Re-educating James Wade with Wumpa Fruit and Lame Snakes

Today Wade was over and we played some of my video games. It surfaced that Wade, coming from a childhood that was rather lacking in consoles, has never played the vast majority of games I consider 'essential' to have played in order to count as a human.

First in line was Crash Bandicoot 1. 

Wade said he recalled playing it back when supermarkets had creches... I told him this was simply not good enough. We started playing, and it soon became clear to me that Wade was having considerable difficulty performing even the most simple of tasks, such as jumping to avoid obstacles. For quite a while he was just muttering to himself "why am I so sh*t?..."

The whole charade quickly became a to and fro between us, as Wade consistently lost a whole bunch of lives and then me having to earn them all back. For the first 15 levels or so, we were hovering around the 3-5 lives remaining mark. 

Although, at points, I was impressed with Wade's enthusiastic approach to play. After navigating a reasonably challenging part of the course in one go (one that even I have trouble with) he recklessly dived straight back down the cliffside to retrieve ONE wumpa fruit he had missed. For those who aren't sure, wumpa fruit (colloquially referred to as 'apples' by crash noobs) are the staple item for collection, similar to coins in mario, rings in sonic, and gems in spyro. 

The whole game is littered with them and the is no extra points for getting all of them apart from the standard rule of 100 fruit makes one more life. The only instance where one would dare to return for ONE wumpa fruit is if you are on no lives and have 99 wumpa fruit. We nearly did have to do that anyway at one point.

Also something we noticed was how well rendered the bats were in the game, compared to the snakes. Considering that the game in Wade's words is "old as f*ck" (not sure how old 'f*ck' is, apparently mid 90s?), the bats look fairly realistic. However, the snakes are hilarious. They just pop up, sway and wiggle their tongues non-threateningly at you.

As we progressed through the levels, Wade slowly picked it up and pulled me out of sticky situations a few times. I know feel that Wade is part of the way to honorary 90s child status. Its a long road and there are many games he missed out on, but we have plenty of time and if Bro House is anything to go by, we'll get there some day.