Penta Penguin

Penta Penguin is a character in the Crash Bandicoot series. He's based on the penguins in Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back who walk aimlessly and then take a moment to spin. Those penguins also appear in Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex and Crash Bandicoot: The Huge Adventure.

Penta makes his debut in Crash Team Racing, where he is an unlockable character via a secret button combination in the main menu. This is the only game where the name Penta appears. He also appears in Dansu! De Jump! Na Daibouken.

Crash Team Racing
This is Penta's first appearance. He is only unlockable via cheat code. If players hold down R1 and L1 and press down, right, triangle, down, left, triangle, and up, at the main menu, he will become a playable character. In CTR's PAL and NTSC-J versions, he is the only racer with maxed out stats, the same as Nitros Oxide. In the NTSC-U version of the game, Penta has the same stats as Polar and Pura, and he is good at turning but doesn't have much speed. His appearance looks a bit different from the other games; in Crash Team Racing, he is black, he has a scarf, his eyes are closer together, and his beak is smaller.

PAL and NTSC-J Version
Speed: 7/7 Acceleration: 7/7 Turning: 7/7 Difficulty: Expert

NTSC-U Version
Speed: 3/7 Acceleration: 4/7 Turning: 7/7 Difficulty: Beginner

Manga
Penta makes an appearance in Dansu! De Jump! Na Daibouken. He tends to be very greedy since most of the time he's a merchant selling items for high prices. He has a girlfriend named Gurin and is head over heels for her and will do anything to win her affections. He is later seen in another chapter selling jet packs when Crash and Cortex decided to go into space to find the Power Stones much faster.

Appearances

 * Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back (cameo, presumed)
 * Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped (cameo)
 * Crash Team Racing
 * Crash Bash (cameo)
 * Crash Bandicoot: The Huge Adventure (cameo, presumed)
 * Crash of the Titans (cameo)

Gallery
See: Penta Penguin/Gallery

Trivia

 * Penta's name might be a pun on the phrase "pent-up", the definition of which means "repressed or suppressed, especially of emotions or impulses". This is plausible because he is suppressed in the game unless players know the super button combination.
 * Penta also means "Five" in the Greek language.
 * Penta is one of the only three characters players cannot race against as a computer controlled character (apart from Fake Crash and technically N. Tropy as he is only computer controlled in Time Trial mode as a ghost).
 * In the NTSC version of CTR, Penta's data is largely unfinished. Examples of this include him being protected by Aku Aku, but having Uka Uka show up in the item box. Also, as well as penguin noises, the sounds he usually makes, Penta also makes various statements which are actually unrecorded lines. For example, sometimes when boosting, Penta will say "Penguin Yay One" or "Penguin Yay Two." This is fixed in the PAL version.
 * Penta Penguin is one of five racers not to reappear in Crash Nitro Kart, the other four being Papu Papu, Pinstripe, Komodo Joe and Ripper Roo. Also, Penta is the only of the non-returning racers who wasn't a boss (however, all of them are secret characters).
 * Penta is the only secret character to have Aku Aku as a mask during a power up.
 * Penta's victory theme is the same as Ripper Roo and Papu Papu.
 * Out of all of the characters that appear in CTR (other than the masks and Fake Crash), Penta is the only one who does not have a text entry in the closing credits.
 * Penta is also the only character to have different statistics in CTR. In the NTSC-U version of the game, he has the same stats as Polar and Pura. However, in the PAL an NTSC-J version, he has the same statistics as N. Oxide.
 * The beta version for CTR claims that Penta became a weather forecaster, and kept predicting another Ice Age.
 * Penta makes an appearance in the CTR intro, when Polar appears (behind him), though he's hard to spot as he's very small.