Crash Boom Bang!
Encyclopedia
Crash Boom Bang! is a party game
developed
by Dimps
and published
by Sierra Entertainment
(Vivendi Universal Games
for Japan) for the Nintendo DS
. It was released in Japan on July 20, 2006, in North America on October 10, 2006, in Europe on October 27, 2006, and in Australia on November 2, 2006. It is the first (and so far only) game in the Crash Bandicoot series to be developed by a Japanese company and the first to be released in Japan before North America. This was the final (or the so far more recent) Crash Bandicoot game to be released in Japan
.
Crash Boom Bang! is the thirteenth installment in the Crash Bandicoot series. It is the first (and so far only) Crash Bandicoot game to be originally developed and released in Japan, the first game to be released exclusively for the Nintendo DS, and the second party game of the series, the first being Crash Bash
. The game's story centers on a multi-millionaire who uses the characters of the series to unearth a powerful object dubbed the "Super Big Power Crystal". The game has received a unanimously negative critical reception upon its release, lambasted mainly for its dull gameplay and bad controls.
Crash Boom Bang!' s stages resemble board game
s, as each play area is split into a number of squares. The game takes place among four players, with the computer assigned to spare players. All players simultaneously roll dice. The number each player rolls is the amount of squares they move forward. Depending on the type of square that the player lands on, Wumpa Fruit (which is used as points during the race) can be won or lost, an item can be obtained, a special event might be triggered, or a mini-game might commence. If a player lands on a fork in the road, the player will have to select the desired direction with either the stylus or the control pad.
In the Adventure Mode, the characters compete in a race for the Super Big Power Crystal. This race is made up of six stages, each containing smaller sub-maps. The host of the race, the Viscount, sets a task for each stage. This task must be completed before the player can continue to another map. The player with the most points is the winner of the stage. The overall winner of all the stages is the winner of the Viscount's race. In the Festival Mode, the gameplay is fundamentally the same as in the Adventure Mode, with the exception of the ability to select stages to play freely. In the My Room mode, the player's character has his or her own private room in which he or she can either play minigames that have been collected in Adventure Mode, view a collection of items obtained in Adventure Mode, or create a Motion Panel, a unique in-game communication tool can allow customized messages to be sent mid-game to help friends or distract other players' gameplay. The decorations in My Room is different for each character.
Crash Boom Bang! features forty mini-games that can be played alone or remotely against friends. Balance, timing, and intelligence are required to win these mini-games. When a player is not taking part in a mini-game, he or she can bet Wumpa Fruit on the winner. The player can help players that have been bet on or obstruct players that have not been bet on by using the Motion Panel. If the player has a special item, the player can access the Shop screen from the Bet screen and buy or sell items.
A number of characters from past Crash Bandicoot games return in Crash Boom Bang!, though only eight are playable. The playable characters include Crash Bandicoot, Coco Bandicoot, Crunch Bandicoot, Pura, Doctor Neo Cortex, Tawna, Pinstripe Potoroo, and Fake Crash. All of the characters physically appear as they do in official Japanese Crash Bandicoot artwork and promotions, though Crash's model was altered for the non-Japanese releases to closer resemble his Crash Twinsanity
model. The host of the party, the Viscount, is an original character designed specifically for the game. His name in the original Japanese version is "Viscount Devil", a reference to the Tasmanian Devil
native to Australia. Other past characters make cameos in the game at one point or another, such as the Lab Assistants, Doctor N. Gin, Tiny Tiger, Doctor Nefarious Tropy, Polar, Evil Crash and Nina Cortex (Mobilegame only). Aku Aku serves as the player's tutor, while Uka Uka makes a cameo appearance as a purchaseable item in the shop.
, the Viscount finds a map of an ancient city containing the fabled Super Big Power Crystal. He attempts to find it himself, but due to the large amount of puzzles, he fails miserably. In the resort, the Viscount decides to gather up the world's cleverest and strongest bunch of characters and con them into finding the Crystal for him. He sends an invitation to Coco Bandicoot, inviting her to the World Cannonball Race, where the winner earns $100,000,000.
The race starts in Port Town, with the winners traveling in a boat to a large desert
. Legend has it that four stone tablets are buried somewhere in the desert, and the contestants are sent out to dig for them and bring them to the Viscount. According to the stone tablets, the actual location of the Crystal is hidden somewhere on the ancient map. Before he can investigate the matter further, Doctor Neo Cortex swoops in and snatches the map. As the two struggle for the map, the map is torn to shreds.
