Crash is back, baby! My favorite jeans-wearing, wumpa-collecting, pelvic-thrusting drop bear has returned in one of the most authentic game remakes I’ve seen. The Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, developed by Vicarious Visions for the PS4, takes us back to the original Crash trilogy - 1, 2, and Warped - with a bunch of extra polygons, pixels, and polyphonic shenanigans. The games look great, play great, and sound mother freaking great - while staying unusually true to the original.

It’s not easy for developers to remake an original product as faithfully as Vicarious Visions have done here. Normally I’d advise against it, even when there are scores of old classics I'd love to see with overhauled graphics. There’s definitely a market for nostalgia, but that market varies from product to product. It’s almost always inevitable that the amount of income generated by appealing to this aging demographic won’t cover the very real (and very significant) development costs. The majority of older products have no real appeal to the contemporary marketplace in their original states, because the culture that the originals were designed for no longer exists. The standards by which we judge gameplay, pacing, and narrative can change drastically within as little as a decade.

But the N. Sane Trilogy works. The interest generated before release and the success in the days since have shown us that in this instance it was worth the time and money to bring a childhood favorite back from the dead. And it’s not wholly due to nostalgia or good marketing. It’s largely because even after all of the progress we’ve seen in game design over the past 21 years, as well as the cultural shifts in how we determine what is worth our time, Naughty Dog’s original three Crash games are still pure fun.