Thought a Crash Bandicoot Collection would be impossible? Think again. It is possible to make them look good if some serious work is done. The person who discovered this was possible goes by the name of HP Zoner (the founder of Crash Mania). Read his quote if you want to find out how he did it.
Most PS1 games would look bad in HD, unless some serious work was done to the textures, models, draw distance and so forth. Crash is kind of an exception as it can easily pass as an early PS2 game if you improve the resolution. Just double the frame rate, smoothen some of the textures and you've got a good enough excuse to re-release those games in an HD collection. I'd buy it.
"Thinking about how much fun it would be to play CTR online, I remembered it would be possible to do so with ePSXe, a popular PS1 emulator and my personal favourite.
Then I remembered I hate playing games on the PC, so I had two ideas - the PS3 controller comes with a USB cable, so surely someone must have come up with a way to use it as a regular PC joypad by now. And they did. Even the Sixaxis features work and you don't need the USB cable after installing if your computer has a Bluetooth receiver.
The second idea was connecting my laptop to an HDTV using an HDMI cable. One thing that immediately came to mind was how good the PS1 Crash games look in higher resolutions.
I tried both things tonight and it was incredible. I actually dropped my jaw.
First I'd like to mention that I tried several PS1 games. Predictably, most of them didn't look any better, due to an overuse of blurry textures and polygonal characters and environments. Naughty Dog, however, is probably composed of wizards, as Crash 1 to 3 looked absolutely gorgeous in HD.
The difference is phenomenal. I played the games at two different resolutions: 1280 x 800, which resulted in extremely smooth graphics (as if anti-aliased), and then at 1920 x 1080 (or 1080p), which was sharp, crisp and amazing to look at. I can't decide which setting was better, but they were both stunning (obviously I didn't stretch the image from side to side, since the games aren't in widescreen format). Pete's D3D driver also did a great job at smoothing all the textures. You don't even need a very powerful computer to make the games run in these settings without slowdowns, as I was able to attest to. Being able to use the Dual Shock 3 was the icing on top of the cake. This is what the PS3 should do to PS1 games.
Speaking of, I then played the games on the PS3 for a quick comparison. The PS3 keeps their original resolution intact, and it was painful to look at. I didn't remember to take any screenshots, but I will post some comparisons next time I do this.
In HD, the games look relatively new for the most part, but on the PS3, they just look their age. It was all we had back then, but it's kind of funny to think about the things we had to settle for at the time. In fact, I don't ever want to play a PS1 game with 3D graphics in its original resolution again. Sony's selling vanilla PS1 games in digital format, but the least they could do is let you improve the resolution. Other people can do it, so surely they can too. They just don't care.
They seriously need to re-release the original Crash trilogy in HD. It's too bad they won't consider PS1 games, but these games really are an exception that needs to get noticed. Like I said, they just need to redraw a few sprites (noticeably the Wumpa fruits), change the resolution to 1080p, maybe double the frame rate and it's good to go. Even if it was just a disc containing an emulator and the games, it'd still be worth every cent.
On a related note, I am never buying an old game again, now that I can use my laptop to run those on a TV screen and play with the Dual Shock 3. Thank you, Internet!"
This doesn't necessarily mean there will be a Crash Collection, but there is hope.
Comparison[]
2012
1998
Noticeably, the pixels in the latter picture are easy to see but in the former picture it looks smoother. The difference isn't huge, but it definitely makes the game much more of a worthy buy for the PlayStation 3.
Gallery[]
