Have you played that YouTube game, where you scan through endless videos of the original Crystal Chronicles on GameCube, clicking and holding the TV remote buttons, dragging back and forth, trying to work out what exactly had changed in the opening level River Belle Path? It’s good fun!
You have to get used to the quick acceleration of that scanning pimple along the time bar, but once you’ve got it down it feels good, and the buttons on my Sony remote have a pleasingly matte and rubbery top-feel, then a satisfyingly crisp click to them. -and-, then a quick release! This time, on a good comparison video of the newly released remastered Crystal Chronicles. Not only does the GameCube one have darker, richer cloud shadows that dapple and drift across the landscape, but it also has a whole layer of smudgy shadow cast by its trees and paths and walls. The atmosphere’s all changed. In the waterfall clearing where you fight the crab boss, originally it was moodily half-eclipsed in a darkness cast by the surrounding trees, whereas in the remaster it’s all just limply even. I think the lighting in general is different, the whole thing a little paler, maybe a little cooler? Username ‘Rami’ in the YouTube comments agrees!:
(I gave his comment a like).
My car’s in the garage by the way. It’s been there for three weeks. Turns out it wasn’t the timing chain after all, so now they have to find someone who’ll peel back the engine to check the valve-cylinders one-by-one. So I’ve been on-foot a lot, and was so excited for Crystal Chronicles I’d basically written an article about it before it was even released, thought-up whilst I walked around, powered by a foot-fall engine that generated endless trains of phrases about a game world I’d always considered one of the most beautiful ever created.
The opening level in particular – which is a pleasure just to say! – always seemed to have captured just-so a type of riverside vibe: grass embankments and stone-wall bridges and pebble-shoal water edges – a school trip to Snowdon. But it also captures a certain walking energy, a kind of path-ness itself, with the adventurers’ running gait around the river’s meanders and bends tempered by the slower, steadier knees-up hiking pace of the one wielding the chalice. A phenomenon caught and sealed in digital, as precisely as one of those hyper-specific place words that Macfarlane collects in Landmarks, like (Gaelic)’.