Ratchet & Clank

Last night I felt like cleaning a plate from yesteryear, and went straight for Ratchet & Clank. This is a game I played through in 2003, quitting after dying two or three times on the final boss. So anyway, all I had to do last night in order to beat this game was get reacquainted with the controls and gameplay before taking on that final boss and finishing him once and for all. All said and done, it took less than an hour. There was definitely an air of nostalgia I felt when playing the game - not quite childhood nostalgia, as this game came after the 16-bit era and even the 1990s in general, but certainly some sort of nostalgia for a more recent, yet still gone, era. I mean, this game was mostly played at the beginning of my sophomore year of high school. I look back on it with a smile, although admittedly, I cannot tell it apart from its sequel by means of recollection alone. As far as the game itself is concerned, I think both it and the series it spawned are underrated. The PS2 always lent itself well to RPGs, sports games, shooters, and racing games, but never to platformers. That said, Ratchet & Clank was easily the premier platforming series on the PS2. And the games were hardly clones of other series. It's easy to scream Banjo-Kazooie when you see another video game featuring a duo where a fighting character carries a flying character on his back, but honestly, this series is largely its own. It's a mixture of platformer, shooter, and puzzle-solver, which I suppose is a generic enough blend, but the ace up its sleeve is its weapon system. You come across over a dozen different guns over the course of the game, each with its own unique ammo that must be collected or purchased, and must use them in order to max out their stats. After firing a certain number of rounds with any given weapon, it upgrades into a more powerful version of itself. This prevents the game from getting stale or repetitive; although hordes of enemies often come after you, there are many, many different ways - most of them entertaining - to eliminate them. Sick of guns? Use Ratchet's wrench, an absolute beast of a melee weapon that just might be the coolest club-like weapon I've ever used in a video game. But the thing is, you won't get sick of guns. Not when you have the abilities to morph enemies into chickens, shoot lightning bolts, drop landmines, and launch spheres that emit tiny robots who hone in on your enemies and explode on them, kamikaze style. My favorite weapon in the game was the R.Y.N.O. (the "Rip You a New One"), which was capable of firing several homing missiles all at once. In fact, I don't see how the final boss could have beaten without the R.Y.N.O. - he was pretty tough, even as far as final bosses go. I think Ratchet & Clank was a fantastic platformer and I'd recommend it to any PS2 owner who can find it relatively cheap. However, I'll admit that its sequel was a better game. But you'll find out all about that one another time.