f13.net

The title gives the gist of it.  I just can't hold it in anymore and I'm making a weak R&C-fanboy thread about it.  My heart is beating a tad faster just thinking about it; it's going to rock inside my brain so hard.  I love me some Ratchet & Clank, and if there was a game to justify my PS3 then this is it.  I watched the trailer a couple times this weekend and I was uncontrollably hopping up and down while grinning.  I might have muttered "kawaii", but I'm not sure.  This game plus GTAVI will pretty much consume me this fall.  I just cannot wait.

What, no love for Madden?

Is he a new enemy in R&C?

I have to give the game credit, it looks fucking fantastic.  The closest I've seen anything come to real-time rendering of Toy Story quality animation, assuming that what we were shown in the trailer wasn't all pre-rendered.  However, apart from the shiny, it would need to demonstrate fun gameplay to me, and everything I saw looked like generic 3-D platformer.

Dude R&C is awesome. I have purchased every one of them except the first on the day it came out. It's the most fun platformer / action shoot-em-up in existence. Yes I know it probably brings nothing new to the genre, and they milk it for all it's worth with a new game every 12 months. But DAMN IT it's just so FUN! Sadly I will not be owning this nextgen Ratchet for the foreseeable future. I'm not shelling out 500 bucks for one game.

The gameplay in R&C has always been a joy.  I am a big stickler for tight controls, ESPECIALLY in a platformer where it counts, and R&C has always delivered; I mean both with the jumping/swinging/flying/vehichles and with the shooting/dodging/smashing buildings with a giant robot.  The fact it looks great on top of that is just gravy.  As for the cinematic elements you see in the trailer, all of the games have plenty of those and they are very well-done.  Some in-engine and some prerendered.


It's not, though, even the first one, since it brings platforming and run-n-gun together so seamlessly.  I have played lots of 3D platformers and I would rank all of them below any R&C game, except that I think God of War is better than Ratchet: Deadlocked by a hair.  Even then, GoW didn't have you fighting hordes of robot zombies in a Running Man style game with humorous commentators.  Yeah, robot zombies from a robot graveyard, and I mean that in a "it's hilarious" way.

I don't know for sure how the new one is going to be, but R&C is the standard-setter for 3D platformers.  Controls are tight since the first one, the story is good, the laughs are nearly constant, the characters are all very likeable, dialog is great and funny, Clank is the best sidekick ever (not annoying or a liability), the weapons are fun and hilarious, and with the PS2 games you could load up previous saves and have access to weapons from the last game.  Lots of things to upgrade, enemies explode in showers of loot, skill points for doing strange or difficult things like shoot down a zeppelin in the "background", and it has looked great from Day One.  Personally I love the music although I cannot tell you if it is "good" music or not.

If you have a PS2, you are totally missing out.  I would suggest playing through them in order for the full story and for the weapon carryover.  The only time Ratchet isn't an armor-wearing hero is at the start of the first one.  The only thing I can expect someone to not like about it is the art style or the silliness or just the fact that it is a 3D platformer/action shooter.  All but the first one support progressive-scan, too.

I, for one, am glad that Insomniac tested the PS3 waters with Resistance before they let loose the R&C game.

Didn't they borrow a lot of the mechanics from Jak & Daxter beyond just the graphics engine?  Althought the first Jak game didn't have the artillery of R&C, the controls feel almost identical otherwise.  And they did it first, sort of.

It does use a lot of Jak & Daxter, yes.  Same engine by Naughty Dog and it does have a similar feel just because of that, plus the art styles are similar.  Sometimes you can find pictures of Jak and Daxter in the R&C games.  I didn't really care for Jak & Daxter and I didn't get very far into it, basically the first time I got lost I just stopped playing.  Didn't care for the hoverbike, either.  And Daxter annoyed me.  I'd suggest that later changes to the J&D games indicate that Naughty Dog decided they couldn't do better than Insomniac, but I'm not sure.  I do know that R&C has not changed to the GTA mission formula.

I like Voodoo Vince more than Jak & Daxter, when it comes to 3D platformers that are not Ratchet & Clank.

Now that I think about it, the Little Big Planet ragdoll people remind me of Voodoo Vince.

There was actually a point in Jak II that I found utterly unbeatable, and it autosaved so I was stuck there.  Something about getting past a freaking army of stormtroopers with only four bars of life and no recharges.  I rarely quit games because of things like that, but I haven't played it since.

This is as good a place as any to put up this link to Insomniac's public PS3 R&D site:
http://www.insomniacgames.com/tech/techpage.php