Cortex sends his loyal Lab Assistants to find the pieces of the map scattered throughout the big City and bring them to him. Now that the contestants know about the map, the Viscount decides to reveal his true intentions: the Super Big Power Crystal can grant a single wish who whoever obtains it, and the Viscount is willing to give a large sum of money to those who help him find it. Finding the Power Crystal is impossible without the Final Key, so the Viscount boards his plane to travel to the North Atlantic Ocean
in search for the Final Key. But the plane is full, and only a select number of the contestants are able to board. Propelled to the skies by an explosive volcano, the contestants are able to board the Viscount's plane.
On the Viscount's ship, the Viscount tells the group the story of an explorer who found the Final Key, but was unable to find the Power Crystal. That explorer was the Viscount's grandfather. As the explorer sailed back to his homeland to recollect his thoughts, his ship crashed into an iceberg and sank, taking the Viscount's grandfather to a watery grave. "Sounds like a movie
", remarks one of the attendees. The Viscount tells them to dive to the sunken ship and retrieve the Final Key, much to their shock, considering the near-freezing temperatures. Despite this, the group is able to find the Final Key before freezing to death. With all the pieces of the puzzle at hand, the Viscount victoriously enters the Tower, where the Super Big Power Crystal awaits its owner. Just as the Viscount is about to make his wish, Crash steps forward and makes his wish of a large pile of Wumpa Fruit, much to the Viscount's grief. "May peace prevail on Earth", says Coco.
Crash Boom Bang! is the first game in the series to exclusively feature the Japanese voice cast in all regional versions of the game. The voice cast of Crash Boom Bang! is of a lower profile than the usual seiyūs, with some of the featured seiyū
having fewer than fifteen credits to their name. The voice cast includes Makoto Ishii
in the dual role of Crash and Fake Crash, Risa Tsubaki
as Coco, Yōsuke Akimoto
as Doctor Cortex, Shinya Fukumatsu
as Crunch, Akiko Toda
as Tawna, Asuka Tanii
as Pura, and Takahiro Yoshino as Pinstripe.
, and a score of 37 out of 100 based on fourteen reviews at Metacritic
. Frank Provo of GameSpot criticized the game for its dull minigames and purely-cosmetic Crash license, citing that "apart from the way the characters look and the way the Nitro boxes explode, [...] there isn't a whole lot that's Crash-like about Crash Boom Bang!". Nintendo Power
recommended the game only to die-hard Crash fans and advised others to wait for Crash's next outing. Lesley Smith
of Eurogamer criticized the game for a number or reasons, including bad stylus recognition, boring gameplay, terrible graphics and rigged, repetitive mini-games. IGN's review was one of the most scathing, dubbing Crash Boom Bang! "a terrible, terrible game with poor organization" and "easily one of the worst games on the system". More middling reviews have come in from Official Nintendo Magazine, who felt the game was hampered by dodgy controls and a testing user interface, and Pocket Gamer's Jon Jordan, who dismissed the game's collection of minigames as "distinctly average and oddly passionless". Despite the negative reception, Crash Boom Bang! was the seventh best-selling game in Australia on the week of June 4 to June 10, 2007.
Party game
Party games are games that some people play as forms of entertainment at social gatherings. Party games usually involve more than one player. There are a large number and styles of party games available and the one selected will depend on the atmosphere that is sought to be generated...
developed
Video game developer
A video game developer is a software developer that creates video games. A developer may specialize in a certain video game console, such as Nintendo's Wii, Microsoft's Xbox 360, Sony's PlayStation 3, or may develop for a variety of systems, including personal computers.Most developers also...
by Dimps
Dimps
is an Osaka, Japan-based video game development studio with an additional office in Tokyo, Japan. Employing a staff of 218 people, it is known for developing such games as the Dragon Ball Z: Budokai trilogy for the PlayStation 2, and the Sonic the Hedgehog games specific to the Game Boy Advance and...
and published
Video game publisher
A video game publisher is a company that publishes video games that they have either developed internally or have had developed by a video game developer....
by Sierra Entertainment
Sierra Entertainment
Sierra Entertainment Inc. was an American video-game developer and publisher founded in 1979 as On-Line Systems by Ken and Roberta Williams...
