Posted by Pip

R6F6- The Multiverse Hath No Fury

You do not mess with Pride's family! Immortal soul bonds between dying humans and godly beings aside, Pride will tear your eyes out if you come back to claim ownership of her baby. And man, you guys are all against Destiny, saying she's a jerk but here she is NOT obliterating Jin AND expressing the lowest acceptable level of remorse for her role in destroying a world. Cut her some slack! On the plus side, Jin gets to continue being nigh-immortal, not-dead, un-Fated, or whatever she is these days. I'm not a doctor!


Quick Review: Ratchet and Clank 3 Up Your Arsenal- I was really disappointed in the HD version of Ratchet and Clank 3, but I'm not sure where all of that is coming from. I remember RC3 being a great PS2 game, so am I just remembering it wrong? Or have the lousy recent games just soured me on the franchise so much that I can no longer enjoy when it used to be good? Or is the port so half-assed that it's making the problems worse? And it is a rather shoddy job on the port. The textures look all weird and don't display properly. The water and fog effects are really messed up so half of the screen will have one overlay and then it's a harsh cut to another. Ratchet's fur looks terrible like a splotchy blurry mess instead of being striped. There are lots of sound issues like the the clanking footsteps of the robots in the background still playing during cinematics and drowning out the speech or too many sound effects playing at once and corrupting. Characters' irises and pupils move through the polygons for their eyeballs so one eye will look normal and the other will just be white space or Courtney's lips falling into her face's model so she'd only have half a mouth. There's supposed to be a sparkly lightning animation when Ratchet levels up, but over the course of the whole game, I think it only played four or five times. I'd get the notification that I leveled up, I could hear the sound effect, and the boxes around me would explode, but it wouldn't play that effect. Plenty of problems with the camera either not moving, swinging wildly before you try to make a long jump, or a combination of the two. It especially starts to really freak out when you're using the Gravity Boots. So even if RC3 was still a good game this almost ten years after its initial release, the port isn't doing it any favors.
The writing and characters certainly haven't aged well. I'm super sick of Qwark after the newer games, so it doesn't help that this was the Qwark-heavy game. The early-2000s were a different time, so I can excuse the bad Britney Spears analogues, even if making an “Ooops, I did it again” joke was ALWAYS lazy and awful, but Ratchet just comes across as a smarmy dick and Clank needs to shut up and stop giggling. The base gameplay is still great, but all the extraneous stuff like the hacking mini-games, vehicles, and the sort are cringe-worthy now. Why on Earth would you make a kind of rhythm mini-game for a dialogue sequence that doesn't actually involve any kind of rhythm? It's just a sequence of button presses and holds for no discernible reason. It's actually worse than a quick time event because the payoff is just walking forward. QTEs usually at least result in some kind of over-the-top action sequence.
I've gone from “Insomniac is an amazing company!” during the PS2-era to “Man, Insomniac crashed and burned” in the PS3-era to “Wait, maybe Insomniac was ALWAYS bad” in the times of PS4s. The core gameplay of RC3 is so good and leveling weapons up is so rewarding. Going back and playing that stuff was still a lot of fun and even though it was no longer new or novel, I had the benefit of foresight to let me skip all the junk. I got all the Skill Points and unlocked everything from the vid-comics once so I could just ignore all that this time around. I knew what weapons to use and level this time so I could ignore all the grind for money and experience on the junky ones. The game really should have been more fun with that kind of knowledge but the bad writing and shoddy port just bummed me out. It also didn't help that to download the 4GB game file took me over eight hours and five attempts because the file kept corrupting. If you do feel compelled to play the game, get the disc copy, not the one from the PS Store.