The Dualsense controller is arguably the most exciting aspect of the new 9th generation console, with its only real competition being the SSDs they both have. I really like the controller, with the exception of having a microphone in it which makes me uncomfortable. I think it looks great, the improved rumble and trigger tension both have potential to them (only realized so far in Astrobot) and it feels solid and comfortable when I hold it.

But I think it's doing something to my right hand.

I first noticed this when I was playing Maneater, a game where fighting pretty much involves jamming on buttons until the enemy died. I played a lot of it over the course of a weekend and was jamming on buttons a ton and I started developing pain in my right hand that felt like a muscle strain. This actually got kind of serious over the course of the next few days and it lingered when I wasn't playing games and made it a little painful to type and do other things. I have a long history of playing video games, including jamming on buttons, and it's never caused this kind of pain before, but I'm getting on in years and as anyone who gets a little older knows things in your body work perfectly until they don't. I wasn't sure what exactly caused it (the pain came on sort of gradually, and I lift weights, which can cause strain or muscle fatigue in a hand) and I decided to just monitor it and hope it would go away.

Over the next week or so it wasn't going away, instead it was lingering and maybe getting a bit worse and I started thinking about going to my doctor to get tested for carpal tunnel or whatever.

Then I stopped playing PS5 for a while. I wasn't even thinking about the controller or my hand, I was just focused on other games, and when my hand started feeling better I didn't connect it to the PS5 at all. I just figured whatever had happened was finally healing.

A couple days ago I went back to playing my PS5, and this morning I turned on Spider-Man Remastered to mess around in Manhattan, got into a couple brawls with some Magia goons, jammed on the buttons again (as you do in Spider-Man) and started feeling it in hand again.

I have no idea why the Dualsense would cause this and I'm honestly not even sure it is the Dualsense that's to blame. The controller feels very comfortable in my hand and it's not that different from a PS4 controller, which I've been using since the launch of that machine. It might be something to do with trigger tension or the shape of the thing or whatever. I haven't seen anyone else complaining about it so maybe it's just my hands and this device. Maybe it's just a coincidence (though I've played a bunch of other games on other controllers in the last couple weeks.) There's another possible explanation because I rarely drive a car and I had to drive for about 5 hours yesterday, so it could just relate to having held the wheel so long, but I'm officially worried. If I go to a doctor and say "this particular controller makes my hand hurt if I use it and the pain lingers" they'll say "then don't use that controller" and maybe I shouldn't, but I'll be super disappointed if I can't enjoy the Dualsense features because of some kind of weird ergonomic incompatibility. I've been excited about its potential and now I might miss out. I'm sure I can find some other controller to play PS5 games with (Dualshock 4 or some random third aprty thing) but it won't have the special rumble or trigger tension.

I don't know if anyone else has had the experience of a particular controller being painful to use, but why did it have to be the most exciting and innovative controller since the Wiimote?

Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom is a game whose execution can’t quite match the scope of its ambition. It’s an indie title that seeks to take the game style of the Wonder Boy series and update it with modern graphics and gameplay conveniences to create a Metroidvania type adventure with HD visuals that reference those games, and a sound track crafted by some of the best composers from Japan’s 16 bit heyday that has the spirit of chiptunes but the fidelity of more modern music.

To a large degree it’s successful. The game looks absolutely gorgeous, at least when standing still, and the music is incredible. The gameplay, for its part, feels classic, but with some updates and conveniences from more modern game design. It’s a little stiff to control, like those old games were, and it takes a little getting used to, but the game gives you powers at a good clip, evolving the gameplay from area to area so that it doesn’t feel stagnant, and has diverse and creative level design for the majority of its lengthy run time. There are nods to old school challenge but there’s no lives system, save points are generally somewhat reasonable, and the powerups and equipment upgrades are pared back but still extensive enough that they feel rewarding. Several of the items and powers you find are serious game changers, and navigating old areas with new powers is a lot of fun and lets you approach them in a different (easier) fashion than you did the first time. There are lots of opportunities to find secret chests and items and explore the nooks and crannies of the world, complete with extra puzzles. The game is, in fact, so good that despite starting as a project inspired by Wonder Boy it was picked up by Sega and made part of the official Wonder Boy series (impressive though kind of meaningless since it’s not like there’s a cohesive Wonder Boy story.) It’s incredibly aesthetically impressive and a lot of fun. For a good long while.

The main problem the game has is that its beautiful visual style doesn’t mesh with the level of precision the gameplay requires as it gets towards the end. Lining up your shield to block a projectile can be a pain, as can perfectly lining up jumps or other abilities to try and get on to small platforms. Because the game’s art is more of an anime influenced illustration (there’s even a full on anime opening and ending) and not as visually clear as many of its inspirations, and your characters vary in size and placement of shields etc… the game can be hard to visually read and interact with. It’s also underanimated. The characters look great sitting still, but every action has at most one or two frames of animation associated with it. That makes for quick gameplay, but it also means that the movement, while responsive, can feel stiff, and that it has limited feedback while you play. Enemy hits knock you back and cause some damage but you don’t get a lot of invincibility frames or visual feedback and combat lacks punch or impact. This isn’t just a visual issue because it’s very easy to lose a lot of health quickly and not realize it unless you keep an eye on your life meter, which isn’t always easy in a game that can be very demanding of your attention.

Part of the reason for the lack of animation is because of the game’s premise. You play as a boy whose drunk uncle has gotten a magic wand and turned everyone in the land into monsters of some kind. You get turned into a pig and you need to go out into the world and collect enough magic to let you confront your uncle and turn everyone back to normal. This involves collecting magical orbs, each of which grants you a new monster form, such as a lion who can wield a sword and shield and also charge at things (unlike your pig form, which has magic but is physically limited to a weak punch) or a snake who can crawl into small areas and stick to walls. Because the character has so many forms it makes sense that the small team wasn’t able to build lavish animations for all your characters and the enemies and the environments etc…etc… They had to pick and choose. And for the most part it works fine. You go out into the level, you fight stuff, solve puzzles (unlike most Wonder Boy games Monster Boy is very puzzle oriented), fight a boss, gain a new power of some kind, and move on to the next area. It’s a good loop, but over time the game starts ramping up the difficulty and the lack of feedback and the speed with which everything happens because there’s so little animation makes things start to feel awkward and more difficult than they should. In addition the puzzles don’t give you feedback like you’d hope they would and even though I finished the game only looking up a couple minor things in walkthroughs there were a lot of puzzles that I found frustrating just because it wasn’t clear if what I was doing was having any effect or not, what exactly I could interact with, and what tools were at my disposal to solve them. A fair chunk of the late game was spent wandering around semi-aimlessly trying to figure out what I could do to interact with the world (and where I was supposed to go) before I even got down to figuring out the right way to go about actually doing it.

The final areas and boss fights really compound these issues to the point where I got very near the end, didn’t know what to do exactly, couldn’t tell if the things I was doing were even viable paths forward, and put the game down for over a month before checking a walkthrough to see if I was on the right path (I wasn’t, and the game had been opaque about something important) and then charging forward to the finish, which was only about an hour away. The last boss was not very difficult but like the boss before him he had multiple phases (in this case 5), required experimentation to figure out how to hurt him, and did not have any checkpoints, meaning that you had to replay phases you’d already figured out before you could get back to the later phases where you were experimenting to see how you could take him down. There was also an unskippable mid-boss dialog sequence in there because of course there was. It probably took me 3-4 tries to figure him out and defeat him, but I found it really annoying and it reminded me why I put the game down in the first place and left me with a sour taste in my mouth about a game that I really enjoyed for the first 2/3rds of its (for me) 18 hour run time.

I’ve made an effort to finish the games I start as often as possible over the last decade or so. As a young person I barely finished any games (I’m not sure if I completed a single one on my NES) and I find it somewhat rewarding to have the entire experience that a developer intends by playing from beginning to end. I treat games as art and I don’t like stopping a movie halfway through either. But unlike a movie a game requires active engagement to get through, and you can’t just sit there waiting for it to be over. If you don’t quite pick up what the game is putting down then you might find your progress slowing to a crawl. It can be frustrating, especially if the game isn’t giving you enough direction about whether you’re doing the right thing, or has issues that make it hard to engage with productively.

