Croc 2 Speedrun Notes

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Croc 2 HD wishlist

Nov 24, 20249 min read

hdc0’s suggestions

  1. Add back the music tracks that were removed from the PC version due to the CD-ROM size limit
  2. Store used boss warps in the savegame
  3. Zero the memory pools at level start or initialize the position of the pet platform
  4. Fix the translation to other languages < thermo note: fix what, specifically? >

(source)

Limbus’ suggestions

Quality of Life

  1. Keep glitches (see:Glitch) in the game if they’re useful for speedrunning and they’re not going to infringe on a normal player’s experience of the game. Some great examples of this are upwarps, cutscene breaks and hazard jumping.
  2. If Croc 2 HD has to feature Jelly Jumps rather than Gummi Savers for copyright reasons, keep the bigger Gummi Saver hitbox on the new Jellies; they’re much easier to land on and they make the jumps more forgiving.
  3. Add a collectible item that’s automatically obtained upon collecting 100 Crystals in a level, perhaps a Crystal Gobbo like the Golden Gobbo. These could be tracked against the save file, and could appear outside the level entrance alongside the Golden Gobbo.
  4. Add level names to the Pause Menu, or have them appear as a text overlay when approaching a level door. They only appeared in the PlayStation version on load screens, and not at all in the PC version.
  5. Improve the Minecart jump mechanic. Currently, jumping while the minecart is going up an incline will give you almost no height, making some Crystals impossible to collect on the first run through a section. This issue is quite prevalent in 1-2 Find 5 Lost Treasure Chests
  6. Improve the throwing mechanic. This is most relevant to 4-1 Save 30 Gobbo Babies! due to the tendency for the babies to land outside the playpens when they shouldn’t.
  7. Adjust the falling barrels puzzle room in 4-3 Bride of the Dungeon of Defright to be a bit more forgiving. Currently, the barrels will sometimes spawn too far away from the player to be caught before they land and explode, which can make it frustratingly hard to collect 100 Crystals on this level. This could be fixed by reducing the area in which they spawn, making them fall slower, making it easier to see where they’re going to land, or just increasing the amount of time before the Crystals start ticking down.
  8. Adjust the default position of swinging ropes so that they always line up with when the player will reach them if they play the room optimally. This is already the case in the Golden Gobbo rooms on 3-5 Save 50 Trapped Gobbos! and 2-1 Save the Ice Trapped Gobbos!, for example < thermo note: wait isn’t Icecube a known example of Ropes getting out of sync? discussion>. This would probably involve resetting their position on every room transition.
  9. Currently, when the Golden Gobbo has been collected for a level, when you go back into that level the Colour Crystals are gone and the Golden Gobbo room becomes inaccessible. This also makes it impossible to collect 100 Crystals in 3-4 Climb the Devil’s Tower! if you haven’t already, because there are 10 crystals in the Golden Gobbo room. It would be better if they simply spawn like usual. Same with Puzzle Pieces in the Secret Levels; even if you’ve already collected them they’re an easy way to exit the level, so the exit gong could be removed from 3-G Caveman Tribe - Secret Mine < thermo note: I like to think they left the gong there as a trick / fake-out; I kinda like it haha >.
  10. Alongside any other graphical enhancement options, have an option to choose between Croc’s more polygonal PlayStation model, or the smoother one from the PC version. In the original PC version, the low poly model still appears in 2-3 It’s Just Snowball Madness!, 2-B1 Flavio the Thermal Fish, and in the animations at the end of 3-B1 Venus Fly Von-Trappe and 2-B2 Lava Lamp Larry, so with that option available, this could be fixed.
  11. Improve the Item Selection UI. Make switching items instant rather than a slow fade between them. It would be nice to have a sound effect that confirms the change and a snappier visual cue.
  12. Have an “automatically use item” function, where if you’re carrying the item needed for an interact spot, it will automatically use that item i.e. if you’ve got a Clockwork Gobbo and you’re standing on the Clockwork Gobbo platform, use the Clockwork Gobbo even if you’ve got a Gummi Saver selected. This could also automatically select the right type of Gummi Saver, but if you don’t have a good enough Gummi Saver for the spot, it’ll just use the best one you’ve got.

