Have You All Lost Your Minds?

[Nespresso]

More people in the UK bought Crash Bandicoot in its first week than Horizon Zero Dawn

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Crash Bandicoot N. Sane trilogy is the biggest launch of the year to date on PS4.

Crash Bandicoot N Sane Trilogy released last week and didn’t score too badly when it came to reviews. The title has done even better now it’s out in the wild, dropping in at no.1 in the UK charts. What’s more, it took the mantle of the biggest launch of the year to date on the PS4 from Horizon Zero Dawn.

 

“More people bought Crash Bandicoot in its first week (UK) than Horizon Zero Dawn, making it the biggest single-format launch of the year,” tweetedGameindustry.biz’s Chris Dring.

It’s also the first time a game from the series has managed to get a no.1 in the charts. Micro Machines: World Series is another new entry, debuting at no.2. GTA 5 has dropped from last week’s no.1 to no.3 because people can’t stop buying it and it will keep this up forever. Elite Dangerous got its Ps4 release last week and cracked the top 10 at no.7.

 

You can check out this week’s charts below.

1. Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy
2. Micro Machines: World Series
3. GTA 5
4. Forza Horizon 3
5. FIFA 17
6. Overwatch
7. Elite Dangerous
8. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
9. Dirt 4
10. Rocket League

 

(and why the fuck are people still buying GTA5?!)

[scottcr]

This is why we don't get nice things

[Hello Goaty ♥]

its just good to see a game with no sweaing or violence do well i suppose. 

 

Thats what games used to be like, aside from jumping on peoples heads.

[Qazimod]

End times. I admit I bought Warped on PSP once, but I have very little interest in the new collection. Crash games aren't, like, offensively bad, but they all seem like the same game, and that game is...well, okay. But not "biggest launch of the year to date" okay.

 

When are we getting a new Ape Escape? Or has that series gone to shit as well?

[Luseth]

It's nostalgic to non-gamers.

 

My cousin's have pretty much all bought the game's and they are all 'casual' gamers. They own a PS4 and play every now and again but they have all gone and bought crash because it's the game that they all remember from their childhood. I suspect it's the case with most people who have bought the game.

 

I plan to get it but the price will plummet when everyone's had their fill and selling / trading it in So give it a couple of months and it will be extremely cheap I reckon.

[jimmbob]

Nostalgia innit. There's a lot of people out there who were kids when they originally released, so they will buy the hell out of a re-release.

It's the same reason we (gentlemen of a certain age!) go all full on "frothing demand" when Nintendo see fit to throw us some scraps in the form of the odd NES or SNES mini here and there. 

[Uncle Mike]

Even the Eurogamer article on it is basically a discussion on how everyone in the office turned out to be a secret Crash fan.

 

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As I played through the Crash games on the big 4K telly in the office, the PS4 Pro whirring nobly underneath, people started to gather behind me. This almost never happens. "Oh man, I love Crash," said someone who shall remain nameless. And then another person said: "Go back a few steps, there's a secret crate you missed."

 

Pretty soon I was getting a granular level of advice that was, to tell the truth, not always that useful. Did I know that if I wanted to take both branching paths one after the other at this particular intersection I would be allowed to double back after the first one and collect all the crates on offer? Did I know that if I bounced on a multi-fruit crate rather than just spin-smashing it, it would magically contain even more juicy bounty for me to collect? Did I know how to visually identify the spars of stone that would support me and the spars of stone that would sink into the ground after a few seconds? 

 

Did I know, more importantly, that Crash inspired this kind of devotion in players of a certain age? And to this audience - the players who grew up with Crash, who saw him being chased by that boulder and didn't think, hey, twitch sequences in which you run into the screen are actually kind of bullshit, but instead just gave into the delirious cinematic pleasure of it - N Sane's approach is oddly perfect. It's the games as you remembered them in the pad and in the hands, and magically, they now look the way you remember them on the screen. The jungles are still astonishingly detailed - it's just now they're astonishingly detailed to a 2017 audience, which recaptures a little of the thrill that a mid-nineties audience would have felt. That ice is so vibrantly slippy. Those animal cameos are so characterful, so filled with slobbering, betusked life. And that slight orneriness, that sense that Crash is bravely stumbling and struggling with the addition of an extra dimension that platformers had never had to deal with before, is still gloriously present. More than anything, Crash is a game from a transition era - and he still feels like that.

 

So yes, everyone has lost their minds.

 

I said in some other thread that whilst I remembered Crash 1 as having some really tough difficulty spikes I don't think I got past (IIRC, when the perspective goes 2D platformer, but you can still accidentally jump in and out) I thought Crash 2 was an actually decent game, and I'd stand by that.

 

Maybe I'll pick it up.

[Opinionated Ham Scarecrow]

Best thing about Uncharted 4 was Crash Bandicoot.

[Zombait]

I bought it. See I never played it back in the day besides a demo that came with the original  PlayStation so I wanted to give it a go. It's actually harder than I imagined it'd be with precision jumping, odd perspectives and instant deaths a plenty. Actually it's bloody annoying how often you'll die.

I know someone who bought a PS4 at the weekend just to play Crash, they hadn't bothered with the console before then but this game was the one to sell it to them, crazy how nostalgia works

[Garwoofoo]

I guess it's a bit like the recent Wipeout re-release.  I can put the game in, turn on the console and be actually playing the game within a minute or two.  If there are other people in the room we can take it in turns, compete for best times or just laugh at each others' inadequacies.  The controls take seconds to explain.

 

Something like Horizon Zero Dawn will have half an hour of cutscenes and tutorials before letting you actually do anything, then it'll be so complicated that if you leave it for more than three days you'll forget what all the map icons mean or where you were going.

