Crash Bandicoot‘s original lead programmer Andrew Gavin has taken to Linkedin to write about his opinion of the mostly excellent Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy. He said that Vicarious Visions remake nailed the original trilogy’s ambience and coupled that with luscious visuals. However, Gavin says that the team completely botched one thing and that was the jumping aspect. He said that Naughty Dog specifically used a special system for Crash’s jumps which Vicarious Visions ignored, making the game harder than the PlayStation One original. You can read Andrew Gavins full post down below.
“In my opinion (key word, opinion!), the Crash Bandicoot remake got almost everything right. Except the most important 30 milliseconds. When they remade Crash, they nailed the visuals. Looked great, faithful to the original, kept the spirit. Then they completely botched how jumping works. On the original PlayStation, we only had digital buttons – pressed or not pressed. No analog sticks. Players needed different height jumps, but we only had binary input. Most games used the amateur solution: detect button press, trigger fixed-height jump. Terrible for platforming. So we built something borderline insane. The game would detect when you pressed jump, start the animation, then continuously measure how long you held the button. As Crash rose through the air, we’d subtly adjust gravity, duration, and force based on your input. Let go early = smaller hop. Hold it down = maximum height. But it wasn’t binary – I interpreted your intent across those 30-60 milliseconds and translated it into analog control using digital inputs. The remake developers either didn’t notice this system or thought it wasn’t important. They reverted to simple fixed jumps. Then realized Crash couldn’t make half the jumps in the game. Their solution was to make all jumps maximum height. Now every jump on the remake is huge and floaty. Those precise little hops between platforms are awkward. The game’s fundamental jumping mechanic feels worse than the 1996 original despite running on hardware that’s 1000x more powerful.”
