Crash Bandicoot Purple: Ripto's Rampage (Game Boy Advance)

Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon have been popular ever since games featuring the two mascots first appeared on the original PlayStation console. Vivendi Universal has had the rights to both characters for a while, so it was only a matter of time before someone at the company came up with the idea to pair them together in a crossover of some sort. That crossover has finally reached fruition as two separate games--Crash Bandicoot Purple: Ripto's Rampage and Spyro Orange: The Cortex Conspiracy (both for the Game Boy Advance). They're both side-scrolling action games, and the story is basically the same in each (Ripto and Cortex have joined forces to try to get rid of Spyro and Crash once and for all). Besides the abilities that the characters in each game have, the biggest difference between the two is that one (Spyro) is geared toward novice players, while the other (Crash) is geared toward seasoned players. Taken on its own, Crash Purple a very good game with a nice amount of variety.

Crash Bandicoot Purple: Ripto's Rampage doesn't stray too far from the formula established by previous Crash games. There are five worlds, each consisting of two main levels. The main levels are set up like a typical side-scroller. Crash can jump, double-jump, and perform a spin attack that knocks away enemies. At the end of each world, you'll go up against one of Ripto's henchmen in a boss fight. Rather than strictly focus on platforming, Ripto's Rampage shakes things up a bit. There are portals located throughout each of the main levels, usually seven or eight per level, that lead to minigames, and the only way to earn gems is by completing these minigames. Most exits require purple gems, which you get just for finishing a minigame, but the doorway to the final world requires silver gems, which are only given out if you manage to break all of the crates within a minigame. Since some minigames use forced scrolling or have time limits, you can look forward to many repeated attempts just to earn those coveted silver gems.

The minigames in Ripto's Rampage are really, really good, and there's a wide assortment of them. One of the more whimsical minigames is an inner-tube game that's a blatant copy of Toobin', an arcade game that was put out by Midway in the 1980s. Crash sits in an inner tube going down a river. The controls let you steer the tube and kick in a burst of speed when you need it. All along the river there are sandbars, mines, torpedoes, and whirlpools that you have to avoid, while at the same time you must try to smash any crates that you see floating in the water. Other minigames include a Breakout-style pinball game, a tank game that lets you wander around mazelike levels hunting other tanks, a pig-riding game that's set up like the mine-cart levels from Donkey Kong Country, and a horizontally scrolling shooter where you need to use rockets and bombs to blast away at enemies and boxes. For those of you who enjoyed the previous Crash GBA games, there's also a minigame that imitates how the levels in those games were set up. You're put into a side-scrolling level that's packed with enemies and various crates--regular crates, bouncy crates, TNT crates, and more--and you need to reach the end in a limited amount of time. Like in the Crash games of old, the trick is figuring out what order to smash the crates in so that you can make it to the end and earn both gems. In all, there are at least a dozen unique minigames.

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