(Vivendi Universal Games
Vivendi Games
Vivendi Games, formerly known as Vivendi Universal Games, was the holdings company for Sierra Entertainment and Blizzard Entertainment. Vivendi Games was founded as Vivendi Universal Games after Vivendi bought Universal Studios in the early 2000s...
for Japan) for the Nintendo DS
Nintendo DS
The is a portable game console produced by Nintendo, first released on November 21, 2004. A distinctive feature of the system is the presence of two separate LCD screens, the lower of which is a touchscreen, encompassed within a clamshell design, similar to the Game Boy Advance SP...
. It was released in Japan on July 20, 2006, in North America on October 10, 2006, in Europe on October 27, 2006, and in Australia on November 2, 2006. It is the first (and so far only) game in the Crash Bandicoot series to be developed by a Japanese company and the first to be released in Japan before North America. This was the final (or the so far more recent) Crash Bandicoot game to be released in Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
.
Crash Boom Bang! is the thirteenth installment in the Crash Bandicoot series. It is the first (and so far only) Crash Bandicoot game to be originally developed and released in Japan, the first game to be released exclusively for the Nintendo DS, and the second party game of the series, the first being Crash Bash
Crash Bash
Crash Bash is a party video game published by Sony Computer Entertainment, produced by Universal Interactive Studios and developed by Eurocom for the PlayStation. The game was released in North America on November 6, 2000 and in Europe on December 1, 2000...
. The game's story centers on a multi-millionaire who uses the characters of the series to unearth a powerful object dubbed the "Super Big Power Crystal". The game has received a unanimously negative critical reception upon its release, lambasted mainly for its dull gameplay and bad controls.
Gameplay
Board game
A board game is a game which involves counters or pieces being moved on a pre-marked surface or "board", according to a set of rules. Games may be based on pure strategy, chance or a mixture of the two, and usually have a goal which a player aims to achieve...
s, as each play area is split into a number of squares. The game takes place among four players, with the computer assigned to spare players. All players simultaneously roll dice. The number each player rolls is the amount of squares they move forward. Depending on the type of square that the player lands on, Wumpa Fruit (which is used as points during the race) can be won or lost, an item can be obtained, a special event might be triggered, or a mini-game might commence. If a player lands on a fork in the road, the player will have to select the desired direction with either the stylus or the control pad.
In the Adventure Mode, the characters compete in a race for the Super Big Power Crystal. This race is made up of six stages, each containing smaller sub-maps. The host of the race, the Viscount, sets a task for each stage. This task must be completed before the player can continue to another map. The player with the most points is the winner of the stage. The overall winner of all the stages is the winner of the Viscount's race. In the Festival Mode, the gameplay is fundamentally the same as in the Adventure Mode, with the exception of the ability to select stages to play freely. In the My Room mode, the player's character has his or her own private room in which he or she can either play minigames that have been collected in Adventure Mode, view a collection of items obtained in Adventure Mode, or create a Motion Panel, a unique in-game communication tool can allow customized messages to be sent mid-game to help friends or distract other players' gameplay. The decorations in My Room is different for each character.
Crash Boom Bang! features forty mini-games that can be played alone or remotely against friends. Balance, timing, and intelligence are required to win these mini-games. When a player is not taking part in a mini-game, he or she can bet Wumpa Fruit on the winner. The player can help players that have been bet on or obstruct players that have not been bet on by using the Motion Panel. If the player has a special item, the player can access the Shop screen from the Bet screen and buy or sell items.
Characters
Crash Twinsanity
Crash Twinsanity is an platform video game published by Vivendi Universal Games and developed by Traveller's Tales, for the PlayStation 2 and the Xbox. It was released in North America on October 1, 2004, in Europe on October 8, 2004 and in Japan on November 9, 2004...
model. The host of the party, the Viscount, is an original character designed specifically for the game. His name in the original Japanese version is "Viscount Devil", a reference to the Tasmanian Devil
Tasmanian Devil
The Tasmanian devil is a carnivorous marsupial of the family Dasyuridae, now found in the wild only on the Australian island state of Tasmania. The size of a small dog, it became the largest carnivorous marsupial in the world following the extinction of the thylacine in 1936...
native to Australia. Other past characters make cameos in the game at one point or another, such as the Lab Assistants, Doctor N. Gin, Tiny Tiger, Doctor Nefarious Tropy, Polar, Evil Crash and Nina Cortex (Mobilegame only). Aku Aku serves as the player's tutor, while Uka Uka makes a cameo appearance as a purchaseable item in the shop.