Larger Changes

(if the aim is a very faithful remaster that changes little about the structure of the game, these might be outside the scope of the project)

  1. For the sake of verisimilitude and adding a bit of extra content, Colour Crystals and a Golden Gobbo room should be added to 4-3 Bride of the Dungeon of Defright and 4-4 Goo Man Chu’s Tower. If this is done, increase the Golden Gobbo requirement for entering 4-G Inca Tribe - Secret Maze from 2 to 4.
  2. Rather than having a Marathon of the last 2 bosses and 2 levels in the Inca Village, it would be nice to have a secondary hub area behind the main temple door with entrances to 4-3 Bride of the Dungeon of Defright and 4-4 Goo Man Chu’s Tower so they can be played in any order like the rest of the game, along with a door specifically for replaying 4-B2 Dante’s Final Fight. The plane could be added to the main Inca Village after completing 4-B1 Dante’s Peak as a way to replay that level.
  3. Cut early levels as bonus content, perhaps in a more finished state if it’s feasible, but even in an unfinished but playable state they’d be interesting as historical curios. If these levels were to be integrated into the main game, perhaps they could be unlocked by collecting the Crystal Gobbos from my earlier suggestion. These could include:
    • Raft Race: While this appears to have conceptually evolved into the Boat Race, the actual level appeared to be very different and featured some unique enemies. < thermo note: you could add a link here to your showcase video on youtube? >
    • Snowboarding: This one is only known about due to datamining of the Croc 2 PSX demo by OverSurge. Not to be confused with the snowboarding level that was cut from Croc 1.
    • Swimming Levels: At least two are known about, the one with the giant fish monster seen in this trailer, and one that was datamined by OverSurge.
    • The original outdoor Cannon Boat Keith fight
    • The Plane Level: while according to Nic Cusworth, this level was retooled into 2-4 Hang Glider Valley due to the low draw distance forcing the plane to move slowly, this would obviously no longer be an issue on modern hardware, and from the 1 second we’ve ever seen of it, the level appeared to have been different enough in layout to justify being separate to 2-4 Hang Glider Valley.

Glitches to be fixed

  1. Invisible walls. Sometimes when jumping across the threshold of a ledge over the void, Croc’s horizontal speed will be reduced suddenly to zero, which can often lead to death. They seem to be caused by Croc’s position being directly above the void, and they’re exacerbated by the presence of Ice and Conveyor belts.
  2. When using TNT to break the first Box containing a Wheel on 3-2 Find the Wheels in the Mine!, if the Box is moving between Conveyor belts when the second TNT hits, the wheel will spawn far below where the box was. It seems to look for the floor directly beneath where the box was to spawn it, and if there’s no floor, it goes to 0.
  3. Rings of 8 Crystals such as the ones that appear in 2-2 Chase the Choo Choo Train and 4-4 Goo Man Chu’s Tower will disappear if the player dies, only respawning upon Game Over or re-entering the level.

Thermospore’s suggestions

Here is some random stuff I’ve got (source). limbus has already covered most of my ideas

Cosmetic stuff

  • In Boat on PC, the shadows under the trees before the waterfall shortcut are broken (screenshot)
  • Croc’s shadow clips / z-fights with the terrain (might be PC specific)
  • In Flavio on PC, Croc doesn’t have a shadow on the ground, which makes it more difficult to tell where you are
  • In Babies, the baby’s models get garbled when they are thrown between the Dantinis (screenshot)
  • No one is allowed to fix this, actually they should make it so it happens every time lol
  • Sometimes cutscenes break or don’t play (EG, the cutscene in Flytrap with the shot of the inside of its mouth)?
  • There is a reverb effect (IIRC only in caves?) on PS1 that isn’t on PC; it would be nice to bring that back!

Gameplay stuff

  • Like limbus says, it would be nice to leave in glitches that are fun / useful for speedruns, and don’t negatively affect gameplay. For example Hazard Jumping, Infinite Jump, Baby Zipping, etc
  • It would be really nice to fix this: Input delay
    • But it’s not present on PC, so maybe they already fixed it
  • Fix how Croc tends to fall off the top of Climbing Walls / ladders. Worst offenders:
  • In Dante when you are in these wind blowing phases, it would be nice if the camera locked on to Dante
  • I pray in the name of Jez San pls fix:
  • In Babies, fix babies bouncing out of cribs
  • General camera intelligence improvements would be nice, as well as being able to manually control the camera with the other stick

Graph View

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