The current gaming industry is filled with remakes and remasters; some of them are faithful to their source material, while others are more open to changing things around when needed. It’s not too often that the original creator of a remade work speaks about a modern reimagining, but recently the co-creator of Crash Bandicoot took to LinkedIn to give his thoughts on 2017’s N. Sane Trilogy–and the “most important 30 milliseconds” worth of change that made a world of difference.
As spotted by GamesRadar, Naughty Dog co-founder Andrew Gavin posted a wide range of thoughts about the modern remasters of Crash Bandicoot 1-3, While he says the games “nailed the visuals” and said they “looked great [and] faithful to the original,” in his mind, things went south when it came to jumping–or, as he put it, the team “completely botched how jumping works.”
The original game, Gavin explains, read how long the player held the jump button down and measured Crash’s jump accordingly–the longer a player held the button, the higher Crash jumped. This mechanic was lost in the N. Sane Trilogy, according to Gavin, and replaced with a system when every jump is always the maximum height possible.
“The remake developers either didn’t notice this system or thought it wasn’t important,” Gavin’s post said. “They reverted to simple fixed jumps, [and] then realized Crash couldn’t make half the jumps in the game. Their solution was to make all jumps maximum height.”
This solution, according to Gavin, fundamentally changed how jumping in the remaster worked, to the game’s detriment. “Now every jump on the remake is huge and floaty. Those precise little hops between platforms are awkward,” Gavin wrote. “The game’s fundamental jumping mechanic feels worse than the 1996 original despite running on hardware that’s 1000x more powerful.”
If you want to try the altered jumping for yourself, Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy is available now for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and PC.
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