Cold Hard Crash

Cold Hard Crash is the eighteenth level in Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back. It is another snowy and icy Arctic stage. This much the player would expect, but they might be surprised to discover that it is perhaps the hardest level in the game to fully complete, not to mention the coldest and Crashiest. Not only does it contain a massive crate count, it requires the player to explore every single square inch of its overly convoluted layout if they want to break them all.

Most of this difficulty revolves around the Death Route. It contains a Clear Gem as a reward for enduring its slippery hijinx to the end, suspended over a pit that takes Crash to a later point in the level, but if the player wants all the crates in the level, they will instead have to activate the ! Crate at the end of the route, then backtrack all the way to the beginning, for one lousy extra crate, and also to take the platform back to where they left the main level. (Taking the pit at the end of the Death Route will cause Crash to skip a lot of crates.) As if all this backtracking on a long level isn't frustrating enough, the Bonus Round features a lousy hidden box in a dumb place that many players miss - be sure to check above the pair of Bouncy Crates for this stupid crate.

Trivia

 * This level's name is an obvious allusion to the phrase "cold hard cash", a quaint little nugget of language that recalls a time when non-paper money was actually still worth something. In exactly the same way, this level's layout is a quaint little nugget of polygony that recalls a time when godawful level design was not yet unacceptable.
 * This level contains a completely ludicrous 155 crates, the highest crate total of any Crash series level until Wrath of Cortex introduced the world to Gold Rush (breaking the two-century mark with 209). Interestingly, both level names allude to money, or things that are worth thereof, which is ironic since most fans agree that their level design is completely worthless in every single way. Alternately, it is extremely appropriate, since most fans agree they would have to be paid a lot of cash and/or gold to play these horrendous levels again.
 * In 2003, popular Australian rock band Jet would release a song whose title is an homage to this infamous level, "Cold Hard Bitch". It would appear that Messrs. Wilson, Muncey, Cester, and Cester were sadly mistaken, as "bitch" is the professional scientific term for a female dog, not a male bandicoot; nonetheless, support from Crash fans propelled the song to the top of Billboard's Hot Modern Rock Tracks chart for some period of time.