Story
While developing a resort in TasmaniaTasmania
Tasmania is an Australian island and state. It is south of the continent, separated by Bass Strait. The state includes the island of Tasmania—the 26th largest island in the world—and the surrounding islands. The state has a population of 507,626 , of whom almost half reside in the greater Hobart...
, the Viscount finds a map of an ancient city containing the fabled Super Big Power Crystal. He attempts to find it himself, but due to the large amount of puzzles, he fails miserably. In the resort, the Viscount decides to gather up the world's cleverest and strongest bunch of characters and con them into finding the Crystal for him. He sends an invitation to Coco Bandicoot, inviting her to the World Cannonball Race, where the winner earns $100,000,000.
The race starts in Port Town, with the winners traveling in a boat to a large desert
Desert
A desert is a landscape or region that receives an extremely low amount of precipitation, less than enough to support growth of most plants. Most deserts have an average annual precipitation of less than...
. Legend has it that four stone tablets are buried somewhere in the desert, and the contestants are sent out to dig for them and bring them to the Viscount. According to the stone tablets, the actual location of the Crystal is hidden somewhere on the ancient map. Before he can investigate the matter further, Doctor Neo Cortex swoops in and snatches the map. As the two struggle for the map, the map is torn to shreds.
Cortex sends his loyal Lab Assistants to find the pieces of the map scattered throughout the big City and bring them to him. Now that the contestants know about the map, the Viscount decides to reveal his true intentions: the Super Big Power Crystal can grant a single wish who whoever obtains it, and the Viscount is willing to give a large sum of money to those who help him find it. Finding the Power Crystal is impossible without the Final Key, so the Viscount boards his plane to travel to the North Atlantic Ocean
Atlantic Ocean
The Atlantic Ocean is the second-largest of the world's oceanic divisions. With a total area of about , it covers approximately 20% of the Earth's surface and about 26% of its water surface area...
in search for the Final Key. But the plane is full, and only a select number of the contestants are able to board. Propelled to the skies by an explosive volcano, the contestants are able to board the Viscount's plane.
On the Viscount's ship, the Viscount tells the group the story of an explorer who found the Final Key, but was unable to find the Power Crystal. That explorer was the Viscount's grandfather. As the explorer sailed back to his homeland to recollect his thoughts, his ship crashed into an iceberg and sank, taking the Viscount's grandfather to a watery grave. "Sounds like a movie
Titanic (1997 film)
Titanic is a 1997 American epic romance and disaster film directed, written, co-produced, and co-edited by James Cameron. A fictionalized account of the sinking of the RMS Titanic, it stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Jack Dawson, Kate Winslet as Rose DeWitt Bukater and Billy Zane as Rose's fiancé, Cal...
", remarks one of the attendees. The Viscount tells them to dive to the sunken ship and retrieve the Final Key, much to their shock, considering the near-freezing temperatures. Despite this, the group is able to find the Final Key before freezing to death. With all the pieces of the puzzle at hand, the Viscount victoriously enters the Tower, where the Super Big Power Crystal awaits its owner. Just as the Viscount is about to make his wish, Crash steps forward and makes his wish of a large pile of Wumpa Fruit, much to the Viscount's grief. "May peace prevail on Earth", says Coco.
Development
On developing the mobile phone version of Crash Boom Bang!, producer Elodie Larre described adapting a party game for the mobile phone as a "big challenge". Not wanting to make "another multiplayer game where the players just pass the phone to each other" and hoping to attract both old and new fans of the series, the development team decided to integrate the mobile phone itself into the minigames, creating such minigame gimmicks as playing with one hand behind the back, with one eye closed, playing with the chin, etc. The biggest challenge for the team was keeping the minigames inside the phone's memory, which was cited as slightly inferior to the first PlayStation console. The WarioWare series was described as an influence in making the game.Crash Boom Bang! is the first game in the series to exclusively feature the Japanese voice cast in all regional versions of the game. The voice cast of Crash Boom Bang! is of a lower profile than the usual seiyūs, with some of the featured seiyū
Seiyu
Voice acting in Japan has far greater prominence than in most other countries. Japan's large animation industry produces 60% of the animated series in the world; as a result, Japanese voice actors, or , are able to achieve fame on a national and international level.Besides acting as narrators and...
