Crash Bandicoot remaster cut corners on the freaking jump button

Enlarge / Recovered 3D meshes help, but pretty much everything about this Crash remaster image had to be rebuilt from scratch. (credit: Activision)

I was happy to offer reluctant praise for the content-loaded Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy earlier this month, but I am admittedly not a Bandi-cologist. I have been watching how more hardcore fans, such as speedrunners, might react to this anthology, which required a full code rewrite, and eagle-eyed fans caught some issues that I didn't.

The anthology's developers at Vicarious Visions took to their official blog on Monday to confirm the issue: yep, you're not imagining things.

"Our game engine features a different collision system than the original game, and combined with the addition of physics, certain jumps require more precision than the originals," the Monday blog post reads. This admission joins a longer description of how the jumps in each of the anthology's original PS1 games had different animation speeds and tunings, which VV only preserved to a certain extent. All three games' basic handling systems are now derived from the Crash 3 model, VV says, and "jump tunings" have been attached to the updated Crash 1 and Crash 2 to make them feel a little more like the originals.

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