I didn’t get much enjoyment out of finishing Monster Boy, and I think doing so actually sapped some of my enthusiasm for the easier and, in my view, more fun first part of the game, where the flaws were less apparent because it didn’t matter whether the game was giving you accurate feedback when you weren’t trying to use a frustratingly spaced dash move to get through a bunch of lasers that would drain half your life bar if you touched one. You were just slashing at jaunty little crabs and doing basic water current puzzles.

I don’t like being the kind of person who abandons games. Sometimes, however, beating a game just isn’t worth it. Developers often focus on the first parts of their games more than the end because many people won’t ever make it to the end (about 35% on PlayStation and less on Xbox) but everyone will play the beginning. Also games are sometimes developed somewhat in chronological order, and the ending parts may be rushed and have less time for testing and balancing. Games often put their best foot forward and save the worst for last, as well as catering in the end to the people who like the game’s unique mechanics and style rather than those who just find it kind of fun. Monster Boy’s final hours aren’t incredibly difficult (especially if you look things up, which I mostly didn’t), but they’re also not a lot of fun, and they feel like the work of a developer who felt compelled to provide a big, tough, finale but didn’t have enough good ideas to actually make it work.

Do I recommend Monster Boy? Sure. It’s initial asking price (which I paid) was $40, and given the quality of the art and music and the nearly 20 hour length that’s not unreasonable. And that’s just to beat the last boss. I’m at about 65% completion for the game as a whole so this is a long game with a lot to do. As I type this it’s on sale on PlayStation for $16, and at that price it’s more or less a steal, even if you don’t complete it. There’s a lot of content here, a lot of it’s very good, and they really don’t make games like this anymore. But if you’re like me and you start to find the back end frustrating and not as fun, I wouldn’t recommend pushing through. It doesn’t get better. It’s definitely a finishable game; I was able to pick it up after a month off and get through the end without too much trouble, but it’s a slog and the somewhat far checkpoints and annoying bosses don’t relent.

Sometimes you don’t have to finish a game to enjoy the best of what it has to offer. Modern games are designed to be finished for the most part, but older games and throwbacks have a less friendly disposition. Just like with a meal it’s fine to leave a little bit unfinished on your plate. Better than force feeding yourself until you’re sick of what you’re eating and just want to stop. I force fed myself the end of Monster Boy and I kind of regret it.

Most of the comments in my blog about Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus were from people who wanted to talk about Sly 2. I'm playing through that game and will have thoughts when I finish, but one thing that has really stood out to me is the sound. The game has fantastic music, but it also has really impressive use of surround sound. I bought a surround sound set up a little over a year ago, mostly for gaming, and I've found it pretty disappointing to be honest. There are a few games that have good separation and make use of the rear speakers, but the vast majority don't do anything special with it. Most games are set by default to surround sound (when I used TV speakers I remember having to go in and change the setting on almost every game until that became a console wide thing) but they don't do anything of note with it. Sometimes you'll hear sound effects like gunfire from the rear speakers or what have you, but it's often indistinct in the mix.

Sony is now pushing 3D sound where it's separated vertically with their new headset, and sound coming out of a speaker in your controller (Destruction Allstars was traumatic) but I feel like those things are gimmicks and can't be trusted when even basic surround sound is used so sparingly.

In Sly 2 (and I've seen some buzz that this may have been altered for the PS3 version, though the PS2 version had surround sound too as far as I can tell) the surround sound stuff is clear and notable. Not only do ambient noises come from the rear speakers, which helps to immerse you in the game, but sound effects often come from them too, and there's even an in game use because enemies and collectables make lots of noise and you can locate them using surround sound. I was able to find a hidden guard with a key in one level by tracking him with my surrounds. The bottles you pick up clink when you're near them, and you can use your surrounds to track them down.

This is awesome!

Not everyone has surround sound so of course you can't put key game functions into it, but you can add little extras like these that really add to a game. In addition, the vast majority of people do have sound of some sort, so adding gameplay sound cues like collectables that make noise is great. Some people are hearing impaired, or just play with sound off, but you can add accessibility options to add visual cues for those players.

Sound in games seems much less developed than graphics. There are a number of reasons for this but I feel like there's a lot of opportunity to innovate there. I know that there have been sound only games, and plenty of games that used sound in interesting ways, but to play this 2004 platformer and be consistently blown away by how it uses sound is just wild to me. It really brings into focus how neglected sound has been in so many games. Lots of games don't even bother with decent sound mixing; making dialogue impossible to hear because they don't turn down music and sound effects when people are talking. I remember that Dirt 5 tried to do something interesting with surround sound audio by having the music play out of virtual speakers on the track when you drove by them, and it just made it impossible to hear the music. Close but no cigar.

Sound can be even more immersive than visuals, especially with surround sound, because the fidelity is closer to life. You always know you're looking at a game on a screen, but with the right sound mix and positional audio you can actually mistake game sound for real life sound. We've all heard the phone ringing in a movie and thought it was in real life. Sound has reached the level of near perfect replication, and yet it's so neglected.

Sly 2 has aged badly in a lot of ways but its sound design not only stands up to modern games but exceeds most of them. As game graphics get more and more expensive and reach a point of diminishing returns there's lots of opportunity to improve sound, and Sly 2 shows that you don't need cutting edge tech to do it, just a little thoughtfulness and effort.

Given how many games I have to turn subtitles on in just to understand the dialog, there's a long way to go.

\This is not a blog about buyer’s remorse or any issues with the PS5. The PS5 seems like a good machine and I’m sure I’ll spend many happy and some frustrating hours with it in the future. This is about how console generations no longer feel as distinct as they once did.

I planned to get both the new consoles as soon as they were announced. I set aside money for them, followed all the news online, and even made sure I had free time to try and nab one when the pre-order window opened. Unfortunately the PS5 window opened unexpectedly a day early when I was asleep and I missed it. I did get a Series X pre-order from the Microsoft Store, but while the Series X is a good piece of hardware it is not nearly as buzzy as the PS5. What followed was over 2 months of regularly checking Wario64’s Twitter feed, frustrating hours in the PS Direct online queue and refreshing broken order systems at various retailers, and eventual success via a Gamestop bundle that the retailer’s terrible customer service turned into its own set of headaches.

I set up the system after it arrived, proceeded to platinum Astrobot and the 2 PlayStation Plus games released for that system, played through the DLC from 2018’s Spider-Man via the remastered edition, platinumed the PS4 version of Spyro: Year of the Dragon, finished the Hitman 1 campaign via Hitman 3 import, and after 3 weeks of fairly intensive play I haven’t turned the machine on in 2 weeks despite playing a ton of video games in that time.

Part of that has just been the natural ebb and flow of the release schedule. Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury came out and sucked me in, leading directly to my first glorious playthrough of Super Mario Galaxy, and more time on my Switch than I’ve spent in many months. Part of it actually relates to the PS5 release schedule. I’ve been playing through old Ratchet & Clank games on my PS3 because I want to have the series polished off by the time the new game drops in June. Part of it is just the natural way of things with new consoles. When the PS4 and Xbox One came out I still spent a lot of time on my old systems because there wasn’t that much interesting on them yet, and while the PS5 and Xbox Series have arguably done better in this regard, I’m not surprised that there isn’t some avalanche of software that excites me just yet, especially in these trying times.

