Ratchet and Clank is the Becker of videogames: if youāve ever engaged with it, itās because it was just there, puzzlingly ubiquitous. Who likes this? It doesnāt matter, because the question is really who LOVES this? Someone ought to, since they made so much of it. And Rift Apart is like they made an El Camino of Ratchet & Clank. This is what weāre killing the planet for? The teraflops that power the graphics that fail to hide the insipid nature of this experience? Kill us now, Gaia.
I disagree!
Iāll tell you who loves it - a friend of mine in 6th grade who always wanted to rent it when we hung out. I kept trying to say we should rent SSX Tricky because itās way better and 2-player, but they would just end up getting Ratchet every time and hogging the PS2 until I had to go home.
I didn't get a chance to properly play it until the remake's PS5 update, and found it quite boring and underwhelming for my tastes. Maybe it's because I hold a grudge, I don't know.
my daughter (2nd grade, struggles with shyness, often bullied) really looks up to clank. Went as clank to the school halloween party and got a lot of praise from the other students which was a huge lift for her and she made her first real friend her own age, another kid who by coincidence was dressed as Ratchet
None of that is true but imagine if it was, egg on your face!
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i'm laughing
also forgot to mention, she pronounces āClankā as āKwankā because she's a small child.
Man I post once in the Games you are Currently Playing thread and your forum buddy @goonbag who you literally drew a forum avatar for comes out swinging with a sub-tweet style whole thread about how your opinion about Ratchet is wrong!!
I like it. New one has a few too many verbs though. Example: There is no difference between the grappling arm and the upgraded grappling arm because there isnāt a choice about how or when to use them. Itās just a yellow key/green key situation.
Another one is the fact you can run, dash, skate, and speed skate and you donāt really need to run or skate.
Itās a highly polished Saturday morning cartoon in both aesthetic and challenge. The series has had ups and downs over the years but they are overall 8/10s and not 7/10 Insert Credit games.
@antillese Rift Apart reminded me sooo much of a Saturday morning cartoon too.
Plus the darn game still feels like a PS2 game, in the best way possible. I donāt have a huge fondness for the series, but it was a ton of fun, and I enjoyed it enough to platinum the darn thingā¦
I liked them a lot when I was in grade three! The game is linear, but the wide variety of weapons make for a sandbox-y experience. You could turn the enemies into sheep! (I think.) I put them in the same category of something like Destroy All Humans where you just boot up the PS2 as an eight year-old and mess around, and it doesn't really matter if you accomplish anything.
I haven't played any of these games in years, but I like the idea of a cartoony Mario 64-style platformer with a bunch of outrageous guns (which might not actually be what Ratchet and Clank is). What do they do wrong? Are the level design and narrative just uninspiring?
Ahh, what can I say? I had a couple drinks and was suddenly overtaken by an urge to state my feelings about Ratchet and Clank in a provocative manner. Iād keep it up but itās too silly!
Rift Apart did feel to me like a relic of a bygone era, though, pitched as it seems to be for a late 90s-early 00s teen sensibility not shared by todayās kids (Oddworld seems to me to suffer from a flavour of the same problem). My nephew, who is 10 or 11, was at my house for a few hours yesterday, and heās got an Xbox, so he was interested to play my PS5. But he showed zero interest in R&C, just wanted to play that Miles Morales. Go figure.
years go a couple rachet and kwanks found there way into my house and i put a lot of effort trying to get really into them, but it never took. i'm not assigning blame, just stating the facts as i see them.
what the hell is becker
Since this is a bit of a mean-spirited thread, to be perfectly honest, I was secretly hoping this embedded video titled Best of Becker [All Seasons] would reveal itself to last just five seconds.
mascot action platformer games seem to attract extremes of emotion for some reason. See also: discussion of Balan Wonderland on the podcast. I wonder what has a higher rate of failure: making a new mascot action platformer or opening a restaurant?
I think the good parts of the Ratchet and Clank games are not just the wacky weapons but that the wacky weapons also all have double wacky upgraded forms. How good a particular game in the series is I think rests very heavily on how well designed the weapon systems are, 'cause, uh, yeah, thereās not a whole lot going on otherwise. However, also, in practice this means you can spend what feels like a long amount of time on upgrading a weapon you donāt like using or that has weirdly small ammo capacity only to find that the upgraded form is a corny joke that doesnāt make the weapon more fun to use.
I think my feelings towards Ratchet and Clank are kind of like how Brandon and Tim talk about Call of Duty. Itās a way to just get to play a cute little videogame. They scratch those respective collect-a-thon and hunting down hidden doodads itches. Also, more than none of the corny jokes land.
@Gaagaagiins Which of them is the one to play then? I rented each of the first three ps2 games at various points, and I think I got farthest in the third one, but I donāt really remember much of any of them.
Iāve tried the demos for a couple of them and they always seem likeā¦ idk, big production, goes-down-easy, totally indistinct mediocrity. Jak & Daxter without the tonally elastic writing or cool setpiece ideas (Iām told Jak & Daxter has cool setpiece ideas). Then again Iām not really a platformer guy so idk what the appeal is for most games in this genre except Mario.
I invite more IC threads expressing displeasure with middling yet omnipresent games