Game:

Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back (1997)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 20:32

90 views

1

Happy Independence Day, at least if you live in the United States. Well...at least, it *would* have been uploaded on July 4 if YouTube hadn't been a moron yesterday. I guess we're celebrating by going through levels 18 and 19 of Crash Bandicoot 2. These couple of levels, and the next one, are actually fairly challenging, more so than the first two in this warp room. Level 18, Cold Hard Crash, seems to be rather infamous...it's the longest and hardest of the snow/ice levels, but the main challenge here is getting all the gems. It has a death route that requires backtracking all the way to the beginning (be glad it's a side-scrolling area!), and as far as I know, you can't get both gems in one playthrough. Just playing through the level normally isn't so bad, though (and as far as gems go, there will be worse in store...). I didn't mention it in the video, but it just so happened that at the time when my game was paused, I had 18 crystals and 18 gems. Then there's level 19, Ruination. It is similar to level 14, the other ruins level in the game, but different in a lot of ways that make it a good deal more difficult. The main problem areas are the part where you must cross a series of tilting pillars (it didn't happen to me, but you can actually slide off them even once you've landed on them) and the Nitro crate detonator, which is suspended above a bottomless pit, all by itself, surrounded by four platforms moving in a circle. At least this level has no death route, although it does have a gem pathway (that, of course, I didn't go through). It is still one of the hardest levels in the game and one of the ones I tend to remember when I think about some of the more difficult Crash Bandicoot levels.

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