Crash Bandicoot.bin

Let me just begin by saying that I am a huge Crash Bandicoot fan. Every since I played "The wrath Of Cortex" on the PSone, I was always thinking about how great it was. Before Activison and Eurocom and all those other developers picked it up and rammed it into the ground, of course.

Anyway, I had just downloaded this awesome emulator called EpsxE for the PSone, mainly because I was sick of wading through the new terrible games, I went on the interwet in search of the original Crash Bandicoot ROM.

Upon reaching Doperoms, I found a file called "Crash Bandicoot.bin" and immediately jumped with joy. There was no time to scan for viruses, this was excalibur I was looking at. So I Installed and put it in my ISO file and ran it. Everything was fine. Until I reached the main menu. Crash was still there, the launcher was largely unchanged, except that it was a much redder tint, and Crash seemed different.

I'd figured the ROM was either poorly copied or my emulator had compatibility issues with it, not uncommon, of course. So I started it up, level design was the same, save that it was still in the dark red tint. I reached the first bonus level, running through the usual musings, until I noticed that Tawna was in pieces. No blood, just in pieces scattered about the level. Tawna's head seemed to try to communicate, but only made an eerie gasping noise. I sat in a very confused state for a moment, and then decided to press on.

A text box appeared, saying, "And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the path to dusty death. Out! Out! Brief candle! Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, and signifies nothing." Tawna's eyes closed after the textbox closed.

A muffled, eerie scream emitted from my speakers at an ear piercing level, I was unable to turn off my computer or lower the sound for almost five minutes. The screen began to get snowy, and before I could tell what was happening, I was in a level I had never seen before. The soundtrack consisted of several different tracks from other levels, only reversed and dubbed over each other. The design of the level was like any of the pitch black levels in the series of Crash games, except there was the same tint of red on the pathway. I moved forward, soon to fall into a pit. I could see nothing, except I heard a yelp of genuine pain as Crash hit the floor.

Another textbox appeared, saying, "Vengeance is futile. Now I rule you, too."

The scene moved to Cortex's lab, Depicting the mangled corpses of characters throughout the Crash Bandicoot series. Some sort of twisted experiments had been done on them, yet they all still lived, including Crash. They all moaned loudly, painfully. Cortex came on the screen, but his color pallet was completely changed, his eyes a deep red and and his skin pure white.

He had a strange smile, growing wider as the moans became louder. I tried hitting escape to end the game, but every time a close up of the Cortex depicted in the game with flowing black hair and a deathly smile appeared, with the caption, "Vengeance is futile. Now I rule you, too."