Crash Twinsanity

Crash Twinsanity
They're working together, but they don't have to like it!
Genre(s): Platform Platform(s): PlayStation 2 Xbox Release Date: NA: September 28, 2004 EU: October 8, 2004 Developer(s): Traveler's Tales Publisher(s): Vivendi Universal Games Series: Crash Bandicoot Predecessor: Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex Successor: Crash of the Titans

Crash Twinsanity is a platform game, developed by Traveller's Tales and published by Vivendi Universal Games in North America and Europe and by Sierra Entertainment in Australia, for the PlayStation 2 and the Xbox. It was released in North America on October 1, 2004, in Europe on October 8, 2004, and in Japan on November 9, 2004.

Plot

Three years after Cortex's latest failure, he returns and disguises badly as Coco to trick Crash into following him to a big trap. Crash (idiotically) falls for it and is ambushed by most of his enemies and Cortex's newest weapon, "Mecha Bandicoot". Crash defeats Cortex again but the two run into a new enemy, Victor and Moritz, a pair of mutant parrots with reality warping powers, and so Crash and Cortex are forced to work together to defeat the Evil Twins.

Good Qualities

1. The game follows the PS1 Crash Bandicoot trilogy's trend of each game starting immediately where the previous one ended by showing Uka Uka and Cortex frozen in the title screen, which ties to the ending of Wrath of Cortex where those two were left stranded in the arctic.
2. Detailed graphics and environments.
3. Solid controls.
4. Interesting story, that's different from most of other games in the series, it also acts as a parody of many platform games like the first Jak and Daxter.
5. Cooperative gameplay between Crash and Dr. Cortex, a first time in the series.
6. Gameplay is much different compared to the previous four installments, instead of an area with five main worlds each with four levels and a boss fight, Crash Twinsanity is now a open-world platform game, which is a nice change in pace.
7. Cortex is fully playable for the first time, and he uses his plasma pistol to shoot enemies.
8. Nina Cortex, Cortex's niece, debuts and is also playable, using her mechanical hands as grappling hooks.
   • Speaking of Nina, she has a nice design, with the goth school uniform and the GENIUS lowercase "n" on her forehead.
9. The levels are still completely linear like in a standard Crash Bandicoot game, but they're not literal hallways and have more secret areas that reward exploration. Levels also transition into each other without a hub world.
10. Very funny and clever humor, an example being the cutscene before the Dingodile battle.
11. The soundtrack is entirely acapella, giving it a very unique and memorable feel.
12. Awesome boss battles, which features most villains from past installments. The final boss is faced with each of the playable characters.
13. While not some of the best of the franchise, Victor and Moritz are undeniably powerful villains. Heck, not even the Aku Aku and Uka Uka duo stood a ghost of a chance against them!
14. The voice acting (aside from Crash, who is completely mute) is pretty well done. This is also the first game to have Lex Lang as Dr. Cortex.
15. Many collectibles (such as the classic gems) on every level.
16. Crash can use Cortex as a hammer, perform a spin attack while holding on to him, throw him across gaps to activate switches, etc. Cortex can even be used as a skate called "HumiliSkate" in two snowboarding levels.
17. If you accidentally throw Cortex into a pit, he will teleport back, so the game isn't ruined by clumsy AI.
18. Spyro the Dragon even makes a cameo appearance near the end of the game.
19. Despite the different mechanics, the game still feels like Crash Bandicoot.
20. If you 100 percent the NTSC version, you get a funny video with Crash and Cortex in a therapy session.
21. One of Dr. Cortex's lines: "Wrath of Cortex didn't do well as we hoped."
22. The cutscene before the Cortex boss fight in the beginning of the game is quite entertaining.
23. The NA box art is pretty well-drawn and gives off some Fairly OddParents vibes.

