GOAT bump.
I already know vaguely through Andy Gavin's blog that it involved Shu Yoshida.
But I love a meaty read.
Do you remember skylanders? Fuck you Activision
Here's a related anecdote from the late 1990s. I was one of the two programers (along with Andy Gavin) who wrote Crash Bandicoot for the PlayStation 1.
RAM was still a major issue even then. The PS1 had 2MB of RAM, and we had to do crazy things to get the game to fit. We had levels with over 10MB of data in them, and this had to be paged in and out dynamically, without any "hitches"loading lags where the frame rate would drop below 30 Hz.
It mainly worked because Andy wrote an incredible paging system that would swap in and out 64K data pages as Crash traversed the level. This was a "full stack" tour de force, in that it ran the gamut from high-level memory management to opcode-level DMA coding. Andy even controlled the physical layout of bytes on the CD-ROM disk so thateven at 300KB/secthe PS1 could load the data for each piece of a given level by the time Crash ended up there.
I wrote the packer tool that took the resourcessounds, art, lisp control code for critters, etc.and packed them into 64K pages for Andy's system. (Incidentally, this problemproducing the ideal packing into fixed-sized pages of a set of arbitrarily-sized objectsis NP-complete, and therefore likely impossible to solve optimally in polynomiali.e., reasonabletime.)
Some levels barely fit, and my packer used a variety of algorithms (first-fit, best-fit, etc.) to try to find the best packing, including a stochastic search akin to the gradient descent process used in Simulated annealing. Basically, I had a whole bunch of different packing strategies, and would try them all and use the best result.
The problem with using a random guided search like that, though, is that you never know if you're going to get the same result again. Some Crash levels fit into the maximum allowed number of pages (I think it was 21) only by virtue of the stochastic packer "getting lucky". This meant that once you had the level packed, you might change the code for a turtle and never be able to find a 21-page packing again. There were times when one of the artists would want to change something, and it would blow out the page count, and we'd have to change other stuff semi-randomly until the packer again found a packing that worked. Try explaining this to a crabby artist at 3 in the morning.
By far the best part in retrospectand the worst part at the timewas getting the core C/assembly code to fit. We were literally days away from the drop-dead date for the "gold master"our last chance to make the holiday season before we lost the entire yearand we were randomly permuting C code into semantically identical but syntactically different manifestations to get the compiler to produce code that was 200, 125, 50, then 8 bytes smaller. Permuting as in, "for (i=0; i < x; i++)"what happens if we rewrite that as a while loop using a variable we already used above for something else? This was after we'd already exhausted the usual tricks of, e.g., stuffing data into the lower two bits of pointers (which only works because all addresses on the R3000 were 4-byte aligned).
Ultimately Crash fit into the PS1's memory with 4 bytes to spare. Yes, 4 bytes out of 2097152. Good times.
You can make save states with the PSP emulator? How that? I don't intend on cheating though, I'm quite well-versed in platformers. Also, I know CoT and MoM are not all that great, I've played throught htem once already, because I reviewed them, I still want to replay them for completion (also I've only rushed through them back then, probably missed a bit of additional stuff).
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Crash Purple/Fusion is more minigames than platforming. Rather, there's platforming to get to the minigames, which are the actual "meat" of the game, as I recall. I'd say you can skip it, tbh. Huge Adventure/XS and N-Tranced were both pretty decent, though. The order you wanted to play them in sounds good too.
I guess the worst I could say from memory about Titans GBA is that it isn't worth your time, and you're really not missing much by skipping it. It was boring, the platforming was dull and the combat wasn't very fun. (Tangentially related, but Legend of Spyro: Eternal Night GBA, on the other hand, had a surprisingly deep and fun combat system, and some decent platforming too)
Nope, Crash 2 and onwards are much more straightforward. Walk up to the big screen in the Warp Room to save and load a game. Always available, no passwords to jot down or bonus levels to jump through, all you need is a memory card. Twinsanity and on have autosave (or at least the option to save in the pause menu).
Yes, it's a factory level. Yeah, you can learn where they hit the ground, but that was basically my point: You also need to do that. I don't like it if a platformer level is not properly playable without memorising an enemy pattern. It's fine if it is too difficult but possible in principle, but with the barrels, the game does not give enough information to do it properly on the first try. And yes, I've played two bridge levels so far, one being the one I commented on above, with the invisible bridge, the other one I've only run through once, I couldn't get all boxes yet - and I'm not looking forward to trying that at the moment.
I will just play them on the PSP or my PS1 when it returns to me
. I do have a PS1 memory card, but the PS2 is quite picky in that regard..There are no special requirements to save a game after the first Crash Bandicoot.
Hope so as I'm really dying for new CTR (Battle mode) or at least remaster so I could play with my friends online because this is the game that I've spent more time so far (next is Crash bash) in my life.
Just Wrath of Cortex and Twinsanity.
There are too many hoops to jump through and it doesn't make much lucrative sense. Even if Sony were to buy the IP, they would only buy it if it was worth the investment. Are they gonna get Naughty Dog to develop a new Crash game? Even so, supposedly the team that developed the original trilogy is dispersed so to speak.
I did assume that was the case.
But hey, play Crash 2 and 3 even if you have already. I'm about to
Thanks man.
.I'm playing through all Crash games right now and will write a small text explaining the game and my experience with it here, only leaving out Crash 2 and 3 for now to find a way to play them with a controller where the left analogstick is swapped with the dpad compared to the Dual Shock