Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 381: Ratchet & Clank

Episode Date: June 7, 2021

By patron request, Jeremy Parish and Stuart Gipp talk about the full span of Ratchet & Clank's storied history alongside said patron (Bill Nielsen). Thrill to intergalactic escapades! Marvel at sequels! Scintillate at Dr. Seuss conspiracy theories! Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network. To hear more great shows or to learn how you could become part of our consortium of independently owned podcasts, check out Greenlit Podcasts.com. This weekend, Retronauts, we go commando up your arsenal. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronauts. I believe the number looking at me in the face right here is 378, although, as always, that is, subject to change at a whim and the vagaries of time. Hi, I'm Jeremy Parrish, very vague, very whimsical, talking about video games this week here on Retronauts. and this episode is a patron request, once again, coming from our friend and supporter Bill Nielsen. Bill, what's up? Hey, Jeremy, thanks for having me back, and I would make a butt-based pun here, but I think it'd be beneath me.

But fortunately, for terrible puns and things of that nature, bad jokes, not bad jokes, but offensive, offensive humor. We have someone, we've flown in someone from the UK to. to make the potty humor for us. Introduce yourself. Oh, hello. I'm Stuart Gip, and I invested in the pocket crotchatizer. What is the pocket crotchatizer?

If you've played Ratchet and Clank 3, it's the thing that the writers think is the funniest thing ever, and it comes up by every other cutscene. It's just some ill-defined vague device that does something to your crotch. I don't know what it is. Oh, so it's not a real thing. been a while since I've traveled by airplanes. So I was thinking maybe that's like something in the sharper image catalog or something. I mean, to be honest, it probably is a little thing. I just,

I just don't mess with those circles, you know. Right. All right. Anyway, just to clarify, Bill, I was, or Stewart, I was not saying that your jokes are bad, just that you're not afraid to go blue. Oh, no, no, no, please. To dive into tastelessness. They're absolutely awful. It's fine. Okay. Well, as long as we're all on the same page then. But, yeah, it does seem appropriate to have us altogether because... Why does it seem appropriate? Well, let's see, because I'm hosting, and it was a request from Bill. And I guess because you, Stuart, play a lot of games that have furry characters in them or mascot-type characters. You nearly made me sound like a bit of a degenerate just there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, okay. So how would you, how would you describe your tastes in video games and your, your attraction? Wow. Wow, like everything just paints the wrong picture here. There's no way to make this work. Okay. I want to put this straight up. I want to make this clear up front. I've got no problem with furries. And I'm just not attracted to ratchet or clank, okay? Right. No, no, I'm not. What about Calwyn or Sasha? you know what? Let's talk about this later. It's fine. It's not a big deal right now.

Stewart plays a lot of mascot-based games. That's what I'm trying to say. Yes, I do. This game was right up my street. I was about to say something awful just then. Then I remember that all these games have awful, awful names, so it's not going to be a problem. Yeah, I mean, you can tell when a game's going to be kind of underwhelming because they don't give it a tawdry name, like deadlocked. No one like deadlocked. And that's because they called it deadlocked. They'd called it like... I've taken the liberty of coming up with sexual and random names for all the games that don't have them. What is your ideal name for deadlocked? Well, I called it Ratchett and Clank Hot Under the Collar. Okay.

That's not that, that's not that, Todry. Well, I originally thought of cuffs and collars, and I was like, is that sexual? I don't know if that's sexual. I don't think it is. But I think Hot Under the Collar is the best I can do, to be honest. I mean, anything else, it would just be a bunch of swearing. You know, I guess maybe, like, ratchet and clank, like, lock-blocked. Would that work?

That's a good, yeah, that's pretty good. Yeah, yeah. Okay, all right, all right. All right. But, you know, I don't want us to be the whole podcast, just like the first hour and a half, and then we can talk about the games, okay? Right, yeah. So, we'll make the dirty jokes up front.

Yeah. So, no, let me ask where each of you sort of entered into the series. Like, why, besides my having asked you here, Stuart, Why, you know, are you on a Ratchit and Clink podcast? Like, how long have you been playing these games? And what's the appeal for you? I bought the first one because I went in, I remember this surprisingly vividly. I went into Game, which is the name of our game shop, very creative, to buy Marvel versus

Capcom 2. And it wasn't out. And I had all the money in my hand. So I just bought Ratchet and Clank anyway, because I'm an idiot. And turns out it's really good. I really enjoyed it. So basically I just picked up the sequel sort of as they came out sort of secondhand and the PS2 games, the first four, apart from maybe deadlocked. I feel like they just kind of get better and better as they go on.

