I don't necessarily care for the character designs.. I like those games simply because they are very fun to play!

I think those games were great for their time, yes even Sonic Adventures. Old games can be judged by how they hold up today but understanding a game and tolerating it in respect of it's time and legacy is not "nostalgia".

I still play Crash 2 and 3 and to this day they are excellent games, Crash 2 more so.

Crash Team Racing is also my favorite game of all time so yeah....

They're fantastic.

I enjoy Spyro The Dragon, the 2nd one not so much. Never played the 3rd. It might be due to I played the first one as a kid and the second one I never owned myself until recently, but I think I like the first one because you just seem to get on with it, rather than the 2nd which has more dialogue and story which i'm not really interested in.

So did you those games when first came out? At the time.i thought spyro and crash were subpar to banjo and mario 64 anyway. But both games u mention were played and loved by millions. Why shouldnt they remember them?

I hope you aren't using the OP to question the awesomeness of some of my favourite videogames ever made.

The reason people like them so much is because they were just young kids when they came out, so it was almost "my first videogame". They were just fun, and engaging, and at that time they were completely new to me. I don't know much about the scenario with other people, but I do know that these scenarios are where I enjoy videogames the most.

See, I don't agree that it has anything to do with their goals. The difference is that every element in Mario Galaxy expertly works towards making the platforming as tight as possible. With the 3D Sonic games, all of that was done poorly, and elements like the homing attack were added as duck tape to haphazardly fix bad systems.

The reason why skillfully trying to bounce off of enemies while maintaing a fast speed wouldn't work in almost every Sonic game is because the controls, physics, level design, enemy design, and enemy placement are specifically and painstakingly made with the single perpose of making that not only possible, but fun. When Mario 64 was made, the first thing they did was put Mario in a room an made sure it felt good to jump. Nothing like that has been done in 3D Sonic, definitely not until Lost World, and like we've both said; even that can be improved.

A common argument is that these games were great "for their time" and shouldn't be judged by todays standards. That's flat out wrong. If a game doesn't hold up today, it was never good to begin with. ALttP wasn't just great "for it's time." OoT wasn't just great "for it's time." Mario 64, Super Metroid, Star Fox 64, F-Zero X, SotN, Tekken, Street Fighter 2, and Sonic 3 weren't just great "for their time." They were always, and will always be great, regardless of time and regardless of better games that may have come out after. Good games are timeless. There were enough good 3D platformers at the time to tell the difference between the good and the bad.

I wasn't saying that you're stuck in a ball in 2D Sonics. I was saying that while you're a ball, you're commited to the different physics that being a ball would naturally entail.

So much comparison to modern games as if they're still supposed to be AAA titles released today. Fact of the matter is crash and spyro absolutely helped Sony differentiate from Nintendo. Clones? Show me one. Literally one n64 game that was 3rd person in the same manner as Crash. Still different genre.  Spyro was about a dragon freeing eggs for his clan vs Mario who wanted to unlock stars to fight bowser.... Where is the similarity? Better yet play those games sequels and tell me they aren't distinct. I'll disagree and tell you they helped to DISTINGUISH. Try crash warped and let me know where you sit because for my generarion who owned an N64, Crash changed the game and put Naughty Dog on a pedastool that no one else has managed to reach in my completely honest opinion. New IP after new IP and each time its GOLD. From Crash to Jak and Daxter to Uncharted to The Last of Us. Show me that pedigree in the history of video gaming and you have my instant respect.

i think this is entirely valid, but that's what i'm trying to get at. this is nostalgia at its purest speaking. it's different from a game being mechanically up to snuff; from the level design being creative instead of limited in scope, bland and samey and intensely confined (and confining); from the character design (in the case of the crash games in particular) being creative and surprising instead of on the one hand being an outright rip-off of the worst excesses of the donkey kong country games and on the other of the "edgy" focus-grouped-to-death nintendon't "attitude" of sanic.

it's very good marketing, i'll admit--ingenious enough, even, that to this day people remember fondly what were mediocre games in any technical sense precisely because they were so much a part of their first experiences playing video games, which is to say, because they were impressionable children on whom the marketing worked precisely as it was meant to do... but peel back the layers of marketing-aided nostalgia and there's nothing there but an uninspired and uninspiring, almost horizontally scrolling pseudo-3d mess of a game, in all three of the mainline psx titles.

crash team racing (1999) = mario kart (1996)

crash bash (2000) = mario party (1998)

the original crash bandicoot (1996) = overhead, horizontally scrolling version of donkey kong country (1994) + sonic the hedgehog (1991)

for examples of ripped off character design:

candy kong:

tawna bandicoot:

knuckles the echidna:

crunch bandicoot:

dr. robotnik:

dr. neo cortex:

i could go on.....

crash bandicoot = 2d platformer with quasi-overhead, horizontally scrolling perspective. pseudo 3d. the gameplay is literally a carbon copy of donkey kong country (1994), except with dkc's flaws (responsiveness, dk's momentum) magnified in some unfortunate ways. if anything, banjo kazooie is a rip-off of rare's OWN game's character design (dkc), which crash is ripping off spectacularly.

and hey, i'm not knocking crash bash and crash team racing. they're fairly good clones. but they're only good clones because the original is in both cases so much better. crash team racing also rips off rare's kart racer, diddy kong racing (1997), which is also a better game than ctr.

and SPEAKING of banjo kazooie, naughty dog's next bang-up job, jak and daxter, was an obvious clone of rare's game. this is not influence. this is just straight up taking stuff wholesale from previous games.