Next to its original material, the remastered "plus" iteration of three Crash Bandicoot staple entries into one package called the Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy stands as a faithful and stellar remake of the popular marsupial-led series, pulling along and improving upon various elements that made the original great.
Despite lapsing the original entries by three console generations, the remastered trilogy has managed to inherit an excellent full-blown semblance of the game's art style and core mechanics. This time, however, it has visibly undergone rigorous bouts of fine-tuning — patching up the game's age-old faults and retrofitting elements exclusive to each game and universally applying it to the packaged trilogy.
Faithful Crash Bandicoot Remakes
DigitalFoundry, consummate scrutinizers of console specs and performance, has taken on the Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy ahead of its release, putting the two games in juxtaposition. Of course, it's impossible to carbon-copy an original source material, but Vicarious Visions, working with some of the games' original geometry provided by Naughty Dog, has refined the visual experience to contemporize the games' aging visuals.
A remake may at first seem simple, but the process is actually far from what people imagine it to be. Developers can't just delete and add a few lines of code and impregnate the games with updates. Converting original materials into remakes involves a lot of legwork, and for this trilogy, Vicarious Vision had to work with a lot of assets, level designs, and various elements people would want to see reincarnated in a brand new varnish.
"It's practically impossible to make a traditional remaster of the original Naughty Dog games. They're roughly 20 years old, and technology has advanced significantly in that time. The original code and assets are nearly unusable," wrote game director Dan Tanguay in a blog post.
Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Features
Vicarious Visions didn't simply remake the original games. The remastered trilogy's "plus" element owes to a number of features added onto the entries. For one, there's a new modern game save system, something the original ones skimped on, alongside an improved unified menu system that props up when the game is paused. There will also be time trials for every single level in the trilogy, the developers said.
Vicarious Visions has noted that these aren't the only new additions to the remastered trilogy, so a lot of improvements could still be announced as the title hovers its release date.
Pricing And Release Date
Arriving exclusively to the PlayStation 4, the Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy contains reworked and remastered versions of the first three Crash Bandicoot games: Crash Bandicoot, Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back, and Crash Bandicoot: Warped. The game will be released sometime in 2017.
The trilogy was officially given an official name this year, following a persistent chorus of fans howling for the beloved marsupial's return. Crash's return has involved hints by Sony itself, leading to an official confirmation back in June.