I mean, you know, opinions differ on those, but I've always kind of liked it. If anything, it's the PS3 ones where I feel like they start to go off the boil a bit, but we'll get to all that. And how about you, Bill? For the longest time, the Ratchet and Clank series was like, oh, wow, they just make a lot of those, don't they? because I had a GameCube and then I had a 360, but then I got the PS4 and just kind of looking around

for something to play. I picked up the Ratchet and Clank game from like 2017, and I was like, wow, this is great. It's like got really beautiful graphics and everything blows up real nice. And there was something very tactilely stimulating about bashing a box

and like having all the lug nuts and stuff like vortex towards you. I was like, man, this is great. and at that time I did have a PS3 I'd picked up on like Craigslist so I was like oh well there's all these games you can play on the PS3 why don't we go with those

and so I started with like the the PS3 ones like Tools of Destruction and then worked forward from there I was like oh these are all still pretty good why don't we go try out the PS2 games and I was like hmm okay I think we've reached the threshold let's stick with the PS3 games but it was still you know education obviously like where the series

it started from. All right. So kind of conflicting approaches and, or contrasting, I would say, approaches and opinions for you, too. Whereas Stewart came in at the beginning of the PS2 era and feels like maybe the series might have dropped off after PS2. You came in and played sort of backward from PS4 and feel like, you know, looking actually chronologically, not in the order you played, but in chronological release order, the games get better. So that's interesting. wherever you start from, that's the best one. There you go. Whichever one you fall in love with, whichever one you play when you're nine, yeah.

As for myself, I admit that this is a series that is kind of a blind spot in my video game ography, my game history. It's a series I've always meant to spend some time with and never really have. And, you know, reading through retrospectives and interviews and watching videos and so forth for, to prep for this, prep for this podcast, just, you know, kind of reinforce the fact that, yeah, I really want to play these sometime. It's just who actually has time for video games. Gosh. So, yeah, like, it's a very appealing game. And, you know, I kind of want to start by talking about the developers first.

I mean, we can call Ratchet and Clink a franchise, and technically it is. But, you know, franchise means it's, it has a, you know, there's lots of people who kind of have an ownership stake in it. Like, when you talk about game franchises, it basically means someone starts the series and then, you know, kind of licenses it out to someone else or, you know, farms it out to someone else. So like when you look at the Mario franchise, that's definitely a franchise because you've had all kinds of people making Mario spinoffs, Camelot and Hal and whoever else. Whereas with Ratchet and Clank, really, there's only, there have only been a couple of games, a couple of the portable games that were not developed by Insomniac games, the company that created Ratchet and Clink in the first place. So it really is more of a like a series, you know, that kind of stayed in-house and has had sort of the same creative leads behind it for nearly 20 years, which is very, very unusual in video gaming, especially with big franchises like this. And, you know, even for Insomniac, because back in the 90s, I think they kind of showed up on the radar for most people when they put together the Spire of the Dragon games. And we can talk about those a little bit, but those were really, really impressive for the time. and really, you know, we're like kind of a convincing,

finally, Sony had some games on PlayStation that were like, hey, this is, you know, of the caliber of this style of game that you'd find on N64, which had been sorely lacking to that point on PlayStation. So, you know, Insomniac really caught people's attention, but Universal owned the Spiro name and, you know, the property. So after Insomniac made like three of those games, they kind of moved along and Universal was like,

let's just give it to anyone. And so you have lots of Spiro games from lots of studios, some good, some not. Now Spiro is just a Skylander. He's a minor character in a defunct sub-franchise, I guess. I don't know. Oh, no, they did the remix, and they were pretty popular, the Reignited Trilogy. Yes. Yeah, they might get another chance with Spiro.

I hope so. All right. Well, there you go. But that is definitely a franchise, because Insomniac was only at the wheel for the first three games. and there have been far more than three games with Spiro. But Ratchet and Clink is really their baby. And, you know, of all the games they've made, and they've made some pretty high-profile games of late,

Ratchet is kind of the one that they keep coming back to. And even though it's been like five years since the last game, this is actually, this episode is actually coincidentally timed for the release of a new game called Rifts in Time, I believe. Rift Apart. A Rift Apart. Okay. Yeah.

Which is not a, that's not smutty at all. What kind of, what kind of subtitle is that? No, I wasn't sure if I'd come up with an alternate for that one. No, I haven't. I haven't been able to think of one. See, that, the thing is, that's good, but there is actually a weapon called the rip you a new one. No, rift you a new one. Oh, I see.

Okay. Yeah. I don't know. I'm just spitball here. As we go through, I'll try and think of a worse one. Okay. Whatever we do, we just have to keep them away from the, you know, dummy thick or cheeks clapping Lexicon. They cannot know about that.

