Backlog Game 006: Crash Bandicoot XS/The Huge Adventure

Main image source: www.crash-bandicoot.fandom.com

In this entry, I’m going to be very loose with my title. Crash Bandicoot The Huge Adventure (XS in Europe) was released for the GBA in the early 2000’s, back when I was still gaming regularly. There’s a high chance I read a preview and/or review in IGN or some game magazine, but just never felt any real desire to play it.

Is it technically part of my backlog then, that list of games I’d always wanted to play but never got around to it?

Not really, but for consistency in my post names I’ll stick to it, and frankly, this game is so good that you might in fact want to add it to your gaming backlog!

A few weeks ago my wife and I were having some major work done on the house, which made it highly impractical to continue gaming on my usual tv/console setup. Thankfully, I’d ordered an RG405m not too long before that, which hadn’t gotten a ton of play time but surely was going to come in very handy in such a situation.

As it happened, this handheld just happened to come pre-loaded with some games, and as you probably know, sometimes too much choice can be a bad thing.

I spent most of my first console-less evening trying to figure out what I was going to devote the next week (at least) to. Sure, I could have made the conventional choice and just played a Mario game, but Nintendo games just don’t hit the same for me in the 2020’s as they did in the 2000’s.

Having said that, I do really enjoy platform games, and I think the good ones still hold up on handhelds. In my opinion, this has to do with the inherent qualities of a platformer versus, say, a first-person shooter: whereas you are absolutely going to have to make compromises to get a FPS running on a GBA, a platform game is going to make those limitations far less apparent, because the gameplay is very much the same as its console siblings (i.e. go right, avoid obstacles, collect stuff).

I’d had a great experience in 2023 playing through the remake of the original Crash Bandicoot, and though the thought of playing Crash on a Nintendo felt kind of weird (remember, I’ve been out of the community for a while,..) I figured I’d give this a shot.

WOW!

Vicarious Visions, the developer of Crash Bandicoot XS, also developed Tony Hawk 2, to much acclaim, but that game is good for a handheld, it is very clearly not in the same league as its PSX sources.

With Crash Bandicoot XS though, the compromises to get a PSX game down to a handheld scale really aren’t that noticeable.

If there’s one thing that Vicarious Visions really nailed, it’s the feel of playing a Crash Bandicoot game; the animations, the challenging but satisfying gameplay, the humor, it’s all there.

The gameplay really is the star in this game, because I can’t remember a handheld game that captured so well the essence of the console version, but still, I have to mention the graphics, because my eyes almost bugged out of my head when I saw I’d be playing one of those famous “Crash-runs-out-of-the-screen” levels…

ON GBA!

What’s crazier is that these aren’t levels that may have looked cool early in the millenium but look super-cheesy now, they actually hold up and they are actually very fun.

There’s also some other really cool stuff I won’t spoil for you :-)

The game ended up being so good that I collected everything there was to collect (even though I didn’t bother with the time trials, I don’t care for any time trial in non-racing games and certainly could not care less about GBA bragging rights).

I’ve written in previous posts about being disappointed by retro games, where the idea of playing something retro just couldn’t hold up to the experience of actually playing retro, but Crash Bandicoot XS shows that if the gameplay is well-honed, any game can be fun no matter how far in the future you play it.

(But some GBA graphical wizardry certainly doesn’t hurt either, great job Vicarious Visions).