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My first games console was a PlayStation, given to me in Christmas 1997 with two games, Coolboarders 2 and Crash Bandicoot 2. While my brother went for the Coolboarders (a game I could never play without sliding nose first down the mountain) I grew gradually addicted to Crash Bandicoot, playing it for hours at a time. My mother tried to join me, but she slipped a disc playing with it, which I think was cosmic justice telling me that this game was mine to play alone. Simply put, it is the game I associate most with gaming.
The premise is simple: you are Crash, a talking bandicoot who can walk on two hind legs. You have to help or defeat a bad guy called Dr. Cortex; it's irrelevant really. It's a MacGuffin for the glorious levels. You have to run through a series of partially 3D environments and get to the end without dying in a hilarious fashion. There are worlds each with different levels; defeat all the levels in a world and you face a boss fight.
That's a basic overview of the game but it doesn't capture the whimsical joy of it. Crash has a variety of motions; his basic grinning amble, spin and slide attacks to ward off the bad guys, who come in various shapes and sizes and the basic jump motion. You collect apples by jumping on boxes; at some points you jump between two boxes, sometimes so rapidly it looks as though Crash has become God's basketball. Also you can pick up a (slightly racist) aboriginal mask, which can protect you from enemy attacks, and sometimes give you invincibility.
The graphics are as good as the early PlayStation was ever going to provide, but the cream and crackers of the game are the wonderful levels. You will play, play and play again. I remember going in one level where you had to fight off carnivorous plants. They would attack you by slowly leaning backwards then rapidly moving forward to chomp you like a mid-afternoon snack. They could be dispatched by a simple spin attack but mistime the spin ever so slightly and you'd be eaten. A level could take days. Another favourite was riding a polar bear across the ice, sliding frantically on the ice away from a huge stack of TNT that would blow Crash to mincemeat. Or going through the sewers, avoiding electric eels that would turn him into fricassee. Yes Crash could die in many unusual ways, and a highlight of the game was trying to find every one. My personal favourite was when he was stung to death by killer bees and swelled up so he looked like a pinata.
The sequels reached a pinnacle with Crash Bandicoot 3 which included many different elements within the game. Crash Team Racing was a fun if derivative mini-kart game, and the GBA's Crash Bandicoot: XS had its merits but unfortunately other sequels were poor rip-offs of the first few games' spark and verve. They were immensely popular in their day and can be found very cheaply pretty much anywhere. If you haven't played them you're missing out on a immensely fun slice of gaming history.
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