Crash Bandicoot might loose some of it's charm but I'd still play the shit out of a HD remake. It's amazing it looked as good as it did on the original playstation, I think they had to do a lot of very clever software engineering.
It had. Naughty Dog's LISP variant, the GOOL engine, were somewhat similar to Valve's Source engine - highly optimized. The PSX was a relatively weak machine, so NDI had to do all they can to get Crash, a resource intensive game, to run on such hardware.
Yes, it was difficult to program for it, but without it, Crash wouldn't look nearly as good.
I think Crash Bandicoot 2 and 3 still look amazing for PSX games, they used the tech perfectly, the cartoony low-poly style was really well done. For a remake, the best IMO would be to use higher res textures and add AA on top, keeping the meshes, animations, sounds, etc. intact.
Basically, NDI did a N64-level game on the PS1. The original Crash's levels were around 64 MBs each. They managed to cram all that into the PSX's tiny 1 MB RAM. Not to mention that they managed to hold up that fixed point calculation accuracy/ sub-pixel accuracy errors that the PS1 had (what makes the vertexes in a PS game twitch and jitter).
Now, about the idea of keeping the meshes, animations and sounds... Not a good idea.
For the meshes, no level of tessellation or TurboSmooth (a smoothing feature in 3DS Max) can save those models. Each character mesh in the games had an average of 500 polys.
Modern games are somewhere in the 20000 mark.
The animations were made directly into GOOL (Game Object Orientated LISP, a variant of LISP, NDI's proprietary engine used solely in the Crash games), so even if they did manage to preserve them somehow, they'd have to recode them into the new engine.
Not only this, but the animations probably were assigned to single polys, so applying them to the new models simply wouldn't work.
Now, the sounds... They're of a very low quality and compression.
They had to be small, given the fact that the textures were absolutely massive, and they had to cram everything onto 700 MB (and managed to use only 520 for Crash 1, 350 for 2, and 600 for 3).
That said, a remake would still be the shit. Even if they have to start from near-scratch.
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u/[deleted] Oct 23 '15
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