"Crash Wolf" creator reviews remake: Overall good, but flawed

2025-07-23 23:09:26|Myriagame |source：minecraft skins

Andy Gavin, co-creator of Crash Wolf, recently shared his thoughts on the game’s remake—the overall review was positive, but believed the jump mechanic was “screwed.”

A few years ago, Crash Wolf released a remake in the form of the N. Sane Trilogy.Gavin seems to be in the camp that highly praised the remake, but now he elaborates in detail why he feels that there is a problem with the jump mechanism.

In a recent post, Gavin mentioned that in the original PlayStation version, the game "detects the animation when you press the jump key, and then continuously measures the time you hold the key."Gravity, duration, and force are then adjusted subtly based on the input.And in Crash Wolf: N. Sane Trilogy, the jump becomes a standard single jump.

Gavin said:

"In my opinion (the point is "I think"), the Crash Wolf remake does a great job almost everything except that most important 30 milliseconds.

They did a great visual job when they remake Crash Wolf.It looks great, faithful to the original, retaining the essence of the original.But they completely screwed up the way the jump works.

On the original PlayStation, we only had the digital buttons—either pressed or not.No analog stick.Players need jumps at different heights, but we only have binary inputs.

Most games use an amateur solution: a key press is detected, triggering a jump at a fixed height.This is awful for platform jump games.

So we built a nearly crazy system.The game will detect that you press the jump key, start the animation, and then continuously measure the time you hold the key.As Crash Wolf rises in the air, we will subtly adjust the gravity, duration, and force based on your input.

Let go early = small jump.Press and hold = Maximum Height.But this is not binary – I will interpret your intentions in those 30-60 milliseconds and convert them into analog control via digital input.

The remake developer either didn't notice the system or felt it wasn't important.They used simple fixed jumps instead.Then I found that Crazy Wolf could hardly complete half of the jump in the game.Their solution is to get all jumps to maximum height.

Now every jump in the remake is high and floating.The precise small jumps between the platforms became very awkward.Although it runs on hardware that is 1,000 times more powerful, the game's most basic jump mechanism feels worse than the original version in 1996.

The importance of the details of timing and feel is much greater than people realize.”

Gavin also talked about how Crash Wolf was successful in Japan.At that time, almost all aspects were adjusted, and Sony paid special attention to the audio part.The game difficulty has also been reduced.

Gavin wrote in his post:

“When we launched Crash Wolf in Japan, Sony took a big risk. Western games were literally placed in the ‘foreign’ area in Japanese stores – like imported movies that no one watched.

They have a special word to call these games: ‘Western game’ (Western game).This is simply a death sentence.

But Sony Japan believes that Crash Wolf may break through this situation.There is one condition: we have to readjust and optimize almost everything.

The gameplay is generally the same (but we reduced the difficulty - they were right, the original version was too difficult - and explained some obscure content).But what about the audio? It's completely remade.

Our "Bunny Bunny" style cartoon sound effects look too weird in Japan.So they added their own sound effects, and to be honest, it sounds equally weird to us.Those sharp squeaks and bouncing sounds are full of Japanese characteristics.

Then there is the voiceover.They hired a well-known TV comedian who specialized in playing the irritable old man.Suddenly, our young, energetic mascot, Crazy Wolf, made all kinds of strange old-fashioned grunts.

Jason and I were both confused.‘You want our energetic crocodile to sound like an old man?’

But this worked.Japanese players like it very much.Crash Wolf became one of the first Western games to truly succeed in Japan.It's not in a foreign area, but in the main exhibition area of PlayStation, next to the Japanese local games.

This teaches us an important lesson – sometimes, in order to succeed elsewhere, your ‘child’ needs to be completely reinvented.”

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