Crash Bash (
Crash Bandicoot Carnival in Japan) is the fifth and last
Crash Bandicoot game on the Playstation One and the first that was not developed by Naughty Dog, who produced the original trilogy as well as
Crash Team Racing.
Crash Bash was the only Crash game developed by Eurocom, and since then the franchise has seen many developers and publishers.
Like how
Crash Team Racing is the
Crash version of
Mario Kart,
Crash Bash is
Crash's answer to the
Mario Party series. Unlike
Mario Party,
Crash Bash has no boards, and the vs style of play consists of playing game after game and then tallying up the points, similar to
Mario Kart. There are 28 mini-games, though most of them can be clumped into groups of four. For example, there are four different games that play like four-way pong, each with different tools or obstacles. Every game can be played in either free-for-all or 2-vs-2 matchups.
There's also an adventure mode where one or two players cooperatively take on computer opponents in each of the games, and a few added boss levels. In
Crash tradition, playing a level again lets you get more prizes. In this case, gems are awarded for winning a handicap match (the computer starts with more points than you), crystals for a special match where the game is changed in some way, and relics for winning 2 or 3 games in a row against
Cheating Bastards.
While it has its share of detractors, some of the minigames are still quite different from anything else available to this day. The pong games in particular were very hectic, with a "kick" mechanism and permanent multi-ball. The 2-player cooperative option was fairly rare in its era, and is a less frustrating way to go through the adventure, as it forces the games into 2v2 competitions instead of the
free-for-alls seen in the one-player mode. Unfortunately, it was only released on the
Play Station Network in Japan, so only the PS One discs exist for the NA and EU regions.
Crash Bash provides examples of:
- The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: In some of the racing levels, there is a glitch that allows one of your opponents to get a free lap as soon as the race starts. This glitch never benefits you, and it usually occurs during the Nintendo Hard Relic Challenges, making them all the more aggravating.
- Invoked in the gem challenges; you need more points than they do to win.
- Cosmetic Award: Platinum relics are only good for increasing your completion rate and proving your supreme skill against computer opponents in that game.
- Crate Expectations: Naturally, for a Crash game. One set of games revolves around throwing and kicking crates at each other.
- Earn Your Fun: At first, only sixteen games are available to you. In order to unlock the remaining twelve, you have to play Adventure Mode.
- Extended Gameplay: Adventure Mode stops at the last boss as far as the story is concerned. After that, there are extra games to unlock. There are also challenges to complete, but they can be ignored once you've done the previous two.
- Everything's Better with Spinning: Crash has his traditional Spin Attack in some games. Coco gains her own version, here.
- Fake Balance: Unlike Mario Party, a few of the games give different attributes to each pair of characters. This is good for variety, but, as usual, some characters will probably be perceived as better than others depending on the game and the players. A good example is Crash and Coco using their spins as a "kick" in the crate war games, which cover all directions with less ending lag than the other kicks. Another example is Cortex and Brio having a charge move in the Panic (shoving) games that is more powerful but uses their entire charge bar instead of half of one.
- Gang Up on the Human: It zigzags depending on the difficulty level - in last-man-standing games such as Tank Wars, the AIs will usually off each other just as often as they try to off you. In Adventure Mode, however, this trope becomes more noticeable.
- 100% Completion: The relics are insanely hard to get, especially in one-player, but they can boost completion all the way to 200%
- Kill Streak: Some mini-games involve killing off the other three players in a level, leaving you the last man standing.
- Mood Whiplash: Despite the game upholding the series' usually wacky tone for the most part, the two alternate endings are pretty damn serious. One has Uka Uka throw an epic tantrum before getting shot into hyperspace, the other has him gain control of all the crystals "and ALL OF THE POWER", leading Crash and Coco into exile). Naturally both fall into Canon Discontinuity.
- But what happens in co-op when one character is good and other is evil, you ask? Why, the two of you, who have working together exclusively up to this point, are pitted against each other in a winner-take-all showdown to determine the ending.
- No Export for You: Inverted since only Japan has released the game onto the Playstation Network, meaning the original PS One disc is the only way to play the original Western version. In addition, the Japanese version has a few extra bells and whistles not available in the original, including Fake Crash as an unlockable playable character.
- The Other Darrin: All characters have different voice overs, par Crash and Cortex who use clips recycled from previous games for gameplay grunts. Granted only Aku Aku and Uka Uka are highly noticable due to being the only characters with voice roles in cutscenes.
- Rumor has it the two masks actually had computer-generated voices. If you've ever heard those two talk in this game, it actually doesn't sound too far off.
- Padded Sumo Gameplay: the "Panic" games involve shoving everyone else off before the time limit. While just one fall results in elimination, there are times where it's hard for one player to get the decisive shove on another, especially when it's down to two players who are moving conservatively, and in the adventure mode, draws are just like losses.
- Rules of the Game: The crystal challenges will put restrictions on the human players but not the computers. Some gem challenges do this too. This leads to very Nintendo Hard challenges.
- Tank Goodness: The Tank Wars mini-game, in which you have to off the other players while riding tanks.
- Unexpected Gameplay Change: Even with Gameplay Roulette in effect. Most bosses are based on existing mini-games, but the first part of the final boss is a 3D space shooter not seen anywhere else in the game.
- Wasted Song: Exploited; the hardly-used N.Gin boss music in Warped is used all over the place in this game.
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