But part of it is that the PS5 just doesn’t feel special as a machine to me. I’ve called the Series X an incremental upgrade over the Xbox One X, the same way the One X was over the launch Xbox One, and while the PS5 has more differences (very different look, cool new controller, somewhat reworked UI) a lot of them are paper thin. The Dual Sense is great in Astrobot but hasn’t done much for me in other titles and was downright unpleasant in Destruction Allstars until they patched it. Playing PS3 over the last week has reminded me what a massive improvement the PS4’s UI was over the PS3, especially when it came to downloading and patching games which remains a total nightmare on the older machine (it was made very clear when I watched my PS3 go through the painfully slow process of patching up my copy of Ratchet & Clank: Full Frontal Assault. Almost as unpleasant as actually playing that game.) There was also the easily accessible game library built into the UI, the convenient ability to suspend games (patched in after launch I believe) and put the system to sleep and, of course, all the normal bells and whistles of modern consoles like automatic updates and news feeds.

The PS5 has everything the PS4 has and a few additional features. It spawns activities in the UI that let you jump immediately into missions in a game, bypassing loading screens and the like. It offers some integrated game guide stuff that I honestly haven’t even glanced at because that’s never been something I used in games. It, of course, has that sweet sweet SSD that makes loading times much quicker and virtually non-existent for games that are well optimized for it.

All of those features are great, but none of them fundamentally change the experience, with the possible exception of the SSD, which can be very nice but isn’t a huge difference maker in games that don’t have a lot of loading times or that cover their loading with cut scenes.

This is not really a criticism of the PS5, which seems like a very well-made system (Dualsense drift aside) and seems like it will have a good library before it sees a price drop, but it does show something of a change in the console market.

The PS1 generation brought 3D graphics and CD media to console games (Sega and Trubografx CD add ons aside).

The PS2 generation brought us a DVD player and 3D graphics that actually looked good and worked, instead of the warped mess of so many PS1 games.

The PS3 generation brought ubiquitous online and made downloadable console games and trophies a central part of console gaming.

The PS4 generation greatly refined the UI and added social features like native screenshotting and streaming, as well as VR.

The PS5 generation…just refines what the PS4 did. At least so far. It’s a better PS4 with a fancy controller and hard drive.

I think that we’ve reached a point where console gaming has finally matured into what may not be its final form but is at least more of a stable experience. We’re not going to see the generational jumps of past machines, either in terms of graphics and games or in terms of the consoles themselves. PS4 games definitely look nicer than PS3 games, but the gap between them is much smaller than PS2 to PS3 or the gulf between PS1 and PS2, and the PS4 to PS5 difference, for now, is mostly a matter of frame rates, resolutions, and lighting, rather than a whole new set of digital worlds.

On the whole I’m okay with this. Games look great now. Many of them play great, and those that don’t generally won’t be improved by better tech. Faster frame rates, better load time, a little more computing overhead for AI and physics stuff, those are all incremental improvements but they aren’t making a huge difference yet. It may be a good thing. The cost of making games at the cutting edge of graphics has increased so much that it threatens the industry’s creativity and possibly long term viability, as so many smaller developers are unable to keep up. Things can’t just keep getting more realistic looking indefinitely, at least not without a serious improvement in development tools.

Gadgets don’t have to blow you away to justify the upgrade. When you get a new phone you aren’t overcome with glee at all the new stuff you can do. You appreciate the better screen and camera, are happy with how snappy it feels, and then it soon becomes just part of your daily life. The PS5 will eventually allow games to reach a level that the PS4 just could not achieve. I’m optimistic about how the SSD and better CPU will impact gameplay mechanics and not just graphics. We could see innovations like Portal that use faster loading to open new horizons. I’m excited for round 2 of PSVR. There’s a lot of potential here, and I don’t buy consoles just for the immediate experience. I intend to own and play them for a very long time. I bought my PS3 in 2009 and I’ve played half a dozen games on it this month.

I think that we’re entering a new phase of the console market where consoles will be more like laptops or cell phones. Longer periods of backwards compatibility, more variations, and fewer clear distinctions. There’s no reason why indie games can’t continue to be put out on the PS4 for the indefinite future. PS4 games run seamlessly on the PS5, and with PS5 production constrained the PS4 market will stay bigger and more active for a long time.

What this does mean is that the chase for new hardware at launch makes even less sense that it ever did. New games machines used to be portals into new worlds, and even if the launch software was often terrible, the experience of the new machine and the incredible graphics made it exciting to get your hands on one early in its life cycle. The PS5 sort of has that with the Dualsense, but that 'cool' factor wore off quick for me. It's no Altered Beast, that's for sure. Though the PS5 does have Altered Beast on it, so I guess that's a point in its favor.

I haven’t touched my PS5 for 2 weeks and that’s okay. I’ll get back to it soon, and I may be playing it for the next decade or so. The console market is changing, and hopefully that should help put the focus where it should always be, which is the games themselves.

Sly Cooper was probably the least popular of Sony’s trio of furry 3D Platformer mascots from the PS2 era. He was also the only one whose games I never played at the time, though I knew about him and have seen video and maybe played a demo over the years.

While Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon were Sony’s mascot platformers from the PS1 era, Sony did not own the rights to either character and they both went multi-platform in the sixth generation. Sony responded by creating a fresh set of characters, mostly using the same studios who had built Spyro and Crash. Naughty Dog made Jak & Daxter and focused on large open levels, evolving into something like family friendly GTA clones (though with separated locations and linear stage designs at points) with the second and third game. Insomniac created Ratchet & Clank, and focused on creative weapon and combat design, as well as a heavy focus on storytelling and minigames. Sly Cooper was the third leg of the stool, and while he was made by a newish studio (Sucker Punch) with only one game, for the N64, under their belt, he was pitched as marrying 3D platforming and stealth gameplay. Sly’s games didn’t seem to review or sell quite as well as the other two, and he seems even more forgotten (though he did get a PS3 game, unlike Jak & Daxter) but Sucker Punch is obviously still thriving as a studio and Sly got the PS3 trilogy remaster same as Ratchet and Jak.

For my own part I never played Sly because I did not like stealth games at the time, but I did pick up the remastered trilogy for like $4 on a PSN sale and after playing a bunch of Ratchet & Clank games in a row I got curious enough about Sly to brave the broken PS3 store and download the games.

So did I like it? Reader, I platinumed it. In fact it’s my first Playstation 3 platinum even though I’ve owned the system since 2009 (and yes this means that I got several plats on PS5 before I got my first plat on PS3.)

The first thing I learned about Sly Cooper when I started playing it is that it’s not actually a stealth game. It’s just a 3D platformer, starring the scion of a family of master thieves who were wiped out by an evil gang of criminals and had their book of thiefy secrets stolen and divided. Sly wants to get revenge for his family and retrieve the book and he will do that by platforming his way through over 40 stages of mostly linear platforming and minigames.

The gameplay in Sly is pretty typical for 3D platformers of the time. Sly can double jump, cling to various surfaces, whack enemies with his cane, and will eventually learn a host of other moves like being able to roll around or throw his hat as a remote bomb. There are five worlds in Sly Cooper (after the intro level) and the first four involve an intro level, a hub world, six other missions, and a boss fight, while the last one changes things up. The game does have some nods to stealth in that there are guards who walk around with visible vision cones (in the form of flashlight beams) and will almost always hit you if you get spotted, and there are a bunch of stealth-themes traps like spotlights and laser fences, but the vast majority of the game is more thief-themed than actually stealthy. There are enemies who you have to fight to progress and Sly is encouraged to smash up the environment for coins without anyone being able to hear his violent assaults on the furniture. You’ll need those coins too because every 100 of them gives you a lucky charm, which allows Sly to take a hit or fall into a pit without dying, and that’s useful because, possibly as another nod to stealth type things, this is a one hit kill platformer. Sly can have up to two charms at one time (any additional charms earned after that give Sly an extra life, because this game also has a lives system) and if you die a lot in any one level the game will start spawning you with them; a bonus you will continue to get even if you run out of lives and have to continue. In fact continuing also lets you keep any collectables you’ve found and just has the effect of starting you from the beginning of the level instead of a checkpoint. Also appreciated is the fact that the game tracks what in-game cut scenes and tool tips etc... you've already seen and doesn't repeat them when you're replaying an encounter, so you don't need to see the boss intro each time or listen to Bentley's radio prattle about how to do things you've already done a lot (like cling to pipes) over and over. This is very good design for a game this old. The fact that losing all your lives doesn't really affect much makes the lives system feel pretty superfluous to the game.

