With [i]Crash Bandicoot: N-Sane Trilogy[/i], Vicarious Visions bring a nostalgia-rich but polish-poor [i]Crash Bandicoot[/i] from the '90s into 2017.

Muscle memory kicks in as I jump from lily pads to logs down a piranha filled river. All of a sudden I am six again, surrounded by the hippest games of the '90s in the Cobb & Co. kid’s area. My legs are dangling off the side of a too-high stool, and my tiny hands are stretched to their limits as I journey through a tribal settlement as a manic-looking orange rat. I mean, what six-year-old knows what a bandicoot is?

Now, 20 years later, those memories flood back as I play the same Crash Bandicoot trilogy remade for the PS4. On the first level I am beaming – it is everything I remember. By the 10th level, my smile has started to falter as it dawns that my fond memories were of a game made 21 years ago.

That isn’t to say that these games aren’t still great fun – they were and remain a bloody good time. Rather, my faltering smile comes from a growing realisation that besides completely remade graphics, developer Vicarious Visions has left the core mechanics, layout and physics almost exactly as they were in the '90s – including every annoyingly spaced jump, poorly timed obstacle and oddly placed checkpoint.

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