1837 - Crash Bandicoot Advance
- Wakuwaku Tomodachi Daisakusen! (J) (English Equivilant: Crash Bandicoot Purple: Ripto's Rampage)
Finally, a game that's not based off of a movie or comic! I got the Japanese version in my role, but as my rules say, I'll play the English version if there is one. We haven't seen Crash do too much gaming recently, so this should be an interesting Blast from the Past.
Apparently this game has both a Story Mode and a Party Mode. Party Mode seems to be a minigame frenzy, so I'll stick with Story Mode.
...OOOOHH!!! I remember this game kinda! This is that one that crosses over Spyro the Dragon and Crash Bandicoot. That would explain the "Purple". Apparently, Cortex and Ripto are joining forces by having Ripto send out his minions, which are modified to have Spyro's face (and nothing else) so that the two heroes will fight each other. Meanwhile, Crash, Coco (blonde ponytail furry) and their mystical floating mask sense that there's more danger afoot, and go to collect Purple Crystals that power up portals that lead to other crystals to power more portals! Circle-tastic!
This game is basically a sidescrolling platformer, so far. Crash attacks with a spin attack, and he has a double jump. The graphics psuedo-3d style is kinda reminding me of Donkey Kong Country. One quirk worth noting is that the Wumpa Fruit (which I presume will give me an extra life if I collect enough) will all go away if I lose a life, which kinda reminds me of Rayman.
It's only a few steps before I find myself doing a minigame. They want me to fall down a deep jungle shaft, landing on crates along the way. This minigame is very hard to do perfectly, to be honest. There's fruits used to guide you from one crate to another, but I still tend to miss 2-5 out of 22. I had to do this about ten times...until I remembered that I have a double jump. Fun Fact guys! Double Jumping helps when doing platforming puzzles. It's true! My excuse for forgetting is that when I first loaded up the game last night, it was 5 AM and I was just doing a preview of what was to come, and now, it's the next day and I forgot. You'll believe me...right? Anywho, winning this won me silver diamond looking thing that is apparently called a "Clear Gem". Is it because I cleared the level, or is it supposed to be clear, like Quartz? The mysteries continue...
One info box that I see along the way helps to clear things up. Wumpa Fruit is used as payment to unlock a minigame, and when I beat the minigame, I get a Purple Crystal. Neat! This next one is called Grin and Bear it. Crash is riding on this...beast of burden of some sort. The creature runs to the right side of the screen automatically, so all crash needs to do is jump over obstacles with A, and turbo boost with b for some extra jump speed. The Purple Crystal is gained just by clearing the race, but you can also hit all the boxes along the way for another Clear Gem. Next to that, was another minigame, destroy crates in a horizontal manner, with a time limit to hurry me up. Apparently the TRUE enemy in this game is crates, and the wood they came from.
Soon after that, I found myself in the next area, which looks like a nighttime forest. Here I meet some weird dude named Blinky
, who threatened to tell his "dragon friend" about me if I don't stay away from him. I also found a card
of some sort. This game really likes it when I collect things...almost as much as it likes minigames. Speaking of which, I found another one! This one may be the most bizarre minigame yet: using a rocket launcher to "stop some sheep". What did these sheep do to me? Maybe Crash is just another one of the Poachers from Home on the Range. Either way, this one was easy. Sheep come from 4 doors and I have to point at a door and shoot the sheep
before it comes to my side of the screen. Sometimes a black sheep will run out, faster than the normal white sheep, but even then, I managed to get this one on the first try.
Moving on, we run into a Buff bandicoot (?) named Crunch. He tells me that I'm way too puny, and I need to play a MINIGAME! to pump some iron
. Okaaaaay... This one has to be the easiest one yet. To win you...mash the A button until you do a Rep. you get 15 seconds, but I had it in about 6. It got me a card.
I think I understand the truth of this game. The platforming is essentially a hub level to get from one minigame to the other. Party mode just cuts out the bullshit and lets me do minigames. The fruits...you don't actually lose them all when you die, and thanks to some of the minigames being a bit tough, I've never had any fruit issues so far. Now that I know the truth of the world, I shall play with a bit more peace in my heart about when I'll get to jump over a cliff (answer: probably never).
Next Minigame: Tanks for the Memories
. Crash rides in a tank and has to get to the end of the course. The shoulder buttons are used to rotate the turret, and the cannon fire can bounce in angles for some Puzzle Bobble/Bust a Move action. Use left and right to rotate the tank itself. Due to the canon shots bouncing, it made it easy to snipe the stationary enemy turrets before they could even see me, along with the (what else?) crates that I had to destroy for the Clear Gem.
Chopper Stopper:Ugh. This one has you shoot parachuting tanks with your chopper and protect the pod that Crash is in. you use up and down to guide the chopper, and a to shoot. Easy right? Well here's the thing. If a tank hits the ground, you have to use the b button to raise Crash's pod up so it doesn’t get rammed. The problem is that when you do this, your chopper is forced to sit beside the pod
, and it can't fire, making it a sitting duck. If either the pod or the chopper gets hit by a tank or its attacks, you lose. To make matters worse, the camera zooms in on the pod for some bizarre reason when you raise the pod, so you can't see the other tanks coming down until they're right on top of you. When you finally do lower the pod, OH CRAP, there are 4 tanks about to drop, raise the pod again! Plus some tanks have shields around them, so the only way you can kill them is to shoot the parachute that they use to drop. Ragequit.
Oh hey, that's not a minigame portal, interesting. This is...a shop. You can buy more of those trading cards with you wumpa fruit, which is great, because I was starting to think that the fruit would just sit there and rot besides some token charges. Oh wait, the shop has some issues too. You can only buy 3 items at a time, and then you have to leave and enter the shop again to see what else they have. Plus, items that you already bought still show up in the shop, instead of being taken out of the shuffle, so you can go in and see 3 items that you already have
(duplicates can't be bought either). You have to leave and enter about 5 times just to be SURE that you didn't miss a card or two.
Crashin Down the River: You ride a jet powered tube down a river, and try not to hit bombs, while COLLECTING CRATES. One odd thing about this game is that one of the crates is a nitro crate that explodes the minute you touch it. The only way to collect this one seems to be to hit it anyways. Fortunately, another crate lets you get hit one time for free, so this may have been intentional.
So after all that, I made it to the gate! Time to move on and...what. I need to collect ALL of the Purple Crystals
...even that annoying as hell Chopper Stopper one?
........
Ok. End of this Chapter. Possibly end of this game. Either way, I re-ragequit.
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