Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrowing our laser focus to one game per week (at least). Be sure to check out the Case File Repository for more details and a full list of games/links!

Extra Note: We've entered Shelftember! In this much-vaunted month, we will be processing one of the second round entries every day. I'll be spending one hour apiece with each game - inspired by DanielKempster's backlog-clearing series "An Hour With..." - and determining its fate from there.

Yeah, that's right. No Sony console retrospective is complete without checking in on ol' Dash Dingo and his quest to find and devour the seven Crystal Babies. When I replayed Rayman Revolution for this feature a few weeks back, it was long after I abandoned my original playthrough. Since that time I had softened on Rayman, having grown accustomed to his world and quirks via Rayman Origins and Rayman Legends, and found on my second time through Rayman Revolution that I quite enjoyed it, despite its faults. Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex ain't gonna be so lucky. I was never a big fan of the guy, and Wrath of Cortex is generally considered a weaker entry in the series, in part because development had switched to Traveller's Tales, who at the time were still pumping out mediocre licensed games instead of the much better licensed games they would eventually create with the LEGO license starting in 2005. In all fairness I had skipped over the PlayStation 1 for the most part and missed out on Crash Bandicoot's "golden period": similar to Spyro the Dragon, it's unjust to really come down on a series too hard if you skipped all the original good ones and joined the party on some outsourced late entry long after everyone involved with its creation had stopped caring and had moved onto bigger and better things (in the case of Crash's original developers Naughty Dog that would be the superlative Jak & Daxter: The Precursor Legacy, released a couple of months after this game).

But you know what? I found some stuff to like about Crash Bandicoot: Wrath of Cortex. I found a lot more I didn't like, mind, but we'll get around to that later. Nothing wrong with starting a review on a positive note, the way I see it. The hour I sequestered away to play this game conveniently timed up with completing the first five stages that comprise the game's first "world" and the subsequent boss fight at its end. It's the first 20% of Wrath of Cortex, so I figured it should make for a fairly revealing cross-section of what the game had to offer. Each of the five stages was subtly different in their level design: the first was a standard platformer level across an Arctic level, the second was entirely within the air as you flew around shooting hurricane generators, the third put Crash inside a ball and had him roll around an arboreal set of half-pipes, the fourth involved one of Crash's infamous chases as you're forced to run away from a hazard in the background towards the screen where obstacles in the way cannot be seen until it's too late, and the fifth began with a minecart ride where you had to lean side to side to smash boxes and avoid the explosive green Nitro crates. While hardly any of those were actually fun, I do admire the game's variation.

No platformer is complete without collectibles (well, depending on who you ask I suppose) and Crash has a decent amount of those too. Every stage rates you on the amount of crates you've found and destroyed, though Wrath of Cortex doesn't do the passive-aggressive N. Sane Trilogy's thing of dropping all the ones you missed on your character's head, and there's also an ankh-shaped relic to be acquired for going back in and completing the time trial. One thing I had to keep an eye out for, I later found out, is a solitary green crate with an exclamation mark on it: these explode all the Nitro crates in the level, which would otherwise be one-hit kills, and add a huge amount to the smashed crate total. Honestly, my drive to 100% complete any platformer was sorely tested by how annoying Crash Bandicoot was to play, so I never felt compelled to return to the stages I hadn't yet entirely emancipated of their cuboid containers.

I guess that's a fine segue to what I didn't like about Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex. The dumb insult talking heads between stages, the ease at which you can clip the corner of an explosive box when jumping over them, the way the game didn't save how many collectibles you'd found if you died before hitting another checkpoint, the way extra life boxes reverted to regular boxes in subsequent attempts at the same area (which is just arbitrarily parsimonious), having extra lives be a thing in general, those friggin' chase levels, those friggin' minecart levels, the awkward momentum for those friggin' Atlasphere ball levels, the admittedly funny way that spinning into apples sends them flying instead of letting you collect them, the way that your apple (wumpa fruit? Is what I should probably call them?) counter slowly and mockingly ticks down after you die on a bonus section before respawning you at the entry point, the way the good mask's name is Aku-Aku and the evil mask's name is Uka-Uka. These are mostly minor annoyances, but they're the sort of irritants that slowly go from nails on a chalkboard to nails through the skull the more you play and the more you wipe out. Every death and restart drops your level of tolerance for everything else you have to deal with just that little bit more. I came away from this brief playthrough mostly calm, but if I tried to complete the whole thing I'd probably be in an unflattering state of apoplexy before too long. Masocore platformers are at their best when they work with the player to mitigate their challenge: Super Meat Boy's the usual example of this and the way it so quickly respawns the player without dropping a beat in its wonderful Baranowsky soundtrack. Wrath of Cortex is suitably named because it would probably cause my brain to explode after a few hours.

Result: Eliminated.

< Back to the Case File Repository