1. Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped

Chapter 1: The Time It Began

I was born on the 5th of January 2001 and from my earliest memories; what I could remember is that sometime around late 2004 which part of the early stages of console gaming, way before micro-transactions and DLCs; my brother was gifted his very own PlayStation 1 slim console, by our parents. As excited as this could be the console also came with 1 game and however without a memory card. The game was called Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped developed by a well-known video game company called Naughty Dog.

From what my feeble 3-year-old mind could remember is mostly watching my older brother and our cousin play this game. As I watched them fail and continuously suffer a countless number of times each of the levels of the game by fell down the depths of the empty large holes or platforms, getting kissed by a frog, getting flambeed, blown up by TNT or Nitro, getting bewitched by a Wizard or getting eaten by a shark most of these deaths or failures had their humor; my absolute favorite was the one where you would fall down a hole or off the platform and as Crash hits the ground, his shoes would fly back up 😂, to this very day, the mere thought of it still amuses me. The game had a clear objective and a confusing story since I did not play the prior two games of the series, I could not get some context of what was happening to the game, as to the different upbringings of the characters within the game, all I could see was entering 1 of the 5 levels of the stage, getting the purple crystal of each level and then having a boss encounter in order to move to the next stage. At some point in 2005, my desire to play Crash Bandicoot was fulfilled when I asked my brother to play and he let me🙌. As excited as I could ever be, I was eager to learn the controls; which were simple by the way. As soon he was done teaching me, I could not wait to show the game who's boss😎 but little did I know, was that some muscle memory was needed and hand-eye coordination had to be good; the game chipped the chip on my shoulder really quick. Playing this game alone was hard because most of the time I would lose all my lives before finishing a single level, so I resorted to playing with my brother, as he had a greater skill than me. The game itself is fun, funny, really entertaining especially if you fail a level or checkpoint. This game will be one of the games I will never forget as it is one of the first video games I have played and enjoyed.