[jonamok]

33 minutes ago, Hello Goaty ♥ said:

its just good to see a game with no sweaing or violence do well i suppose. 

 

I distinctly remember loads of swearing when I played it.

[DC Lemon]

[HarryBizzle]

Crash is love. Crash is life.

[Soulstar]

I never really got into Crash, although do remember before owning a PS and seeing it for the first time, it did look really cool. Eventually when getting a PS1 I think Crash 2 was out or new and I got that, played a little bit of it then just left it. It was a copy though. I did return back to the original game though a few years ago when I was with my young nephew to pass some time with him and really found it quite brutally difficult. The saving system seems to be quite harsh too, where you need to play a stage up to a bonus section, then complete the bonus section to the end. This became hit and miss in the later stages as to whether I'd pull that off even. Some bridge stages became the worst. 

[sandman]

Picked it up for my mrs at the weekend. The crash series is her favourite of all time

[Garwoofoo]

Just now, sandman said:

Picked it up for my mrs at the weekend. The crash series is her favourite of all time

 

It does seem to be a popular series with the ladeeez.  I remember my other half spending ages 100%ing Crash 1, a ludicrously difficult and thankless task.  In retrospect I should have realised then that she was a dangerous obsessive with weirdly skewed priorities; we've been married for 17 years now but in my defence, her manual dexterity is second to none.

[SeanR]

i just ordered a copy of the n.sane trilogy, before it sells out everywhere!

[Majora]

Here's some more perspective on those sales: the first week sales of the Crash remaster are higher than every single Mario platformer's first week in the UK. Even the Wii games. 

 

People I didn't even know still play games have posted about it on Facebook. I knew it was popular at the time but I think I underestimated just how much nostalgia people would still have for it in 2017. Possibly because I owned an N64 and not a PS1, although I do remember seemingly everyone had that demo disc with the first level of Crash on it.

 

 

[Kevvy Metal]

I bought it and hammer Crash 1 over the weekend. 

I love it, and it's a perfect palate cleanser for me to enjoy during breaks from the gargantuan, but excellent Persona 5.

It's really refreshing to playing a platform with really, really simply mechanics and a bit of a challenge for a change... and the nostalgia.  

[Petrousgyre]

Baffling stuff. They were pretty average games even at the time.

[Fry Crayola]

I played through the first three games in the series for the first time last year. The first has a stupid save system and is a bit rough in places, with some ludicrously difficult sections not helped by the aforementioned saving. The second is genuinely great, the third has too many gimmick levels.

[Stoikovich]

I must have played the PS1 demo at the time but otherwise have never touched a Crash game.  Are they known for being particularly great platformers?

[K]

I would hazard a guess that this is down to the gaming demographic getting older. Sony picked up a lot of customers in the late nineties by targeting their advertising at the young adults of around 18-25 who'd played games as kids, but had dropped out; maybe something similar is happening now, except publishers are targeting those same customers, now in their late thirties. Crash Bandicoot's going to appeal to people who played it as kids and want to reminisce, and whom also want their own kids to play it as a bonding thing.

 

Something similar happened with Wipeout, I suspect - the Omega Collection was the top of the charts a couple of weeks ago, and the most prominent print advert for that game was a shot of a suburban cul-de-sac full of identikit Barratt homes with depressed-looking dads washing Ford Focuses in the driveway, except for one guy who's cleaning one of the anti-gravity sleds from Wipeout. Compare that to how the original games were advertised twenty years ago; I don't think you'd make huge inroads in 2017 showing potential customers images of Sara Cox with implied drug-blood streaming from her nose, or giving them free promotional roach material. Better to show a tired middle-aged parent driving a Qirex racer to soft play, or listening to haemorrhage-inducing nursery rhyme youtube videos while hitting 600kph round Phenitia Park. I was thinking that they could have pushed this aspect even further and had a soundtrack of period house, rather than the anonymous dad-scaring selection they went with.

 

Maybe I'm just assuming that the world still revolves around me, but I do wonder if the nostalgic middle-aged parent is becoming a sizeable niche in the market for videogames.

 

 

[Dig Dug]

There's definitely a market for these kind of games now. There's a lot of older games that are still popular now with more and more people being able to happily go back and play them again. At the same time however for the less hardcore gamer the same games they liked are also a bit dated or have become a bit inaccessible due to the hardware and games being so old. Of course we have digital services like PSN given us the choice to download these old games but that isn't really what people want, they want remasters like Crash and Wipeout and remakes like Resident Evil 2.

I wouldn't be surprised if Ubisoft consider doing this with the original Rayman as it held a few sales records back in the day for consecutive weeks on the charts which means nearly everyone would have played it.

[Sabreman]

I played the first game for about ten minutes back in the day and disliked it, mainly because I got an awfully cramped, straightjacketed sensation from the 'into the screen' levels. You know when you're willing the camera to be in a better spot, but it never goes there? Awesome game for claustrophobics, I bet.

 

Also, running towards the screen is the worst platform game mechanic ever. Fundamentally broken. I guess I'll avoid that pit next time!

 

Also:

 

 

Look at this shit.

[gossi the dog]

Crash Bandicunt as he was lovingly known by me. One of the most frustrating games ever.

[Tetchy]

I love that people still think this is a Sony thing when really it's just Activision playing off people's sentimentality of all things nostalgic for the money. They've brought back Crash Bandicoot, and later this year they'll be bringing back World War 2. What will they (re)think of next!?

[RubberJohnny]

Kill nostalgia

[DC Lemon]

1 hour ago, HarryBizzle said:

Crash Coco is love. Crash Coco is life.

 

[NEG]

Bubsy's comeback team must be excited now.