What’s not superfluous to the game are the only real collectable; green bottles with bits of codes in them that will allow you to open a vault at the end of each level with the help of your friend Bentley should you collect all of them (generally between 20 and 40) in any level. These bottles are strewn throughout the environment, often out in the open but sometimes cleverly hidden, and frequently in clumps of two or three. As collectables go these are just okay, fun to break but not visually interesting and often placed in boring locations, but unlocking a vault gives Sly a new ability, ranging from the fairly useless (roll around slightly faster than you can walk; see names and brief trivia about enemy thugs in your binoculars) to the very useful (you no longer drown in water) to the kind of gamebreaking (you can move while invisible, allowing you to walk past most spotlights, alarms, and guards.) I thoroughly enjoyed gaining the various abilities, which made for an excellent reward for collectable completionism and are the reason I bothered with the plat. Most of the levels allow for at least some backtracking and are only a minute or two long once you know what you’re doing, and some of the vaults unlock “blueprints” that let you see where the collectables are, so the process was never onerous or boring, and some of the best times I had with the game involved searching out a final bottle or two in a level cleared of hazards before finding it and getting some cool new power.

I had a lot of fun with the 3D platforming levels of Sly Cooper And The Thievius Raccoonus, but the minigame levels have aged very poorly. Crappy dual stick shooters, crappy turret sequences that feel floaty and bad using the Dualshock 3 analog stick, annoying 3D Super Offroad clones, and a mode where you have to bash 50 chickens while dodging roosters with bombs just don’t play well in 2021. None were super difficult so I can’t say I ever raged at the game, but I always wanted to get back to the core platforming rather than spend my time messing about with some side mode that probably seemed cool in 2002 but just isn’t fun anymore.

What is still a little fun but not as fun as it probably once was is the story. Sly’s comic book style voiced cinematics are still stylish, and his turtle friend Bentley and hippo friend Murray are likable enough, but Sly’s voice actor sounds bored and the game’s brand of early 2000s “stereotype as character” writing has aged very badly. The voodoo swamp alligator boss and Chinese fireworks factory panda boss probably didn’t seem as problematic then as they do now, but Sly’s love interest/nemesis, a police fox named Carmelita, would have been cringey even then. Especially the way the game calls her a Latina hottie in faux newspaper coverage after each episode. It’s not the worst stuff I’ve seen in a video game but it is jarring, especially from the company that would go on to make Ghost of Tsushima, a game that’s sensitive enough about Japanese culture to have been embraced by the Japanese market.

I came away from Sly Cooper having enjoyed the game but not loving it. I thought it was about a 7.5 out of 10. I decided to read Jeff’s old review on Gamespot and he gave it a 7.8, but his views were pretty different from mine. I liked that the game was a relatively short experience, since I got it very cheap and it didn’t stick around long enough to wear out its welcome despite its early PS2 era jank including contextual commands like grabbing surfaces that don’t always work and a camera that can be problematic even though it has preset angles designed for the mostly linear levels. On the other hand Jeff loved the minigames and thought they broke up the pacing well. In 2002 that might have been true but in 2021 they’re just too clunky and simple to be enjoyable. One area where we agree is on the visuals, which are marvelous and have aged very well. Cartoony games that have a unique style always age better than realistic looking games. Sly Cooper’s graphics and animations still look great and add personality and charm to the proceedings. Jeff really liked the soundtrack, I thought it was fine but not memorable.

I liked Sly Cooper a little bit less as I got further into the game. The first world was a ton of fun and the second world was probably the highlight; a neon-drenched casino city with gangster dogs as enemies and some really tight levels that coiled back on themselves. The third and fourth worlds were aesthetically less interesting (a swamp and a snowy Chinese mountain) and the final world is just a boring volcano level like we’ve seen in every video game ever. The game also ramps up the number of minigames towards the end, until the final world features almost none of the platforming stuff that I actually enjoyed. The boss fights in Sly all feature unique mechanics (including making the third world boss a rhythm game) and the last boss is an irritating Space Harrier type battle that I found frustrating and probably took me half an hour to learn and beat. I was left with something of a sour taste in my mouth, though it wasn’t enough to ruin the experience.

Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus has aged a little weirdly compared to many games. Some of the things that were charming about it in 2002, like the graphics and the solid level design, are still charming today. Other things, like the story and the game’s variety, have aged poorly. On the other hand some of its flaws at launch, like its short length, are much less of an issue when you’re not paying full price and it’s not a major release on a current platform. Is it worth playing in 2021? For 3D platformer fans and people nostalgic for the PS2 era. It’s not an essential game, but it has its moments. And whatever you think of it, it’s definitely not a stealth game!

I understand why fans didn’t love Ratchet & Clank: Into the Nexus when it came out in 2013. This was the first mainline Ratchet & Clank game in 4 long years after 2 disappointing spinoffs. It’s short, disconnected from most of the series, and lacking in some key Ratchet & Clank signatures; chiefly exploration and variety. The length is somewhat ameliorated by the $30 price tag (and it also came with Quest for Booty, a previous downloadable title) but waiting 4 years for a favorite series to return only to get a half-length game with 5 planets and only one substantial minigame (in a series that’s known for them) is a tough pill to swallow.

Into the Nexus has other issues too. Like many games in the Ratchet & Clank series on PS3 it has a frame rate that can tank when action is fast and furious (or fast and furrious…because he’s a Lombax, you see. It’s funny if you understand it!) There is a lot of story here, and a metric ton of fan service for people who like the series, but the main plot is disconnected from the past games and the way some fan favorites are treated probably upset quite a few people who were hoping for a continuation from prior games. Into the Nexus itself seems abbreviated and like it should have had a lot more in it. It feels like a game that had its ambitions scaled back mid development and was patched together into salable state and shoved out the door. At the time it seemed like Ratchet & Clank might be going out not with a bang but a whisper, especially considering where Insomniac was as a studio at that time.

For me, playing it in 2021, this game gave me a lot of what I wanted from a PS3 Ratchet & Clank title. I have the benefit, 8 years later, of knowing that there was another game on PS4 and there’s a PS5 title planned this year. Insomniac is thriving as a studio and was just purchased by Sony. I bought the game for $15 years ago, so the short length is even less of an issue at that price, especially considering that I didn’t already own Quest for Booty so I got to play that too.

Ratchet & Clank: Into the Nexus starts with Ratchet & Clank aboard a prison ship escorting a prisoner to the Polaris guard. Talwyn, Ratchet’s semi-unspoken love interest from Tools of Destruction and Quest for Booty, warns him that this particular prisoner is particularly dangerous and in typical Ratchet fashion he reassures her that nothing will go wrong. Things then proceed to go wrong and Ratchet & Clank have to recapture the prisoner, save the universe, blah blah blah. I don’t come to these games for the story and the plot here is just a framework on which to hang some nice character moments and the tried and true Ratchet & Clank gameplay. Despite being a short game without a lot of extras, Into the Nexus does introduce a few new ideas to Ratchet & Clank. Ratchet can leap from magnetic surface to magnetic surface, and he quickly gains the ability to create a sort of wind current that he can ride between two predefined points. This makes for new platforming opportunities and the first half of the game really takes advantage of this with some neat little puzzles where you combine platforming and current riding to get where you want to go. Clank’s sections are also new and are sort of a 2D take on Gravity Rush. I love Gravity Rush and I enjoyed these little segments, which all end in an intense but never frustrating chase scene.