Okay, yes. They're not allowed to know about that. Insomniac must never learn about memes. So, yeah, I would like to talk a little bit about insomniac first, because I feel like they are kind of this plucky little studio once upon a time that basically got their start in publishing and development just on sheer chutzpah. Like, they just, they had nothing. And they were like, we're going to go out and make some video games and they somehow, somehow managed to go, like a two-person studio with a little demo for PlayStation and 3DO was like, hey, Universal's, you know, you're this massive film and

entertainment company. Why didn't you publish our game? And Universal was like, yeah, you should make three games for us. That's, that's bonkers. Like, who, you could not do that in this day and age. There's, there's no way, like, somebody, like a two-person studio with nothing under their belt would go to like Disney and say, hey, look at us. We have an idea and we have a demo and you should give us a three game deal. It's always nice to think about those like basic roots for like them and naughty dog, like making, you know, a way of the warrior from naughty dogs to like making this game with all their friends as like the fighters. And like now they're all both these monolithic companies. It's like, oh, you can still see in the near distance. Oh, they were a little

once. They were like us once. Yeah, we just recently, I don't know, a few months back, did a Spiro the, they all kind of blur together, Crash Bandicoot, a retrospective episode and talked a lot about the origins of naughty dog and how they also just got by on sheer pluck and chutzpah. So a lot of, a lot of strong fricatives. There are lots of chutzpah. But yeah, Noddy Dog and Insomniac, I feel are kind of, or two of the three, um, Solwart Sony second-party publishers, basically. I don't know if they're entirely exclusive, but pretty much, along with Sucker Punch,

kind of started out in the PS1, PS2 era, basically the early 2000s, late 90s, making games for PlayStation, impress people with the quality of the work they did, and somehow have managed not to be absorbed or dissolved or splintered apart, and, you know, have been behind some of the biggest games, for the PlayStation brand in the past couple of years.

I mean, Sucker Punch just published Ghosts of Tsushima. Insomniac, of course, is behind the Spider-Man games. Miles Morales just came out on PS5. And Nottie Dog, obviously, is behind The Last of Us. And already doing a reboot on that one. It's been 10 years. Let's start over. Just like Spider-Ral.

That's more of a Spider-Man thing, really. I want to add very quickly. I think that Sony did actually buy Insomniac a couple of years ago. Oh, yeah? I think they own them stock and barrel, which means no more sunset overdrive, which is a good outcome for basically everyone. Okay, I am mistaken about Insomniac then. But in any case, those are kind of like the three big Western studios

that are sort of their, have been their long-term, like 20 years plus partners and just, you know, reliable hitmakers for Sony. So yeah, did, did either of you ever play? Oh, so yeah, did either of you ever play Insomniac's very first game, a PlayStation first-person shooter called Disruptor? No, never, never. Possibly extremely briefly, but not it made an impression on me or anything.

Well, that is in keeping with that game's fortunes. Apparently, it was a, I did not play it either, but apparently it was an extremely good FPS, really kind of, you know, did cool things early on with PlayStation Tech and was published by Universal

and got great reviews, and then Universal was like marketing, what's that? And went absolutely nowhere. So basically that kind of put them out, but they were still tied to Universal for two more games and were kind of embedded into the PlayStation ecosystem. And evidently, based on an interview with Ted Price, who is the head of Insomniac and was the guy who started the company back in the mid-90s, 25 years ago, he was talking to

Mark Surny, who of course is like the technology guru at Sony. And Cernie was like, you know, we don't have any really convincing family-oriented 3D platformers. Like half of all the games on Nintendo 64 are those. And we have nothing. So maybe you guys could do one of those for us. And that's where we got Spire of the Dragon, which was basically a combination of 3D platforming, collectathons, more kind of open flying mechanics, at least a lot of gliding. and featured the voice of the Taco Bell Chihuahua and music by the drummer from the police,

which is a really strange mix, but it was really good. A real technical showcase for PS1. I don't know if you two are familiar with the original Spyro. I love that game. I'm all my favorite PS1 games. All right. Tell us a little bit about why it's so good, because it is really good.

Okay, well, I'm doing one of my sort of legit hot takes in a way, because basically what I love about Spire 1 personally is the fact that it's just kind of laid back. There is challenge in there, but it basically drops you in a world, and all there is to do is collect jams and flame enemies. There's no learning new skills, there's no swimming, there's no missions, there's no hockey. Like, there isn't the second one. It's all just platforming and exploring and searching.

There are a few flight levels, which is the closest thing it gets to being a gimmicky game. But with that sort of Stuart Copeland soundtrack, which is just fantastic, plus the relative simplicity of the game, I find it's one of the easiest PS1 games to go back to because so many of them I feel now have fussy controls that aren't quite as good as they need to be for what they're trying to do. Spiro is so simple, it's just charge, jump, flame,

and everything pivots around that. You never, like I said, you never level up, you never learn anything new, you never go back to old levels with new skills. You can do everything the first time you go into a level, but you probably won't be able to because it's pretty well designed. Great game. Fantastic. Love it.