Bad Qualities

1. The game is very much unfinished, because it has a very messy development. The game was incredibly rushed in order to reach a very tight deadline and resulting in it almost getting cancelled. This predictably caused a great amount of problems listed below.
   • Despite being advertised as playable characters, Cortex and Nina only get 2 levels each, with the 2nd level being the final boss. This is a side effect of the cut content.
   • Coco was originally going to be playable and have an entire level dedicated to her, but due to executive meddling from Vivendi Universal, she has absolutely no reason to be in the game, aside from filler.
   • Mecha Bandicoot was also supposed to be playable, with an entire level dedicated to it, just like Coco, but it would ultimately be playable only during the final boss.
   • Many sound effects are missing. One of the most jarring examples is N. Brio transforming to a completely silent cutscene after drinking one of his potions.
   • In an interview, it was revealed that the final product is just 1/3 of the game Traveller's Tales wanted to make.
2. Due its crazy nature, Twinsanity constantly jumps the shark and this predictably results in many problems such as mechanics that don't get expanded on, too many gameplay styles at the same time, and some unoriginal ideas like introducing an evil version of Crash, simply called Evil Crash.
   • The idea of an evil Crash had essentially already been done with the creation of Crunch in The Wrath of Cortex!.
3. Because of all the content that had to be cut, the game is very short. If you don't go after collectibles and make little mistakes, you can complete the game in just three hours. If you know where everything is, you can even 100% the game in four hours.
   • Also there are only 12 levels in total, which is pretty small, compared to the 30 that TWOC had.
4. If you miss a colored gem in a level, you have no choice but to do a massive amount of backtracking through previous levels until you get that gem.
5. Gems are no longer collected by breaking all boxes in a level, instead they are simply found in the level as regular collectibles, meaning there's little incentive to break boxes, besides Wumpa Fruits and lives.
6. The game is a literal goldmine of glitches and bugs. It's very easy to go out of bounds and skip huge chunks of the levels. The world record speedrun is just about 14 minutes.
7. On top of the glitches, there are programming bugs and screwed up hitboxes.
   • The natives are hard to kill because of the massive hitbox of their spears.
   • Even if Tikimon is defeated, his corpse will still damage Crash if you touch it.
   • In some versions (specifically the Xbox version), touching stunned Coco kills Crash.
   • In some versions Evil Crash has pathing problems when crashing after Cortex which makes him spin in circles.
8. The story has serious plotholes:
   • How did Uka Uka end up stuck in a wall of the iceberg lab if he was frozen along with Cortex near N. Sanity beach?
   • When did Cortex build a huge lab in the middle of an iceberg?
   • It is never explained how Coco found the Iceberg lab or gotten rid of the paralysis at the end of the game (though to be fair this was product of the rushed and unfinished state of the game as the storyboards hinted).
   • Why didn't the evil twins use their psycho powers to fight against Evil Crash?
   • How did N.Tropy and Brio know that Crash was on the N. Gin ship and why were they working together?
   • Cortex remembered that his first experiment was teleporting his pet parrots to the 10th dimension which is illogical since his first experiment was creating Ripper Roo.
   • Why does Evil Crash appear out of nowhere in the Lab after entering the 10th dimension?
   • In the 3rd phase of the final bossfight, it isn't explained how Crash was able to get Mecha Bandicoot when it was back in his dimension at N. Sanity Island destroyed in a pit.
9. Whilst the controls are overall great, the slide jump is terrible because it's not long or high and it locks you in an arc.
10. The bosses from the other Crash games appear only as cameos in one cutscene. Aside from N. Tropy, N. Brio and Dingodile, none of the other bosses are seen again, which just further emphasizes what we could have got if only the game was actually finished.
    • Also for some reason, Nitros Oxide is present which hints that Traveller's Tales probably didn't know CTR was supposed to be a spin-off.
      • Speaking of bosses, N. Gin, N. Brio & N. Tropy and the Evil Twins are the worst boss fights in the game. The N-scientists are just pathetic and not challenging in the slightest, while the Evil Twins fight is really tedious, long and boring, in fact all the bosses are easy to defeat.
11. If you head the wrong way in the Academy of Evil, it's possible that you'll be forced to replay the entire sewers level until you exit and find the right path.
12. If you die and don't hit a checkpoint crate you'll be forced to rewatch cutscenes you just witnessed, and it didn't help that the in-game cutscenes are unskippable.
    • What's worse is that on the Gamehut YouTube channel there is footage of beta versions showing that it was originally possible to skip those cutscenes, but the developers feared that the game would be prone to freeze if the player tried to skip them, another example of the game's troubled development.
13. Crash lacks a lot in expressions; he's constantly smiling, unlike the other games where he was more expressive. Hell, even in Wrath of Cortex he was more expressive (at least the CGI cutscenes are okay in that front). But the most puzzling thing is that Crash doesn't say anything in this game, not even short exclamations like his famous “Woah!”. This makes Twinsanity one of very few games where Crash is completely mute.
14. For unknown reasons, the therapy session clip reward for collecting every gem was replaced with a montage of random animation tests in the PAL versions, thus killing such an efficient incentive to 100% the game and making for a really disappointing reward.
15. Although good, the level design quickly overstays its welcome. When it's not making you deal with fun platforming sections, the game bombards you with NITRO crates.
16. Aku-Aku and Uka-Uka are borderline useless in this game. They do not protect you from NITRO and TNT crates and their invincibility doesn't kill enemies to the touch, destroy the crates, or make you go any faster, not even having the iconic drum beat. At least the invincibility worked in Wrath of Cortex and it had its music, even if it was a boring synth track. No wonder Victor and Moritz defeated them so easily.
17. Nina's playstyle isn't really unique, she just plays like a worse version of Crash and the level design doesn't do much other than finding some uses for Nina's bionic arms.
18. There are some very inappropriate scenes for a E/3+ rated game, like Crash staring maliciously at Cortex's butt in the cutscenes before the humiliskate sections, the fact that Cortex owns a brothel, Rusty Walrus wanting to cook Crash and Cortex's infamous line “My daughte-eeerr n-niece!”. It would be understandable, but in that same year the E10+ rating arrived in America and the PEGI 7+ rating already existed in Europe.
19. The Evil Twins (Victor and Mortiz) are bad and unfunny villains. Their backstory is also lacking and rushed; they were Cortex's pet parrots that he accidentally teleported to the 10th dimension with a machine that would become the Evolvo Ray later on... and that's about it.
20. Although it does have better texture quality, the Xbox version has next to no lighting which makes the character models look darker.
21. The game is notoriously difficult to emulate as the PS2 version constantly crashes when played on a PS3 and the Xbox version, as seen in Caddicarus' review, has massive slowdowns that make some levels painful to sit through if played on an Xbox 360.