having fewer than fifteen credits to their name. The voice cast includes Makoto Ishii
Makoto Ishii
is a male Japanese voice actor from Chiba Prefecture. He is currently affiliated with Mausu Promotion.-Television animation:*Black Jack *Fafner in the Azure *Futakoi...
in the dual role of Crash and Fake Crash, Risa Tsubaki
Risa Tsubaki
is a female Japanese voice actress from Meguro, Tokyo affiliated with Mausu Promotion.-Television animation:*Fighting Beauty Wulong Rebirth *Ouran High School Host Club -Video games:*Crash Boom Bang!...
as Coco, Yōsuke Akimoto
Yosuke Akimoto
is a Japanese actor and voice actor from Tokyo. He is currently attached to Mausu Promotion. He is a graduate of the Hosei University business school.-Television animation:*Agatha Christie's Great Detectives Poirot and Marple *Angel Heart...
as Doctor Cortex, Shinya Fukumatsu
Shinya Fukumatsu
is a Japanese voice actor from Tokyo Prefecture. He is affiliated with Mausu Promotion.-Television animation:*Air Gear *Black Cat *Devil May Cry *Digimon Data Squad *Eureka Seven...
as Crunch, Akiko Toda
Akiko Toda
is a Japanese seiyū from Kōchi Prefecture. She was formerly affiliated with Mausu Promotion, and is now affiliated with Mediaforce.-Television animation:*Hakken Taiken Daisuki! Shimajirō *ReBoot *Sorcerer Hunters...
as Tawna, Asuka Tanii
Asuka Tanii
is a Japanese voice actress.She was born June 19, 1978.-Anime:*Black Jack *Elfen Lied *Futakoi *Futari wa Pretty Cure Max Heart: Friends of the Snow-Laden Sky *Futari wa Pretty Cure Max Heart...
as Pura, and Takahiro Yoshino as Pinstripe.
Reception
Crash Boom Bang! has garnered a generally negative reception from critics, with the game receiving an average ranking of 42.45% at Game RankingsGame Rankings
GameRankings is a website that collects review scores from both offline and online sources to give an average rating. It indexes over 315,000 articles relating to more than 14,500 games.GameRankings is owned by CBS Interactive...
, and a score of 37 out of 100 based on fourteen reviews at Metacritic
Metacritic
Metacritic.com is a website that collates reviews of music albums, games, movies, TV shows and DVDs. For each product, a numerical score from each review is obtained and the total is averaged. An excerpt of each review is provided along with a hyperlink to the source. Three colour codes of Green,...
. Frank Provo of GameSpot criticized the game for its dull minigames and purely-cosmetic Crash license, citing that "apart from the way the characters look and the way the Nitro boxes explode, [...] there isn't a whole lot that's Crash-like about Crash Boom Bang!". Nintendo Power
Nintendo Power
Nintendo Power magazine is a monthly news and strategy magazine formerly published in-house by Nintendo of America, but now run independently. As of issue #222 , Nintendo contracted publishing duties to Future US, the U.S. subsidiary of British publisher Future.The first issue published was...
recommended the game only to die-hard Crash fans and advised others to wait for Crash's next outing. Lesley Smith
Lesley Smith
Lesley Smith is a scholar, historian, heritage publicist and actress. She was resident historian on the television show Most Haunted Live! and presenter of Most Haunted: Midsummer Murders...
of Eurogamer criticized the game for a number or reasons, including bad stylus recognition, boring gameplay, terrible graphics and rigged, repetitive mini-games. IGN's review was one of the most scathing, dubbing Crash Boom Bang! "a terrible, terrible game with poor organization" and "easily one of the worst games on the system". More middling reviews have come in from Official Nintendo Magazine, who felt the game was hampered by dodgy controls and a testing user interface, and Pocket Gamer's Jon Jordan, who dismissed the game's collection of minigames as "distinctly average and oddly passionless". Despite the negative reception, Crash Boom Bang! was the seventh best-selling game in Australia on the week of June 4 to June 10, 2007.
External links
- The Official Crash Boom Bang! website
- Crash Boom Bang! (DS) at GameSpotGameSpotGameSpot is a video gaming website that provides news, reviews, previews, downloads, and other information. The site was launched in May 1, 1996 by Pete Deemer, Vince Broady and Jon Epstein. It was purchased by ZDNet, a brand which was later purchased by CNET Networks. CBS Interactive, which...