Gem

Gems are almost as important as Crystals, however less valuable, and if the player gets every single gem, s/he usually gets some sort of award. There are about 42 gems in a game, except for Crash Bash with 28, Twinsanity with 100 and CTTR with 5. It has appeared in all games except the home console version of Crash of the Titans (They did appear in the DS and GBA versions, however). The 5 coloured gems featured in Crash Team Racing where collecting 4 tokens of a certain colour unlocks its respective Gem Cup. All but yellow were in Crash Nitro Kart.

Types of Gems
Aside from the regular-shaped Clear Gem, there are several other Varieties and Colours of Gem. In the platform games it is usually much harder to obtain a coloured Gem than it's clear counterpart, but some levels require a certain colour Gem to obtain all of the crates and hence the Gem. Also, the coloured Gems are much harder to find in Crash Bandicoot than the others as a coloured symbol appears next to the level name in the other games. The final level (apart from secret levels) in Crash Bandicoot 2 & 3 features a Gem route requiring all five Coloured Gems to complete. The easiest way to get a Gem is to start a level with two masks.

What follows is a list of each kind of Gem and where they can be found in the first 3 Crash Bandicoot games.