Reception

Crash Twinsanity received mixed to positive reviews from critics upon release, but very poor sales, only selling about 700,000 copies. Play Magazine declared that "Traveller's Tales has delivered a 60 frame/s cartoon epic without sacrificing expanse, dwarfing boss encounters or vivid effects by skillfully balancing model and environment integrity with performance."

Brent Soboleski of TeamXbox crowned the game as "one of the best Crash titles to have been released since its earliest inception on home consoles, and its creative use of combining past enemies as partners is what gives Twinsanity a new lease on life".

Crash Twinsanity became a cult classic among fans of the franchise, over years more and more was leaked of just how much was missing from the final version. After the release of Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy the lead concept artist of Crash Twinsanity expressed interest in the possibility of a remastered version of Twinsanity that includes all the content that was cut from the original release.

WatchMojo ranked this game the 5th BEST in Top 10 BEST & WORST Crash Bandicoot games.

Why the Game Was Rushed

• Executive meddling: Traveller's Tales's new division, called Traveller's Tales Oxford Studios, originally wanted to make a darker and more serious game called Crash Bandicoot Evolution, but the project was scrapped at the end of 2002 because it was too similar to Ratchet & Clank, which had just came out, in its tone, atmosphere and plot (the Evil Twins, who are also the villains in the final game, plan to create their own planet by stealing pieces of other planets and Crash has to travel in space to stop them). They started out a new, more comedic project whose main goal was to only develop games for the franchise, but despite having spent more time on Evolution and Twinsanity being so ambitious, Vivendi Universal still gave Traveller's Tales a deadline for 2004 and the actual development after production restarted only lasted one year (in other words, executive meddling). This was made because Universal wanted Twinsanity to come out alongside Spyro: A Hero's Tail and starting to have financial issues which they didn't have a concrete solution in the middle of the uncertain outcome of the game. After having a messy development due to the inexperience of the developers and the underestimation of the PS2 and Xbox capabilities, Traveller's Tales Oxford had to get it together and cut a lot of content from the game with entire music tracks, characters, concept levels, a whole dimension getting the axe and even cancelling the GameCube version in the process, so the game could just barely making it to the markets. Unfortunately Twinsanity had very poor sales (It was the first game released on home consoles who didn't reach to the Greatest Hits/Platinum games mark on the PS2 and Xbox respectively), causing it to be Traveller's Tales Oxford Studio first and last ever game and the last Crash game to have any involvement with Traveller's Tales.

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