Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex (PS2)

Product Information

Lafferty described the audio as "fun, with a solid soundtrack and over-acted vocal characterizations". Halfway through the year 2006, a small article was published on the Internet, listing several online PC games which were meant to be released by Sierra. An earlier draft of the story featured an alternate version of the game's climax and ending, which involved Crash battling Crunch in a mechanical robot suit. Amongst the new additions of the PlayStation 2 game is Crash's all-new tiptoe move, while the series' use of vehicles has also been hugely expanded with Crash gaining access to gyrocopters, jeeps and a scooter.

It was first released for the PlayStation 2 and later ported to the Xbox, and GameCube, with Eurocom developing the GameCube version. The "Greatest Hits" version of the game features quicker load times than those of the original version.

The character Crunch Bandicoot was designed by Craig Whittle of Traveller's Tales and Sean Krankel of Universal. If there's anything good that came out of this game: The music consists of a very high quality diverse techno-symphonic soundtrack.

The vehicle levels aren't very good though, there were some that felt fun like the "Super Monkey Ball"-esque ball levels, but most of them such as the plane levels were just boring and didn't fit in with the game. The game was cancelled due to layoffs at Radical on February 11, 2010, and was abandoned in favor of Prototype 2. This game sticks safely with the old formula of collecting crystals, gems and relics, although it does try to inject some originality by introducing "new vehicles", a technique which, I'm afraid is overused and fails to inspire.Universal was considering Mark Cerny as the designer for the new game (which came to be Crash Bandicoot Worlds), and intended to have it distributed by Sony as a PlayStation 2 exclusive. Vivendi/Universal fell out with them and we had to go from a free roaming game to a standard Crash game with a reduced time-line - 12 months - and having to design the game ourselves from scratch. Most levels contain a "Bonus Platform" that leads to a special bonus area, where the player must navigate through a maze and collect everything in sight. Pura, Coco's pet tiger cub, serves a very minor role and appears only in the introduction of the game. The Wrath of Cortex was originally intended to be designed by Mark Cerny, who had designed all the games in the series thus far, and published by Sony Computer Entertainment.