Remember Crash Bandicoot? He’s back, in remastered form

As the old saying goes: Ask, and you shall receive. Kids of the ’90s have been asking for a genuine Crash Bandicoot reboot or remaster, and we’re finally having our dreams answered.

For years, the franchise sat in limbo in the depths of the Activision IP portfolio. Naughty Dog, meanwhile, the studio behind the chaotic critter, was busy being awesome making the likes of Uncharted and The Last Of Us.

Sony always appeared keen to bring back a character that was for a while there the PlayStation’s answer to Mario and Sonic. While not anywhere near as iconic, Crash still holds a very important place in gaming history, and in many ways helped define ’90s gaming.

It’s unsurprising, then, that Sony was so intent on giving the character a B-12 shot of energy.

Activision came to the rescue, releasing the shackles and lifting the lid on a remastered/remade effort, with the first three games in the Crash library — Crash Bandicoot, Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back, and Crash Bandicoot: Warped — all getting some significant visual touch-ups.

It’s called the Crash Bandicoot N Sane Trilogy, and well, it looks pretty darn insane.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fbO2-egZ3U[/youtube]

The N Sane Trilogy sees the return of everyone’s favourite video game marsupial, with Activision confirming that all three games have been completely, fully remastered in “HD graphical glory”.

Sony admitted that with the games being almost two decades old, it was extremely tough to remaster them. “The original code and assets are nearly unusable. Nearly,” the publisher said.

Instead of a full remake, they opted for a remaster, except Sony calls this a “remaster plus”.

“The first step in our remaster plus was to truly understand what made the Naughty Dog games special and why fans still love them to this day,” the publisher said. “The best way to understand a game is to play it, and boy, did we play the Crash games. We played them to the point that we broke controllers from mashing the jump button too much. We studied original concept art and commercials for inspiration. And we went even further back to understand the material that originally inspired Naughty Dog, including Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Looney Tunes.”

The level of refinement is rather impressive. N Sane Trilogy will offer rebuilt levels, rebuilt characters and rebuilt cinematics, all based on the designs of the original game, simply remade using modern technology.

It will also get a host of new features not available in the original games.

Gamers can expect a unified checkpointing and save system, meaning the frustration of not having a save system in the first game will be rectified. Time Trials will be offered to see players battle it out for the best times, while a unified menu system will keep the games under one, simple-to-use UI.

The game is scheduled for release in 2017, exclusively on PlayStation 4. If the original announcement of a new Crash didn’t get you excited, surely this will!