Sunday, July 5, 2020

Time Twister - Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped - Part 3

After a short break, we're ready to continue our adventures through time. We're so close to our inevitable confrontation with Dr. Cortex and the evil Uka Uka that it won't be much longer now.

But first, I lose my patience with bastard cops who keep ramming into me. All Cops Are Bastards.

Apologies for the audio in this one. I suspect I know why it's such buggy, and I should be able to fix it next time.


In case anyone is curious, the reason why OBS was crashing so often was that I kept forgetting to turn off the desktop recording. I have multiple layers in my OBS setup, one of them is the PS4/Switch footage from my capture card. Another is the Desktop recording for when I stream games from my PC.

For my setup, the Desktop is "under" the PS4/Switch footage, so when I stream from my PC, I disable/hide the console footage. However, I didn't think I needed to do the same for console games because they're already on top. Unfortunately, that also mans OBS still has to take it both streams of footage, so it's performing double duty when it doesn't have to. So during this recording, I experimented by seeing if turning off the desktop footage improved performance, and it looks like the test is successful. We should see less OBS hiccups from now on as a result.

As for the game, we're now at a point where we have all of the additional abilities granted to us by the bosses. While some of these late-game stages absolutely are designed around making use of them to cross gaps and distances that would be otherwise impossible, in many ways having access to them just feels like cheating. You see it a lot in the recording, but I'm frequently using the Slide -> Double-Jump -> Death Tornado Spin technique in order to bypass sections that I'd need to time correctly or avoid without it.

Having said that, I'm sure what they could really do to stop players from abusing that string short of making every jump one that requires it, which would be it's own brand of tedious. An almost natural consequence of giving players access to all of these abilities and forcing them to master them for 100% completion is knowing that they can use them to trivialize large segments of the game. And this is all before we get into the Bazooka, which allows us to deal with pretty much any thread we see coming before it ever has a chance to get in our way.

Though considering that we don't unlock it until right before the end, it can also serve as a good way to make the player feel like they've come a long way since the start of the game. There's no denying that Crash is much more capable of dealing with threats towards the end than he was at the start.

Hopefully we'll be completely finished with the trilogy at the end of the next recording. We may be able to start a new game, but I wouldn't hold my breath. Even with Crash Dash at our disposal, we still have our work cut out for us getting the rest of the gems and relics.

Remember that Black Lives Matter and All Cops Are Bastards:

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