Crash Bandicoot™ N. Sane Trilogy

this game is like if they remastered the original 3 crash bandicoot games and put them into a trilogy for the price of some amount of money

What a fantastic collection of remasters! After having put hundreds of hours into the original trilogy (as well as CTR), this collection is top-tier, but it has some downsides that make it hard to pick over the originals at times. If you do not care about slight gameplay changes, this is absolutely worth your time and money. However, if you do care, there are a few things that are, at least in my opinion, downgraded from the original trilogy. First off, the good/QoL changes: the "no-death" requirement for clear gems in the first game has been removed. This is good for casual play, and the game is so fun that if you want to go for a no-death run on stages, I have found it just as enjoyable because of how tight the controls are. Crash 1 has the most beneficial changes of the trilogy in this collection. Whereas the original had issues regarding momentum—where you would continue sliding forward while spinning into enemies or crates—this is fixed in the N. Sane Trilogy, making unintentional deaths from falling off platforms a thing of the past. The bad parts of this collection are somewhat subjective, with the exception of the Crash 3 vehicle levels. All I have to say about Crash 2 is that the game can look a bit bland at times. It is beautiful, don't get me wrong, but the colours and style are lacking compared to what the original game managed to pull off; this can also be said for Crash 3. A less subjective negative I have is with Crash 3's vehicle levels, which feel far worse to control compared to what Naughty Dog managed to pull off with the original game. Levels such as the motorcycle races make it feel like you are constantly fighting the physics while trying to make turns. While it was never perfect in the original, it feels much more clunky and slow here. The opposite is true for the jet ski levels: the jet ski is far too slidey, and it feels like one small turn could send you barrelling into bombs, ruining your time trial runs. It is nothing that makes them impossible by any means, but they do feel overall underbaked, as if they could have been tweaked to make the vehicle physics more enjoyable. overall if you just want to enjoy 3 incredible platformers and don't have the means to play the original games, these are absolutely worth it and prove to be incredible fun for first time players and repeat playthroughs.