Valentine's Crash Multi-Platform

Hello all on this fine Valentine's Crash Bandicoot catch-up. It's been a while, hasn't it? I'll probably do my own little blog catch up, but for now, there's been a few exciting little bits of Crash tid-bits since the start of 2020...

Crash Bandicoot 4 hits multi-platform

Following the success of Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time (my views on that game to come in future), publishers Activision have decided to release Crash 4 multi-platform. That means on Nintendo Switch and Xbox Series X and S on 12th March 2020. Then, later on in the year, Crash will be coming to PC via Battle.net. What a nice Valentine's treat!

Crash has made you spin, jump, and Wump for 25 years, and this year he’s celebrating N. Style 🤪 #Crash4 will launch on PlayStation® 5, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch™ on March 12th, 2021! Coming to PC via https://t.co/ugBIEX5PlO later this year.https://t.co/MRqiWikuxj pic.twitter.com/WGo83N0GYv

— Crash Bandicoot (@CrashBandicoot) February 9, 2021

Animation creation

The end of January gave us a tantalising peek at, what looked like, a Crash Bandicoot animated show. This video shows the initial pitch video:

Funky, isn't it? I like it, although it took a while to grow on me. I think it's extremely well animated and crams a lot of animated fun in the 30 seconds it has. Clearly, it's riffing off of more modern animated successes in recent times, such as the newer Animiacs show, but with a lot of key classic callbacks to things like Tom and Jerry and, interestingly, that 1930's Cuphead style of rubberhouse animation. It's pretty neat and I know Crash has always felt like he should fit the cartoon mould, so it's a shame this project is no longer in operation.

Yes, you read that right. The show has somewhat been cancelled before it had already begun, but the true reasons are somewhat unknown. At least we have the initial video to offer us a glimpse of what it could have been like.

Waterfall mod

The original Crash Bandicoot had several unfinished levels and unused assets hidden in the beta build of the game. Many fans uncovered the entirety of Stormy Ascent, back around 2010, which was reinstated as downloadable content for the N.Sane Trilogy, for Halloween 2017. There was another level, however, which was much more unfinished.

The unfinished waterfall level featured Crash heading down the side of a waterfall via rocks and mossy terrain. It's clearly an early level that was abandoned, but I do quite like the idea of Crash descending an environment rather than climbing it, like many other levels entail. The level textures were clearly unfinished, but a modder by the title of airumu, has decided to touch up the level and put together a working version of it:

As you can see, the level bears strong resemblance to the original, although has been patched up in places to create a working version based on the available unfinished assets. It looks like airumu plans to keep touching up the textures and bits in time, so we shall see how this pans out. It's quite nice to see it in action, however, originally placed after the Ripper Roo fight.

In fact, some of the rotating platform ideas featured in this level were paid homage to when developers Vicarious Visions created the brand new level, Future Tense for the N.Sane Trilogy, in 2018. It's nice that this level hasn't been entirely forgotten about by fans and developers.

And that's all for now! I hope your 2020 is going well so far and I'll catch up with you more soon. Take care!