Growing up, I always used to think Crash Bandicoot looked really cool. I never really had any of his games as a child, but I wanted them. I even had a couple of toys that you get out of a machine when you put £1 in. Now that I’ve finally played it as an adult, I can see that I would have loved it if I had played as a child.

It’s basically a mixture between classic 2D side scrolling games and early 3D platformers and as those are two things that I enjoy very much, I had a lot of fun with it. Some levels are standard side scrollers, some levels have you moving forward or backward down a set path and other levels are a little bit of a mixture.

A lot of the time, with these older games, you find that the controls have aged badly, but that is certainly not the case with Crash Bandicoot – it felt very tight. When you lose, it feels like you’ve lost because you jumped at the wrong time (or made some other mistake) and when you win, you feel like it was down to pure skill. This fact alone should be very appealing to a lot of people.

The real icing on the cake is how nice all of the game’s environments are. Sometimes you’re taking a path down a jungle. Sometimes you’re exploring an ancient temple. Sometimes you’re floating down a river on a leaf. Other times you’re on a rickety bridge up in the clouds and it’s really annoying… but I digress. It’s probably just nostalgia talking, but I love seeing natural environments created with early 3D graphics. I will admit, though, that they did reuse certain level archetypes a few too many times, meaning that it did get a bit repetitive from time to time.

The biggest problem this game has is its difficulty. It can get really tough at times. You’ll have to jump off moving platforms to land on (and bounce off) flying enemies, while avoiding other enemies and timing anything slightly wrong will lead you falling off the screen and being sent back to the last check point. More casual players are likely to have a lot of trouble with later levels – I certainly did! It was so bad that I almost lost interest in the game. Even saving the game becomes difficult, because it depends on you finding secret tokens within the levels and then successfully completing a tricky mini game. This then means that you end up having to play the hardest levels multiple times. If you’re aiming for 100% – good luck to you. That is going to be extremely hard.

Nonetheless, while the difficulty is problematic, I still think that this is definitely worth playing. You may give up before the end, but the earlier levels are a lot of fun. It’s a game with a lot of historical significance (Crash was kind of Sony’s mascot at the time) and one which holds up pretty well.

Rating: 8.3/10

Buy it here.

If you’ve heard of this game, I have a feeling I know what you’re thinking. Is it “Oh great, another Mario vs. Donkey Kong game based around Mini-Marios, I can’t wait” with a sarcastic mental intonation? If so, that’s understandable. After all, there had been not one, but two very similar Mario vs. Donkey Kong games on the DS already. What more could there be to experience in a third game following the same formula? Even I, a deranged fan of all Donkey Kong games, didn’t buy it until over five years after its release. But you know what? It’s actually a pretty good game. In fact, it’s the best Mario vs. Donkey Kong game on DS, so if you’re going to buy only one of them, make it this one.

Once again, the story goes that Mario and Pauline are opening a new theme park when Donkey Kong gets mad about something and kidnaps her. Mario then sends his Minis after him in order to rescue her. Very basic and, unlike the last two games, it doesn’t have a twist ending – which was disappointing for me. It also provides the most menacing portrayal of modern Donkey Kong that I’ve ever seen and that’s not quite how I like to see him… but these are nitpicks, really.

In terms of what specifically makes this one more interesting than the other two, it’s hard to say. Overall presentation has been polished up, backgrounds look nicer, animations are all much more fluid and so forth – these may just be small things, but it all adds up and it contributed to my enjoyment of the game.

Ultimately, I think what I liked about this game, was that this seemed to be the point that they really perfected the Mini-Mario gameplay. You set off your Mini-Marios and then you use the stylus to manipulate the environment to guide them safely to the exit. You place platforms, ladders, conveyor belts and other items in just the right places for them to avoid enemies. You’ll know this if you’ve played the others, but it can be very satisfying to get them all to the end. By this point, their level designs were better than ever and it’s all very fun – never too easy, never too hard and certainly never too boring. The fact that you get to use the Mini versions of Donkey Kong, Pauline, Peach and Toad helps to add a further layer of variety too.

This is genuinely a good game and one that I would recommend. It may not stand out due to the fact that it’s one of three very similar games on the same console, but I don’t think that does anything to subtract from its individual merits. With a nice number of levels in the main game (with plenty of extras too unlock) plus the capacity to make your own stages, there’s a lot to this game.

Rating: 8.8/10

Buy it here.