It would be a 7 or 8 if not for the save system. Probably took me around 30 hrs. I ended with 1 gem by pure happenstance and there is no way I'm going to try to 100% it, since that would seem to be extremely tedious.
I can't give a positive score to a game with the worst save system I've ever come across. Beyond actually being destructive (e.g. deleting other save files on the card or corrupting the card on a reload or something), I would have to try pretty hard to think of a worse system. I guess having the password system, which serves the same function as the save system, is a plus if you don't have a memory card. I was having fun with the game, but that kept getting less and less the more I had to deal with the save system. As with the N64 games with saves that I've played, what's the point of lives in this game? The save system doesn't save them -- oh, you built up 35 lives and have to take a break from the game? Ooh, too bad. You now have 4 lives. When I got to a particularly difficult stage, I just went to Sunset Vista and farmed lives from the never-ending stream of bats for 20-30 min at about 1 life per minute.
Being a two-button game (jump and spin attack) really limits it. Not even using the 4 shoulder buttons is borderline inexcusable. Some of the difficulty comes from not being able to look around, something that easily can be accomplished with the 4 completely unused buttons. There are a lot of blind jumps. There are a handful of places with floating platforms on a black background that I could not tell where it actually was in relation to Crash, or looked like it was down when it was actually to the right. Vertically climbing several stages makes dying by falling down open spaces when you've been to the area directly below just because you're now in a new section of the stage makes absolutely no sense, especially when there are multiple places where Crash can survive a fall of probably 50-100 times his height.
Just put in a decent save system, and I would have really enjoyed the game.