Otherwise this is just Ratchet & Clank as you know and hopefully love it, but scaled back a bit. There are weapons to buy, and what I think is the best upgrade system in the series, where you use Raritanium on a hex grid to purchase upgrades and unlock new abilities. Mr. Zurkon is here and he brought the wife and kid, which is a lot of fun. There are a few gadgets to get including the hoverboots and a jet pack. There are gold bolts and RYNO plans and all that stuff. The majority of the game is structured like typical Ratchet & Clank, where you fly to a planet and go down one or two paths, but the game is much more linear than most of the titles in the series and you have to do most of the objectives in order (though you can sequence break in the first planet you get to, which is one of the reasons I think this game once had larger ambitions.) There is one planet that’s just a battle arena and one that’s more of an open world you can explore to collect things in, but with only 5 planets in total there’s just not a ton to see or do. There are only a dozen gold bolts in this game, while most of the games feature around 40, to give an idea of comparative size.

I really liked the combat in Into the Nexus, I liked the weapon upgrades, and I liked the character moments, especially between Ratchet and Clank. When I played through A Crack in Time I commented that having Ratchet and Clank separated for most of the game reduced my enjoyment of it, and it was great to see them back together in a game that’s at least structured like the mainline. The new villain characters are underdeveloped but fun, the smuggler’s back and just as shady as ever, and Talwyn’s brief appearances are welcome. One planet is mostly devoted to fan service for the series, and despite having played the games recently I loved seeing the callbacks to prior titles.

Into the Nexus definitely feels like a game that should have more to it. Only getting 4 real planets was disappointing, and flying around a simple 2D map without any ship combat or side areas was a real step back after prior games made piloting a substantial side activity. The open world area is pretty drab and feels mostly like busy work. Even the substantial linear planets (of which there are 3) feel smaller than prior worlds. But all this just made Into the Nexus feel like a delicious appetizer to me. Is it a full meal? No. If I’d been waiting 4 years for new Ratchet & Clank and got this I would be disappointed. But as a snack it’s tasty stuff.

Into the Nexus may be a short game but it doesn’t skimp in production values. This game is gorgeous, with lush areas that reminded me that the PS3 was a very capable machine for its time, and that Insomniac can be a very strong developer. If you told me it was an early PS4 game I might even believe you. The music in the game is also top notch (and not just a pop song reference that raises a lot of questions the game does not answer about whether humans exist in this galaxy) and the score actually includes what I think is a proto version of the Spider-Man 2018 theme. The voice acting is, as always, impeccable, the new and returning weapons are a lot of fun with some great upgrades, and the whole thing feels polished and goes down super easy. There’s some disappointment with the final boss battle, which is ludicrously easy, but at least it’s not frustrating.

Into the Nexus feels, to me, like a successor to Tools of Destruction. Something about the camera angle and the level design (which is much more vertical than that of Crack in Time) recalls the first game in the Future series more than the subsequent sequels, and I really like that. Nexus is too short and underdeveloped to be a great game, but I had a great time playing through it and removed from its disappointing context I feel like the criticisms I have for it didn’t really matter.

What do I like about Ratchet & Clank? The art and music, the characters and voice acting, and that sweet gameplay loop where you get a new weapon or gadget, fly to a new planet, and just jump and shoot your way through well-designed levels against fun, colorful foes. Give me a few puzzles to solve, a few collectables to find in out of the way areas, and a couple tight platforming sequences and I’m happy.

Into the Nexus made me happy.

After the disappointment I felt with A Crack in Time (which is a good game, but felt regressive to me), the mediocre slog of All 4 One and the waste of time that was Full Frontal Assault it felt really good to find a game in the series that resonated with me. I get why fans didn’t like it at the time, but removed from that context it’s an easy recommend for people who enjoyed Tools of Destruction.

I’ll probably take a break before the PS4 game, just because I’m a bit burned out, but I’m looking forward to Ratchet and Clank’s PS5 debut with renewed excitement after this. These games may be formulaic and I get why Insomniac tried to mix things up, but it’s a really great formula.

It isn’t fair for me to pass judgment on Ratchet & Clank: Full Frontal Assault because it was clearly intended as another attempt to make Ratchet & Clank multiplayer a thing. I only played the single player and the multiplayer community is long dead (I didn’t even check if the servers were up), though there is local multi if that’s your thing. Reviewing Full Frontal Assault based on its single player would be like reviewing Ryse: Son of Rome based only on the multiplayer. You don’t even know what the game really is and you definitely haven’t given it an opportunity to show you its best stuff. Nonetheless I am going to write about it because, well, I played it and I write these blogs for me.

This time the team at Insomniac seems to have taken inspiration from Brutal Legend and Sanctum (as well as the general concept of MOBAs) and made a hybrid third person shooter tower defense/RTS game, depending on the mode you’re playing. There is a single player/co-op mode with a story attached, but it’s even less consequential than the side story of All 4 One. The character stuff is also way pared down from that game, and this is the first Ratchet & Clank game I’ve played where it feels like Insomniac did not care about narrative. Even Deadlocked and All 4 One had substantial storytelling (All 4 One had almost as much story as a main line game, just not advancing the series ongoing plot) while this game’s feels cursory at best.

If the story is missing from the game, then at least the Ratchet & Clank gameplay is here, albeit in modified form. This is much more of a third person shooter than All 4 One was, with a zoomed out behind the back camera angle and dual stick controls. Ratchet feels zippy and using the hoverboots allows him to zoom around the terrain at a refreshingly fast clip. The weapons are greatest hits from prior games, but have persistent leveling across play sessions, which is a nice touch, and Ratchet can level up too, gaining health points and perks, as he progresses through the goals. The combat feels like a tighter version of Crack in Time’s, and there is some minor platforming and rail grinding to round out the Ratchet & Clank elements. It's still fun to wreck stuff with the buzz blades or make an army of bad guys dance to the Groovitron so the core shooting mechanics work fine, even if the braindead and repetitious enemies sap a lot of the fun out of the fighting. If you've ever wanted to destroy the same armored attack chopper over a dozen times then this game has you covered.

Where the game departs most from prior titles is in level design. The game takes place in relatively small arenas where you start in a base with some energy generators and two paths out into the rest of the level. In the remainder of that level are a bunch of enemies, some collectables like bolts, golden bolts, and weapon pods, and a series of objectives protected by force field generators. The gameplay loop involves going out into the level, grabbing resources and weapons, blasting force field generators until you break through to an objective, and rinsing and repeating until you unlock the final objective and can repeat the loop there. Meanwhile your base…does pretty much nothing the majority of the time. It sits there with some health and ammo pickups (you can find those in the field too) and looks pretty. On occasion, however, the game will inform you that all your base are about to belong to the enemy and unless you want to make your time you need to hustle back and defend it. There are teleporters throughout the level to take you back so it’s never a huge problem to get into a defensive position, and you can fortify the bases with turrets, barriers, and mines. That’s the only use for bolts in this game, with weapons being unlocked from pods each level.

Defending the base during the level is slightly annoying but relatively harmless, mostly serving to yank you out of your assault to rush back and blast a few waves of weaklings or one strong enemy like a tank. You need to rush back because your base defenses are, to put it mildly, a bit crap. The turrets can do a little bit of damage and the single use mines a little more, but even with a lot of them they never seem to take out even half of a wave, and they are extremely brittle and vulnerable to attack by enemies, meaning that massive bolt investments can be wiped away in seconds if you’re not babysitting them. The generators are also very vulnerable, but at least they can be repaired for money.

These issues all come to a head after you’ve activated the final objective, when the game pulls you back to base for a final series of assaults that’s much bigger than anything you’ve faced previously. It’s not unmanageable but it’s frustrating because the waves come down two separate lanes and if you’re playing solo there’s just no way to keep them both clear at the same time. This means that your defenses inevitably get hammered and by the end you have almost nothing left. This is made worse by the fact that you get very few bolts for killing enemies in this game; they’re almost all acquired from boxes in the field (especially in the earlier levels), so you can’t replace what’s been damaged. In the end I always lost one or more generators to this final attack because I just didn’t have enough firepower to keep things clear. The game rewards you for certain subgoals, including a par time that I never came close to and keeping all your generators, so I found this frustrating, even though checkpointing and respawns meant that I didn’t actually lose all my progress from the levels (which are on the long side, with even par times often exceeding half an hour.) These goals become more achievable if you grind a little bit to get your persistent weapon levels up and raise your damage output, but I had zero interest in revisiting prior levels that were boring enough the first time.

