Spyro
For the past few months (that is why I’ve been away, looking for content and I found it) I have been playing Spyro the Dragon Reignited Trilogy and it is soo much fun.
Here is some context, Spyro the Dragon is a young (12 year old) purple dragon, who saves the world. In the first game he has to free all the dragons from Gnasty Gnorc and save his home land. The second game (Ripto’s Rage) he has to save Avalar, and then the last game Year of the Dragon, I have started and have been loving it.
The original Spyro (just named Spyro the Dragon), was developed by Insomniac Games in 1998 for the original PlayStation. Insomniac then developed Riptos Rage (aka Gateway to Glimmer) and Year of the Dragon. I have not played those three original games (instead the Reignited Trilogy) but I have done some research on them, and here is something that I learned. In Spyro Year of the Dragon, Insomniac did something really interesting to detect pirates/mod chips. YouTuber “Tech Rules” did a video on it here is the link if you want to check that out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GYSeXLr5sY
Here is a reap of the video:
PS1 discs have slight imperfections on them, this is how discs are region locked. US (SCUS) games had a certain imperfection on them, Japanese discs had it’s own imperfection on them. The disc drive in the PS1 could understand that imperfection and play the game if it was within the region. Some users would install mod chips and this would trick the console into thinking that it could play that game because it had the “correct” region (example: If a US console had a mod chip, it could play Japanese games and vice versa). Well Spyro Year of the Dragon would start, the console would ask for the region, and the mod chip would say that it is a US (or Japanese) game and it would start normally. At some point in during game play the console would ask for the region again, now this should fail because the game was running. The mod chip would report the region and the console would know that it had a mod chip. So what Insomniac did was they made gaming pirates think they won and bypassed the checks. What actually happened was that in one point in the game the save fairy Zoe would say to Spyro that “this is an illegal copy, and you may experience some issues”. Then that would be it, an odd message but whatever. From there gems from the game (required for 100% completion) would go missing, eggs would be gone too. It would also start crashing. If you put up with all that then when you get to the final boss, the game would dump ALL your save data and put you to square 1.
Enough about the mod chips and pirating the game. (This should go without saying, please don’t pirate, I highly recommend Reignited Trilogy mostly because it can be gotten so much easier though Steam, Microsoft Store, Xbox Store, the PlayStation Store, or in store for Nintendo Switch)
When it first starts, the game there is a news crew interviewing the dragons in the Artisans, Spyro can be seen in the background punting a sheep. The main villain Gnasty Gnorc is watching the news, when the elder dragon insults Gnasty Gnorc, he turns all dragons into statues, except for Spyro because he is super small, don’t insult his size though or he will flame you. He then looks at the camera and says “Looks like I’ve got some things to do”. You then rescue all the dragons, collect all gems (including those in the speedway levels) and then defeat Gnasty Gnorc. Fun fact, there is an achievement if you force Gnorc to run around in circles.
Complete accident by the way.
The levels are laid out in an odd way, instead of a linear game play it lets you go to any level in the game. I had to have the IGN guide next to me to figure out some of the tricky jumps that killed poor Spyro several times. The level Tree Tops in Magic Crafters took me 2 hours to complete because of a long jump that needed so many power ups and perfect timing. The music is rather enjoyable and suits the levels. I enjoy a ton of the idle animations that Spyro does when he is waiting for you to do something like sneezing (I know, odd thing for me to say), stretching, wagging his tail and grooming himself.
The attention to detail in this game is impressive. When he breathes fire (as dragons do), the grass around him starts to smolder. When he flies by the camera, his tongue is hanging out and that is not the tip of the iceberg, there are so may details in this game that add to the overall enjoyment.
It is a cozy puzzle game in a different type of way. It is not like Stardew Valley where you can easily log 40+ hours after owning it for a week. Instead it takes a while to get going and a while to figure out the puzzles. I have learned to use an Xbox controller on my Windows computer for best control over the purple dragon.
The history of Spyro is an odd one. The game was orginally developed by Insomniac games, from there Spyro has jumped (or glided) around several studios, then landing on Toys for Bob who developed Skylanders, and Crash Bandicoot [1].
According to an interview on gamestm.co.uk, the new technology back in 1998 could just barley render in 3D. Everything had to be written for efficiency and about 80% of the games code is in hand written assembly, what was not in assembly was in C which is “slower than assembly, but is still a magnitude faster and harder to use than modern languages like C#” This was written in 2018 for context. Source
According to the wiki, it was supposed to be a darker game that “would have involved the dragon defending its lair over thousands of years and experiencing nine different eras of human invaders”, however an executive at Universal and the games producer had advised the team to create something more light hearted and compete with Nintendo’s collection of kids games.
(As I am looking at the Wikipedia page, I saw this “During development of Spyro, Insomniac had a very close relationship with Crash Bandicoot creator and fellow PlayStation developer Naughty Dog, who had their office located across the hall from theirs. The two developers frequently worked together, playing early builds of each other’s games and later sharing game technology. As a result, a demo of Crash Bandicoot: Warped was hidden in Spyro, and vice versa.”)
If you are looking for a fun/fast paced game I highly recommend Spyro the Dragon Reignited. Some of the levels took me hours to complete because of skill points (adds lives and unlocks the gallery), but it has been worth it so far.
1. They did not develop the original Crash Bandicoot games, much like Spyro. They just rebooted the series and are developing new games under the title.[↩︎](#fnref-1)