Crash 4 is stubbornly stuck in the past.

 

[manigamer]

Crash Bandicoot 4 coming to PS5, Switch, Xbox Series X in March

A PC version of the new Crash is also coming

www.polygon.com

 

[CerebralTiger]

Stuttering unrelated to the frame rate can happen at some points on the Xbox consoles. This issue wasn't encountered on PS5. An example of a level that this stuttering was found in is the level Hit The Road.

Yikes!

 

[Necrokiller]

Switch = 30fps with frame pacing issues...yikesss!

 

[Chandoo]

I wonder why so many multi platform have these random jitters on the Series consoles. It's certainly not a CPU/GPU related issue, maybe I/O ? that the Series SSD isn't fast enough to cope ?

 

[Necrokiller]

Why would it be SSD related when it performs like this on One X? This is an even more consistent read out than the PS5 (yikes lol)

 

[Chandoo]

Right, it's definitely not a CPU/GPU issue. But the video does show some random hitches here and there which are what accounts for any and all drops on the SX part. I wonder what's causing them, if the last-gen consoles are running the game that well.

 

[Radical]

A dev from Remedy spoke with IGN, they prefer the sdk from sony over the xbox.

Control also has performance issues on the xsx.

 

[iampasha]

Abhi tak "tools not ready" nhi huwe? Shame.

 

[CerebralTiger]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1375491622549458945

Hahah this is hilarious

 

[Chandoo]

"you lost your internet connection and now we're kicking you out. oh no"

That's some master-race worthy trolling.

 

[Necrokiller]

Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time cracked in just a day, despite its always-online DRM

Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time released on the PC yesterday and it has been cracked in just a day, despite its always-online DRM.

www.dsogaming.com

Looks like Activision lost its DRM and has been kicked out. Oh no.

 

[iampasha]

Based

 

[Necrokiller]

PC version has an uncapped frame rate and the game feels amazing at 100fps+ at all times with gsync.

 

[CerebralTiger]

PS5 version feels amazing with adaptive triggers and 3D audio support

 

[Necrokiller]

None of which improves input latency