Totally Fly

Totally Fly is the twenty-seventh level in Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back. It is the second of two original secret levels in the game, unlocked by finding the secret warp out of Hangin' Out. Similar to Night Fight in the fifth Warp Room Zone Room, it is a jungle level taking place in the pitch-blackness of night, requiring Crash to navigate with the assistance of numerous fireflies. This level is decidedly harder, however, thanks to more hazardous placement of TNT and Nitro Crates, and one notable section in which the player is essentially required to blindly clear out a bunch of Locked Crates before picking up a firefly, or else it simply won't last long enough to get them to the next one. The Bonus Round features a slight change in firefly mechanics, as instead the player must keep up with a firefly flying along a predetermined path.

Trivia

 * This level's name could be a sly reference to the popular slang phrase from the 1970s, "That's totally fly!", referring to something that is "cool", or "good", or otherwise "generally favorable" in a "positive" way. Not coincidentally, it rhymes with the phrase "totally high", something that everyone in the 1970s was, all the time.


 * More likely, it is an even more sly reference to the fact that Andy Gavin, one of the lead programmers on this game (and, not coincidentally, the lead level designer responsible for this secret stage), briefly owned a sandwich shop called "Totally Rye Creations" in the late 1980s. Conceived as the Jew-friendly alternative to Subway, the store flopped miserably, primarily because Gavin, not being Jewish himself, simply could not wrap his brain around the Kashrut, or Jewish dietary law. It was this failure that led to Gavin abandoning his culinary roots, in favor of pursuing a career in computer programming instead. Ironically, Gavin himself later developed a pork allergy that led him to converting to Judaism in early 2005, for reasons unrelated to his old Jew sandwich shop.