Thanks, yeah it is definitely HDD.

No, I'm pretty sure it's just a HDD.

Here's a clip of the crash happening on PSN. I only had to try twice for this to happen:

Thanks for getting back!

I can probably get some footage later today of the PSN crashes, but I might have to upload them tommorow.

Hopefully we can work something out about it.

Hi. Sorry that was me who posted about it. I then felt a bit stupid about bringing up such a minor issue so I deleted it.

So yes this happens on the PS2 / PSN version of the game for me. I'm not sure about the GC version. The cutscene occurs when you enter the level "Bear's Path", which is the fourth and last level of the forest zone.

Crashes, in general, occur when you try to skip any of the cutscenes of this game, however this one is a bit of an issue because you'll have already completed 3 levels if it happens, so it's quite stressful especially when you feel like you've got a good flow going.

The PS2 version is the absolute worst about it. It does seem to crash the majority of the time for me. I used to chalk this up to me having a bad disk, but when I got the PSN version I found that it happened quite often too. Not nearly as much, but about 10% of the time.

It's an awkward issue because the likelihood of a crash seems to depend on two factors: how long you watch the cutscene for before you press X, and pure luck. If you watch it for five seconds then it's far less likely to crash when you skip it. It still might, but it's not as likely. However, skipping immediately will nearly always result in a crash. I tend to wait one second for Merlock to say "Well..." and then skip. This isn't foolproof but it gets me by most of the time. I've never had it crash if I watch it entirely, although this doesn't happen often I'll admit.

My concern was about whether we should discount the cutscene time entirely from runs? Mainly because I wouldn't want the game to dissolve down to "who is brave enough to press X the soonest for the level 4 cutscene?". Instead maybe let runners watch it all, so that there is no risk of the crash... or... I'm not really sure tbh. It's not the end of the world for me if we just leave things as they are to prevent a fuss, it's just something I wanted an opinion on.

Also it could just be me having faulty hardware. I doubt it, but i've only experienced this myself so I can't rule it out.

Really cool find! I never knew you could do it in the fire level, though I did find the city hand glitch a couple of months ago:

It'd be great to test where this is possible / helpful to help optimise the game.