The game isn’t unplayable or broken, but it feels poorly balanced for single player. If you got more bolts from killing enemies so you could repair more effectively during the final phase, or if your defenses were more durable (or even better couldn’t be destroyed) or if the multiple pathways funneled into each other so there was a central area where you could make a stand without exposing your generators… whatever. The single player is supposed to be functional and it is, but it’s not the focus of the package. Complaining about the balancing of perfunctory single player content in a $20 (now $10) downloadable multiplayer game is pointless.

I will say that the last two single player levels do attempt to mix things up with an escort mission in level 4 (not as bad as it sounds) and a fifth level that features no base building, just an all out assault followed by a pretty good final boss battle. These levels do provide some much needed relief for the tedium, but by the time you get to them the basic loops of the game have worn out their welcome. The boss battle does mean that the game ends on something of a high note and is worth playing the final level just to experience, but it's not worth it to play the four levels you have to slog through to get there.

The multiplayer seems to have two modes. One is just the single player in co-op (where having two separate paths for the assaults makes more sense and would be much easier to deal with) and the other is more of a full blown RTS, where you go out and capture nodes to gain income and then purchase offensive units to send against the opposing player(s) etc… That’s probably where the meat of the game’s design went, and while I doubt it would have captivated me even when the game was released it kind of made sense during the beginning of the MOBA craze to try something like this.

It’s worth noting that this is yet another Ratchet and Clank game with technical problems. The framerate drops into the single digits when you’re lobbing grenades or other AOE weapons at large groups of enemies, and I had two hard locks of my PS3 during the few hours it took me to get through the campaign. Yes this is a downloadable game that retailed for $20 originally, but it’s also a Sony published game that has to patch multiple times before it will run at all, so you'd think they would have at least made it work. Nope. Then again this thing reviewed poorly for an R&C game and doesn't seem to have sold well so it's not shocking that they left the unloved single player in a bad state.

At this point Full Frontal Assault is just an old curiosity. I bought it because I wanted all the Ratchets & Clanks, and I played it because I was going through the series and it’s now or never.

As it turns out, sometimes never is the better choice.

I kind of get what they were going for with Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One. One of the strengths of the Ratchet & Clank games is the characters and their relationships and another is the arsenal, so creating a multiplayer focused shooter with cool and interesting weapons just makes sense. They did something similar at the end of the PS2 era with Ratchet Deadlocked, which managed to tweak the classic Ratchet & Clank shooter into a sort of console third person version of Unreal Tournament but with complex vehicles, and there was no reason to think they couldn't do it again. All 4 One takes a different approach, with a more traditional Ratchet & Clank set up where the titular heroes, accompanied by frenemy Captain Qwark and arch enemy Dr. Nefarious, take on a new threat to the galaxy and blast and jump their way through a lengthy campaign, destroying baddies, riding rails, collecting bolts, and upgrading their weapons along the way.

Unfortunately, while Deadlocked played pretty well and had a certain amount of charm, All 4 One fares much worse, especially in single player. The camera is locked in a sort of PS2 era God of War semi-isometric fixed position, automatically adjusting as you go through the levels, and because of this the game features a generous auto-aim system with lock on. This choice makes the gameplay both finnicky and kind of brainless. Finnicky because it can be hard to get the game to aim at the enemy or object you want when there are a lot of things on screen, and brainless because without aiming the game often boils down to keeping your distance from enemies, dodging the occasional attack, and just hammering the fire button.

The limited overhead perspective also eliminates a lot of the fun of Ratchet & Clank in exploring and looking for bolts and collectables, and greatly limits the platforming. There is some exploration and a few side paths with goodies down them, and there are some platforming sequences, but for the most part these elements have been replaced by ‘puzzles’ that you have to solve with a partner. These range from just pulling the same switch at the same time to one player using a vacuum to suck the other up and hurl them to a ledge and then pull themselves up after to, towards the end of the game, slightly more complex activities that involve activating a series of switches together to get past a barrier.

These puzzles are necessarily limited in design because of the required coordination and the game not knowing how many players will be in it at a given time. If you play solo you get an AI companion who helps during combat and also aids you in getting past these puzzle areas, but because the AI will immediately run over and do one part of the puzzle they are simplified even more for solo players. The AI will also occasionally break and fail to do what they’re supposed to, though it was less of a problem than I expected (though the AI was predictably atrocious in combat and often hurled itself gleefully to its death in the platforming sequences; which is okay because it would just respawn a little later.) The meat of the game is definitely the combat, but with the auto aiming issues it’s less engaging than in any other Ratchet & Clank game.

So with mostly brainless shooting and simplistic puzzles is there anything good about the game? Well at times it can be kind of relaxing and mindless fun, just blasting enemies as you walk through the various environments. Some of those environments are pretty interesting to look at, so the game has that going for it. There’s a full story here, and lots of cut scenes and radio dialogue, and those are alright, even if the character barks of “it’s too far to jump” and “good job, Ratchet” get grating pretty soon into the game. The game does mix things up in a few sequences, including some basic rail grinding, some turret sequences, a couple jet pack levels, a rafting level, and a truly dire trip through an asteroid field in a rocket ship that thankfully ends after about five minutes. None of this stuff is great but it does break up the action some, and most of the game offers some mild entertainment. It’s the kind of game you can switch on if you can’t sleep and just sort of blast through, not thinking too much or testing your reflexes, but doing just enough to not be bored.

Unfortunately this pleasantly mindless progression falls apart in the back quarter of the game, where the developers decided to ramp up the difficulty and give the players a bit of a challenge before the game comes to an end. This doesn’t make these segments hard; I never had to retry any checkpoint more than a couple times, but it does make them frustrating. Bosses are never fun in All 4 One, but in the late game there are so many bullet sponges that I often found myself running out of ammo for the useful weapons with no way to replenish. This meant I either had to switch to one of the less useful weapons (generally those with limited range) or just jump around and let the AI partner do all the work. There are also some sequences that are just ridiculous, like one where you fight on an ice floe that’s falling apart and end up on a tiny little strip of ice while the bad guys rain down fire that you have no reasonable way to avoid, and you’re probably out of ammo (a situation that isn’t helped by the bad aiming.) If you alternate deaths with your AI partner and just heal or respawn each other you can cheese your way through these sequences, but they’re not fun. In general the bullet sponginess of the late game enemies really saps the fun of the game. It’s just not enjoyable to chip away at bad guys with what are supposed to be powerful Ratchet & Clank guns. The guns themselves are all things we’ve seen before in this game and others, including the returning Mr. Zurkon drone who has some of his same voice lines from Crack in Time (though some new material as well) and a beam that turns enemies into animals. Each gun has three upgrades, with the last one making the gun “elite” and granting it some extra ability, like turning your basic pistol into a three shot blaster or adding cluster grenades to your mortar launcher, but the only one that feels meaningful is the ammo increase, and because of the sponginess of late game enemies the weapons all feel underpowered. The intended way to play is to focus your fire on one enemy with the same gun, which causes a circle to appear over the enemy and built to an explosion that causes some additional effect, like setting enemies on fire or freezing baddies, but some late game grunts require multiple “bursts” to take down so even that mechanic feels half baked.

It is also worth noting that the game’s performance is mediocre most of the time, and the frame rate can really tank in later areas, dropping to what seems like 10 frames a second at times. Because the game doesn’t require much precision that never makes it unplayable, but coupled with the loose controls and boring gameplay it makes it feel like an inferior product rather than a second party Sony game from a studio like Insomniac. In many ways it resembles an upscale of a mediocre PS2 game, with mechanics and structure that was already obsolete by its 2011 release date, when there was much better stuff available. It reminded me of random games I’d pull out of a bargain bin in 2004 and maybe have some fun with, but quickly move on from (often before the end; though I did finish this, unlike the vast majority of players since the beat the game trophy has a 17.1 percent attainment.)

