Remembering That Time Crash Bandicoot Rode A Sickass Motorbike

thegamer.com:

This week our Features Editor Andrew King reviewed Jumping for Joy, a non-fiction book about the history of platformers, and it has prompted me to revisit my love of the genre. Though I find many modern day efforts to be both too simplistic and too overstuffed with poorly executed concepts, platformers remain my favourite genre in my heart. Either that or maybe video games were just better when I was a kid - whatever works. In any case, this all led me to thinking about Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped, my personal favourite video game of all time. It was when platformers peaked, having seen a slow and consistent rise to that point before falling off a cliff shortly after. But there's one thing we don't talk about enough - that time Crash Bandicoot rode a sickass motorbike.

The reason Crash 3 is my favourite of them all is not just that the raw platforming is great, but that there's so much variety. There are underwater levels, there are chase levels, there are levels where you ride a tiger across the Great Wall of China, jet ski levels, and aeroplane dogfight levels, and of course, levels where Crash Bandicoot rides a sickass motorbike. I believe I may have mentioned this before.

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It's a completely unique concept in the game. On paper it's just a race, but there's far more to it than that. For example, in the jet ski and tiger levels, where you instead play as Coco, these are still variations of a 'true' Crash Bandicoot level. Your goal is to reach the end, you will lose lives when you die, there are checkpoints along the way - you know, it's Crash. Except it's Coco. The motorbike levels are closer to races, and while racing is not a unique concept in video