Ratchet & Clank Collection

First off, this is a review of the HD collection and not the games themselves. I just want to say upfront that:

• All three of these games are amazing and worth playing for just about anybody.
• Currently, none of these games work properly on a freely available PS2 emulator, so there is no way to play your (legal, naturally) PS2 copies in HD.

So unless you're happy with a blurry, 480i mess this HD collection is the only choice you've got. And that's a shame, because it's a very disappointing port job by a studio called Idol Minds. I only bring them up because another studio, Blue Point Games, is responsible for the near-flawless HD remasters of the Metal Gear Solid, Ico, and God of War. I'm sure Idol Minds are competent developers, but it feels like Ratchet got shafted with a lack of care in comparison despite being a similarly big-name Sony franchise. The games all play just fine, so that's nothing to be concerned about. Additionally, it seems that all of the textures and HUD elements have been recreated in a way that closely resembles the original, but are more suited for 1080p. However, there are a bunch of new aesthetic bugs and compromises that sour things somewhat.

First are the usual, much more understandable HD upgrade issues: None of the FMVs have been rerendered, so they are fuzzy, washed out, and stuck in 4:3. The draw distance has been pushed way back, but this leads to seeing some ugly geometry out in the distance that was meant to be obscured by fog. In-engine cutscenes are 16:9, but horizontally squashed to avoid seeing characters bugging out on the previously-unseen edges of the frame.

Like I said, these are understandable consequences of porting a 4:3, 640x480 game into a 16:9, 1920x1080 environment. Those FMVs, the distance geometry, the intended-for-4:3 cutscenes, those were all present in the original games, it's just that the porting process makes them visible. What I'm less okay with are the many visual bugs that were not present in the originals. For example, whenever Ratchet has a helmet on it does not get properly squished during those in-engine cutscenes making it awkwardly placed on his head in a distracting way [note: during gameplay the helmets are fine] and whenever a character appears on a television screen they are way smaller than they are supposed to be. The most pervasive new bug is how alpha textures are now, for the most part, completely busted. Basically any flat texture or particle now has a cool semi-transparent rectangle around it, even if its supposed to be a circle. Also because of these transparency issues, a major character in Ratchet & Clank 2 that wears bifocals is now wearing blacked-out bifocal shades like a cool Benjamin Franklin.

There are worse issues, too. Music will loop incorrectly with an awkward skip. In one level in Ratchet 2 the music would consistently stop playing altogether. Also in Ratchet 2 there's a level where you're following a robot giving a tour of a rocket facility. He's meant to stop at each rocket and give a little speech before moving onto the next one, but instead he stops for a second, says nothing, and immediately heads to the next rocket. There are occasional framerate dumps when a huge number of objects are onscreen. These drops were either nonexistent or much less severe in the PS2 versions, but they do only last for about a second before going back to 60fps. It shouldn't happen, but it's something that can be dealt with.

And that's the HD Collection in a nutshell. All of these bugs are easy to begrudgingly overlook as they rarely affect the, again, stellar gameplay and are hard to notice in the middle of playing. It's certainly not Silent Hill HD Collection levels of crap, but it's a real shame nonetheless. I get it, Idol Minds. They gave you a tight deadline to port three games, and you knew that if you tried to fix all of the aesthetic bugs it might introduce even worse ones. But it's still evident that multiple people, be they developers or executives, looked at all of this and went, "Eh, good enough." No. It's not. And this is not even close to the standards set by other, better HD collections. But it's, unfortunately, the only option you've got if you want to play these games at 1080p.

I want to send a special shout-out to the collection's front end for being a nice pile of shit, as well. It takes forever to get through all the logos and load the damn thing-- at least a minute and a half. Once the menu appears it's another few seconds of loading a demo reel FMV before you can hop into a game. After this, you can cycle through all three games, but you can only cycle forward. If you're on Ratchet 1 and press right you go to Ratchet 2. If you want to go back to Ratchet 1 you have to press right to Ratchet 3, then press right again to Credits, then right again to Ratchet 1. There are two arrows on the screen, right and left, but pressing left does not cycle backwards. Instead it's a shortcut to view the credits. So it's really really easy, after a long time spent mindlessly staring at logos, to mash into the wrong game. At that point you have to quit all the way out and sit through the logos again. It's like a poorly conceived DVD menu from 1999. They sell each game in this collection on the PSN individually. So you can buy Ratchet & Clank HD, Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando HD, and Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal HD individually and select them from the PS3's OS. Of course, this might end up costing you five extra dollars or so. This extra five dollars is worth it in order to not have to deal with the stupid frontend.