All 4 One was probably at its best as a local co-op game for tweens. It’s a little too tough and ‘edgy’ for very young kids, and doesn’t have anything for older teens, but I could see it being enjoyable for a couple siblings in the 8-12 age range who just want something to play together and might enjoy the cartoony presentation and story. As a solo experience for an adult it has nothing to offer anyone but the hardest of hard core Ratchet & Clank fans, all of whom have already played it. I’m going through all the R&C games I own on the PS3 right now and I knew this would likely be the toughest slog to get through, so I’m glad to be done with it, and I can’t say I didn’t enjoy it at all. There were some points, especially during the middle of the game, when it was pleasant enough and even engaging. But it’s a decade-old game that is best off forgotten at this point.

I understand why Insomniac thought this game made sense as a product but it never came together. There were too many compromises, from the camera to the multiplayer design that also had to accommodate single players to the stripping away of much of what makes Ratchet & Clank fun. Deadlocked was a much better experiment that ironically feels newer, even though that actually was a PS2 game. Sometimes games just don’t come together.

Criticizing old games is hard. Many of the frustrations and issues they have were much less noticeable in the time they were made, and it’s easy to lose track of how much game design and technology have advanced in the last decade when you’re looking at a game like Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack In Time, which still has nice graphics and plays more or less like a modern game most of the time. It’s easy to get annoyed by issues like not being able to pause cut scenes (WHY did it take so long for this to become somewhat standard?) or not having subtitles for in-game dialog even though the sound mixing is bad, without fully acknowledging that those issues were very common at the time. I am, however, better equipped than most to peer through the mists of time and see the game in something like it’s original context. I still play the PS3 fairly regularly and I even played much of the Ratchet & Clank series last year, stopping before Crack in Time because I was starting to feel burned out. I owned a PS3 when the game was released and was aware of the discourse around it and how it was received. I think I understand enough about games of this era to give an honest assessment, and despite the fact that Giant Bomb’s Vinny Caravella rated the game 5/5 and seems to have loved it, I personally think that Crack in Time feels unfinished and like a step back for the series, especially after Tools of Destruction (Quest for Booty being a smaller downloadable game with a different focus.) I don’t think it’s a bad game by any stretch, but it feels stripped back in a lot of ways, and closer the PS2 iterations of the duo than the Tools of Destruction version.

R&C:CIT starts immediately after the end of Quest for Booty, with Ratchet & Clank still separated and Ratchet searching for his friend while Clank is being held captive by Dr. Nefarious in a place called “The Great Clock.” The game alternates between the two characters, with Ratchet’s sections (the majority of the game) playing like a traditional Ratchet & Clank game while Clank’s segments are linear platforming levels with a little bit of combat and the added wrinkle of Clank’s new time powers, which mostly amount to being able to reflect shots back at enemies and use a “time bomb” to hold moving platforms in place. Ratchet jumps and guns his way across alien worlds, and also zooms around some 2D sections of space in his fighter ship blasting enemies, while Clank focuses on platforming and some puzzle solving. The puzzles primarily take the form of door opening puzzles where Clank must record versions of himself doing various actions and play them back so they can work together in a synchronized fashion to flip switches and open doors. These are clever enough, but I found them boring because of the number of times you need to repeat actions as you build new iterations of each time clone’s activities and I really would have appreciated the ability to jump in mid-recording instead of having to start over from scratch each time.

If the Clank sections of the gameplay fall flat, the Ratchet segments are…fine. I’ve played through 4 main games in this series and two spin offs (Quest for Booty and Deadlocked) previously so at this point I know the controls and how the game plays pretty well. There’s nothing wrong with this particular version, but the level design seems to have taken a step back both aesthetically and in terms of gameplay. Future Tools of Destruction felt like a whole new generation of Ratchet & Clank, with levels that felt dynamic and exciting. From teeming cities to vicious pirate hideouts everything was full of character and a real sense of place. CIT is much more like the PS2 games in level design, except it strips out a lot of elements from those games (like swimming and mini-games like hoverboard racing or mining) and doesn’t replace them with anything. There are only 4 gadgets for environmental obstacles and they are pretty boring. The environments all feel linear and simplistic, even though they look good. Even the rail grinding, which used to be intense and complicated, is stripped back and feels perfunctory.

Of course it’s not all bad. Those signature creative Ratchet & Clank weapons are still there, and while the best of these come from prior games (and none are quite as wacky as the morphing rays) they’re still fun to use. Weapon experience and transformations carry over from the last game (as does the smart system of Ratchet gaining experience from taking damage and upgrading his health that way) and you can also collect mods for 3 specific weapons that lets you add stuff like automatic fire or incineration damage, but the menus are too clunky to switch that stuff up too often. It’s all fine stuff.

Also fine is the ship stuff. Instead of flying from planet to planet through a menu you now explore a bunch of different sectors of the galaxy and you can do things like run short sidequests for NPCs (like fetching them materials to fix their ships) or explore small moons that might contain some collectables and a platforming or combat challenge, and engage in ship to ship combat, which is now on a 2D plane and feels stripped back from prior releases. This is all filler but it’s mostly harmless filler and I enjoyed some of the platforming and combat challenges well enough. There’s also a combat arena with a variety of rewards as there have been in prior games. It’s very standard Ratchet & Clank.

The game keeps Ratchet & Clank apart far longer than I expected and I think it suffers greatly for it. Ratchet & Clank are a duo for a reason and each character is built to compliment the other, not so much in terms of mechanics (Ratchet quickly gets equipment to replace Clank’s hovering function) but in terms of rapport. Ratchet meets up with a bunch of characters on his quest and none of them have Clank’s acerbic wit or fussiness, making Ratchet feel a little bit bland as a hero. For his part Clank is accompanied by a caretaker of the clock who knows quite a bit about his past, and he is too busy learning new information and trying to figure out his origin to bother being sarcastic. This all makes for a boring and forgettable story, and while Ratchet & Clank has never been a great story series it did at least have banter going for it. Not anymore.

In addition to having a story that didn’t hit for me even though the voice acting was quite good, this Ratchet & Clank game felt downright unfinished in spots, despite being a big budget first party release. In addition to a general bugginess that I’m not used to in Insomniac games (especially ones that have had a decade to be patched) there are obvious chunks of this game missing. At one point Ratchet, Clank, and Captain Qwark discuss a daring mission that involves Clank sneaking into some vents so he can get some information about Dr. Nefarious. In any other Ratchet & Clank game this would lead to a Clank level where you navigate the little guy through a bunch of security systems in the vent, but here it just leads to a simple cut scene. Similar situations abound and there were times when cut scenes ended so abruptly that I wondered whether my digital copy was somehow corrupted or if I’d hit a button to skip or something. A late cut scene includes several seconds of voice over played over a totally black screen, which is a clear indicator that they just ran out of time or budget to animate what they originally intended. For what it’s worth the cinematics that do exist in the game are gorgeous and still impressive all those years later, so there was definitely talent and budget behind the game, which are undermined by the cut corners.

The cut sequences are one thing, but the game also has a bunch of glitches. There are collision detection problems that had me plummeting to my death when I shouldn’t have, contextual button prompts that will have you firing off a shot instead of using the swing shot (and thus also plummeting to your death) and at least two cases where a scripting era caused me to have to either die or reload a save because a door that was supposed to open wouldn’t. In one case I spent 15 minutes wandering around trying to figure out where to go while thinking “is this a scripting error? Is that door supposed to open?” I finally reloaded my save, spent 15 more minutes fighting back to that place, and yes, it was a scripting error and I lost half an hour to it. Not the biggest thing in the world but not the smallest, and that’s 10 years after release on a fully patched copy.

