The Not Quite Crash Bandicoot Remaster

The Crash Bandicoot trilogy has been a stalwart in my retro collection, it's a series I go back to every so many years and that's indicative of the high production value of the first three games. The first has aged, sure. But Cortex Strikes Back and Warped have remained brilliant games and still stand the test of time. They're not even bad to look at, they did a wonderful job with the cartoonish graphics. They're not like so many other playstation one games that just don't hold up today.
The franchise did lose it's way past the trilogy, (in my opinion) developer changes, license wars and just a general savage milking of the franchise lead to it's penultimate demise. The series disappeared back in 2010 and then last year it re-emerged as what we now know as the N Sane Trilogy remaster.

The remaster looked amazing and it frankly is, I love the remastered soundtrack and I was so shocked to see that it would remain faithful to the level architecture, at least that's what it seemed. 
Not long after it's release, topics creeped up over the internet regarding the physics and jumping mechanics of this remaster. Something was up, something didn't feel right. After none too long the developers confessed, they had made some changes.
Apparently the jumping mechanics are borrowed from Crash Bandicoot 3 Warped, but that's not just it. Crash's overall jumping capabilities have been reduced. Whilst the height appears similar it's the length of time in the air. I've been playing the original Crash Bandicoot as a reference and I have been able to breeze through it so fast and seemlessly compared the remaster. Why is a remaster so much more difficult than the game it is supposed to be remastered from? Is this purposeful? Was something lost in translation? End of the day, it has a negative effect on the game and puts a warning for me on the future of the series.

Going back to the discrepancy between the original and the remastered version, I find one of the biggest issues is perspective. Considering the age of the original games, they translated Crash's position in the environment very well to the player. In the remaster, the perspective is off. It's so hard in some instances to gauge your position in the field and in the end you have to make a leap of faith for some very generic jumps. 
One such instance is in Cortex Strikes Back, one of the sewer levels sees you walking through a tunnel atop grating. There are gaps in the grating where spiked drones are hovering up and down. In the original, this is a trivial situation. But in the remaster it gave me so much trouble. The camera angle, the shading, the perspective it was just so hard to tell when to jump. When it looked like I should jump, I was in fact jumping far too soon. In fact the best time to jump is when Crash appears to be standing in the air just after the grate.

This warped perspective is obvious in other levels, there are definitely some chasms that look shorter than they actually are. Also not helped is that some pitfalls have been increased and I know this because I hand tested several. 
The amount of times I made jumps (on levels where Crash walks away or towards the camera, normally the latter) at the edge of a drop only to have jumped too soon and not made it. It's like you have to re-wire your brain to trigger jumps just as Crash has walked off the platform. This is even more irritating when you play the originals and you find out you could do the same thing, gaining even more ground when jumping. It's undeniable that the developers have removed approx 10% of Crash's jump distance.

There are more issues that I have umbrage with, the slide dash in Cortex Strikes Back appears shorter and he covers the distance quicker, making slide jumps harder to time, an essential skill for some levels.
The motorcycle race levels in Warped require almost absolute perfection in order to gain the crystal, the thing that allows you to proceed with the game. 
I found it impossible to slide attack the porcupines on the snow levels in Cortex Strikes Back and the hitboxes for Crash when riding the Hog or Polar Bear in Crash 1 and 2 are just wrong. 
I've rattled off a few there, but I could write a book with all the cross referencing and evidence I've collected just playing through the first original game and it's remaster. 

I'm disappointed and worried, mainly because the jumping mechanic alterations were a design choice. The developers saw how the game plays and how odd the jumping and collision detection is and thought "that's what we want". 
I would love nothing more than to see the series rise up again and see more entries into the franchise but I think Vicarious Visions need to re-adjust their approach to the game. From all the information I've read about, this change was purposeful to increase the difficulty of the games and give hardcore fans a renewed challenge. That sounds all fine and well, but not everyone was looking for Crash Bandicoot Trilogy hard mode. 

This game is supposed to be aimed at a younger audience, adults can enjoy if they want but by artificially increasing the difficulty in a nuanced way is catering to high tier play and that's wrong.
The original games introduced difficulty in a natural curve and then if you wanted to complete all the secret levels and gather all the gems etc, the difficulty was upped. The difficulty steadily climbs as the player makes their way through the content. As it stands, the difficulty spike is all over the place in the remasters. One level that plays well because the perspective works, the next you're falling into every other pit because it's throwing you off.
And what of Warped? How fun is it for a new player to steadily make their way through the levels and bosses happily and then to find themselves stuck for twenty to forty mins trying to finish one damn motorcycle race. 

Difficulty is easy to implement, hard to master and so many developers cheese a true difficulty mode by just making things unfair. When I think of great games that are difficult, I think of Super Meat Boy, Ninja Gaiden and Dark Souls. Games that are hard, make that fact their unique selling point, but despite that, they play fair. Within a set of clearly defined rules and boundaries that the player has to master and respect in order to achieve victory.
When you shorten Crash's jump but keep the platform distances the same, that's cheap. 
So if you've felt cheated by the N Sane Trilogy, you're not on your own. You're also not imagining it. Just replay the originals back to back and you'll see, the changes are as clear as day.

Here is one fan hoping Vicarious Visions most likely future original Crash title plays a lot more smoothly and fairly.