iMakz
One of my favorite Nitrome games. The game is very charming. The gimmick is cool and is used in creative ways in every level. The game is difficult but fair, that is until the final boss, which I could never beat as a kid and I probably would not have enough patience to try today.
1996
Some anon on 4chan perfectly captured my opinions on this game, so I'll just paste what he said.
"The game design is basic, so I guess they decided to design it around running through levels perfectly to add challenge. So, every level is like a collision course where you get punished for any mistake. There's just way too many pits, stuff that sends you back way too far if you miss, etc. That seems to be the whole idea of the game.
I just don't like this sort of game design that is based on punishing error. The 100% run takes this even further and asks you to literally do a perfect run on a single life. I'd be maybe ok with it… if the level design was any more interesting, or less "plain". I just don't want to memorize those levels like it's some SHMUP.
So far, half of the challenge revolves around timing. Wait until path opens up, hurry up before it closes, rinse wash repeat. The other half is platforming, and I've never liked it in this game. Despite Crash is a "momentumless" platformer, the jump surprisingly isn't very responsive, but the game asks you to land on tiny crates, so you have to be pretty damn precise with it.
All in all, the difficulty is pretty high, but the game is rather basic and just doesn't give you much stuff to keep your attention. It's still better than 90% of 5th gen platformers, but that speaks more about the state of the genre at that time than anything."
"The game design is basic, so I guess they decided to design it around running through levels perfectly to add challenge. So, every level is like a collision course where you get punished for any mistake. There's just way too many pits, stuff that sends you back way too far if you miss, etc. That seems to be the whole idea of the game.
I just don't like this sort of game design that is based on punishing error. The 100% run takes this even further and asks you to literally do a perfect run on a single life. I'd be maybe ok with it… if the level design was any more interesting, or less "plain". I just don't want to memorize those levels like it's some SHMUP.
So far, half of the challenge revolves around timing. Wait until path opens up, hurry up before it closes, rinse wash repeat. The other half is platforming, and I've never liked it in this game. Despite Crash is a "momentumless" platformer, the jump surprisingly isn't very responsive, but the game asks you to land on tiny crates, so you have to be pretty damn precise with it.
All in all, the difficulty is pretty high, but the game is rather basic and just doesn't give you much stuff to keep your attention. It's still better than 90% of 5th gen platformers, but that speaks more about the state of the genre at that time than anything."