Look, I get that nobody really cares about my thoughts on a decade old Ratchet & Clank game that is only available on hardware 2 generations out of date. The truth is that I got the game for $15 and it had some enjoyable aspects even if it was a disappointment. It’s still Ratchet & Clank and I still like that formula. I was just surprised at the lack of memorable locations and characters, all the re-used assets and planets, the simplistic puzzles and the lack of polish, especially because the game reviewed quite well. I kind of get that because if you can get past the lack of polish and other issues there’s still a lot of fun to be had here, and at a time when 3D platformers were starting to feel like an endangered species. They’re not anymore, and in the cold light of 2021 A Crack in Time’s cracks have really started to show. The last game in the Ratchet & Clank Future sub series feels like it takes a step back into the past, and not in a good way.

Bowser’s Fury is the new add on for the Switch re-release of Super Mario 3D World. The question of what it is from a mechanical standpoint isn’t very complicated. It’s a remix of Super Mario 3D World assets (with some new stuff added, and controls and a camera that are much closer to Mario Odyssey’s) into a vast open world lake level, where Mario searches out “cat shines” in order to fight Bowser, who has been corrupted by some kind of sludge into a giant dark form, that’s sort of a mix between Godzilla, Bowser, and Ganon. The shines are spread out across islands on the lake and are accessed through standard Mario challenges ranging from getting to a specific point where a shine is to fighting a boss to collecting blue coins in a specified time limit to completing a time trial race course on back of Plessie, Mario’s giant Loch Ness Monster friend, who also lurks around in the water and is used to travel from island to island in the lake.

Mario is accompanied on this adventure by Bowser Jr., who also explains the threadbare story, and mainly serves to hold power ups, meaning that Mario, for the first time I can remember in a platformer, has a substantial and immediately accessible inventory. `Just like in the main 3D World game when you collect a powerup that replaces your current one the old powerup goes into inventory, except here you can hold up to 5 of each type, meaning you can have an inventory of dozens of powerups. Because there are no lives in this mode you get a new powerup into inventory with every 100 coins, and you will naturally have quite a few stored up by the end of the ~5 hour adventure. Bowser Jr. can also kill enemies (and you can select how often he does this) and paint over specific points that you indicate with a gyro, often giving you a powerup for your trouble but sometimes doing something more substantial like opening a secret pipe. While Bowser Jr. is AI controlled by default a second player can take control of him, though he definitely serves a secondary role to Mario, especially in the massive boss fights.

And yes, there are massive boss fights. After collecting a certain number of shines Mario can use a “giga bell” to transform into a giant Super Saiyan Cat Mario and battle Bowser across the open world, which mostly consists of swiping at him with your claws or stomping on his belly after he launches a falling shell attack. These battles resemble Kaiju battles and you can use the islands for cover from Bowser’s projectiles and beams, waiting for him to expose himself. It’s a fascinating and unprecedented use of a Mario open world level and even though the battles are relatively simple and easy (especially because you can take 3 hits and there are new cat bell powerups constantly respawning) they are a lot of fun.

When you’re not fighting Bowser he mostly lurks in the center of the lake, much like Gannon, but every 5-15 minutes or so he emerges to wreak havoc, turning the normally sunny environment dark and rainy and dropping dark shards into the levels, changing their geometry. He also blasts at Mario with flame drops and a giant beam, the latter of which is the only way to destroy fury blocks, scattered throughout the island, each group of them hiding another cat shine. Bowser can be tamed either by waiting him out, collecting a cat shine, or beating him in a kaiju battle, though the last option is only accessible if you have enough cat shines for the next tier, and defeating him will unlock a new set of islands to explore (meaning you only really get 4-5 kaiju battles between the beginning and the credits, though they do evolve in complexity as they go.)

All this combines into something unique in the history of Mario. It’s kind of like a small scale Zelda game (minus the narrative, complex inventory, and deeper puzzles) set in the Mario universe and was clearly inspired by Breath of the Wild. From Bowser lurking at the center of the map waiting to be challenged like Gannon in that game, to the fury moments that resemble BOTW’s blood moons, to the fact that Mario can collect and hold a large inventory of items (and Plessie functions like an ever available Epona) this is the Mario and Zelda fusion we never knew we wanted. The challenges are very Mario (each of the islands is like a small version of a Mario 64 level in its design, complete with 5 unique cat shines collected through varied goals and objectives that evolve as you progress, replacing enemies and obstacles with new versions like how Mario 64 remixed its levels depending on the star you were after) but the structure is way more like Hyrule and the ability to explore is intoxicating.

Bowser’s Fury is fantastic. I finished it in a single day, immediately after beating Super Mario 3D World, and as good as that Wii U classic is I liked Bowser’s Fury way more. The open world exploration, the clever remixing of items, the complete freedom of camera movement and choice of what to do, those are my favorite things in Mario games and Bowser’s Fury distils them into one giant playground. It doesn’t have the boundless creativity of Odyssey and it’s much smaller in scope, but it’s also more cohesive and it’s by far the biggest Mario map ever created. The ability to just get on Plessie and ride wherever you want is intoxicating, and the fact that you get to carry your powerups with you and choose whatever you want for a given situation makes for a more dynamic approach to the game, since you can climb something as cat Mario, switch to tanookie Mario to glide down, switch to fire Mario to wipe out some enemies and then switch to boomerang Mario to grab and item (there are no twin cherries in the game for obvious reasons.) Even though the assets are mostly from 3D World it feels fresher and newer than I could possibly have imagined because of these structural changes, and I really wish that it were 3-4 times as large as its already impressive size.

But its size brings up what I think the more interesting question is about this game. What….IS it?

It’s not DLC, because it’s not separately available. It’s not an expansion, because it isn’t related to Super Mario 3D World at all except for borrowing assets and being on the same cart. It doesn’t even play like that game. It’s sort of its own title, but Nintendo isn’t treating it that way.

Does this count as a Mario game? Would it be eligible for Game of the Year (I could easily see it making my top 10.)? Should it be included separately on listings of the series? It’s certainly big enough to be its own game. There’s at least as much content here as in something like Astro’s Playroom. If I bought it for $20 I would be thrilled with the purchase, and even for $30 I would be satisfied. But it’s not separately available, even though it should be, since the biggest Mario fans probably owned Wii Us and purchased 3D World back in the day and shouldn’t have to rebuy it.

The closest analog I can think of is something like Star Fox Guard, but that game was available separately, and was far less substantial than this one.

Bowser's Fury doesn't even have its own entry on Giant Bomb's Wiki. It's that hard to categorize!

I’m also fascinated as to how and why Nintendo conceived of this thing. Was it originally intended as its own game but they decided that the prototype wasn’t good enough to go ahead with as a full title but worth polishing as a smaller release? I could easily see that happening, except for the fact that Bowser’s Fury is built from 3D World assets, which seems to suggest that it was made for this particular package. If that’s the case….why? Nintendo’s other rereleases of Wii U games have included small extras, but nothing nearly as big as this. A new mode here, a new character there, but not a whole separate adventure of their flagship character. Look at New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe and its tiny additions and then look at this thing. And 3D World was already one of the best Wii U games. Why would Nintendo bother making a whole new game just to sell a game that was already going to sell well?

I feel like there has to be a story here. Either the team was just prototyping using old assets and they decided their prototype was so good they should polish and release it, or they started developing this as an independent game and then decided it wasn’t good enough for its own release (very wrong) but was good enough for people to play it, or…something. It’s just such a weird thing to exist, and an even weirder thing to package with 3D World, which is a totally different type of Mario game.

Whatever it is I hope that some of the elements of Bowser’s Fury are incorporated into newer Mario games. Just as Odyssey freshened up the series with its capture mechanics and wildly creative worlds, the structure of Bowser’s Fury allows for an experience that’s definitely still Mario but doesn’t just repeat older beats that we’ve all played to death at this point. The game is far from perfect, with serious frame rate issues and a lot of camera problems during the kaiju battles, but it is one of my favorite gaming experiences in recent memory and, for me, a reminder that even though I don’t play my Switch very much I usually have a fantastic time when I do.