Yeah, I don't think that's a hot take at all. I think that's spot on. I really, like you said, it's a relaxing game or chill. And that, like to me, that perfectly defines it. It is, it is a really sort of easygoing take on the platformer. And the soundtrack is a big part of that. Like, Stuart Copeland didn't, you know, go in with trumpets blaring and, you know, hard rock or anything like that. it is this really kind of low, low, low, not low energy, but sort of low key soundtrack. Just very chill has kind of like a nice groove to it. You know, obviously good percussion, like very sort of rhythm oriented, but it just isn't really in your face.

And I feel like that's like the most in your face thing about the game is the fact that you know, the main character is voiced by the Taco Bell Chihuahua, which is a very sort of late 90s thing. Like, that's the most dated thing about it. But besides that, like, it really did push the PS1 in a lot of ways and did things that you really didn't see happening on N64 with this style of game. Like, really long draw distances, really huge skyboxes. And actual, you know, like actual skyboxes, like not just, you know, a pixel graphic floating around eternally in the sky. But, you know, they actually built these spaces, which, again, you know, you.

just didn't see back then. So, yeah, like, it did kind of feel like Spiro came out of nowhere, but I kind of feel that's how everyone was back then. Like, you know, new studios were just kind of showing up out of the either and being like, hey, check it out. We're going to blow your mind with like eyeball melting graphics. And you've never heard of us, but look at this thing we did. It was a great era. It was probably the third and finest of the PlayStation 1 Reptile trilogy, which is Crook, then Gex, then Spiro. I mean, you know how I feel about Gex. I'm a big fan. I mean, Gex isn't really a PlayStation brand. It's really a 3DO brand. That's fair. Yeah, you're right. I take it back. But that does give it some simpatico with Spiro because Insomniac started

like they had a 3DO dev kit when they started out. A 3DO dev kit and like a Sony dev kit. And And fortunately, they ended up going with Sony as opposed to putting their chips in with the 3DO. That worked out okay for naughty dog, but, you know, you can't all be naughty dog. So, yeah, anyway, Spiro was a big success. But like I said earlier, that property was owned by Universal. So, you know, obviously that really limited what Insomniac could do with it. So I think once their deal was up, they were like, yeah, universal, you just kind of do your thing. We're going to go do something new that we can own.

spent like a year trying to figure out exactly what that was going to be. Like, it sounds like they had a tough time coming up with the actual concept of Ratchet and Clink and had a lot of false missteps in there. Yeah, it seems like they wanted, I mean, based on the final product, they were looking for something that was a little cooler than Spiro maybe. Like, I don't know exactly how Spiral was perceived by people who played the game, but I always got the impression it was a little kiddier and Ratchett's like meant for like teens. He's got attitude. He's got goggles.

So they might have been trying to figure out how to capture that new distinct essence. Well, you know, if you look at descriptions of the games, they were kind of floating around internally before they came up with Ratchet and Clank. One of them was sort of a Tomb Raider style game that was the operating name was Girl with a Stick. I don't know if that was going to be the final name. actually a really great name, very descriptive, very evocative, but maybe not marketable. No. Beyond Good and Evil was basically that, and that flopped. Yeah. Well, that was a girl with a stick and a camera and a pig. Fair play. Yeah, that's true. They did have the pig. But yeah. Like, you know, I think they were kind of going for the Tomb Raider thing and

working to something that wasn't really their strengths. And I think internally, it sounds like everyone was kind of like, eh. And externally, people Sony were like, yeah, guys, we don't know about this. So they scrapped it, which, you know, that's brave to do when you are a growing studio that's staffed up and you probably have a pretty high burn rate in terms of staff and, you know, overhead and things like that. But they went back to the drawing board and came up with Ratchet and Clank, which is basically a friend of mine, a friend of the podcast, Nick Marigos, once described it as, let's see,

this is what Mega Man in 3D has been trying to be. This was, you know, I think around the time of some false starts like Mega Man X7, and he was like, this is what Mega Man and 3D should actually be. Although, you know, all loved to Mega Man legends, it is a different kind of thing, whereas this is like Mega Man, like classic Mega Man, where you just have all kinds of crazy weapons and it's, you know, just shooting and running around in science fiction. so like that's that's very appealing and um you know even even ratchet and clink went through a lot of iterative changes in development like ratchet started out as more of a lizard man and clank was going to be three robots instead of one ratchet and clanks I like it ratchet and clink yes ratchet and clink and clink it's like this is my my name's ratchet and this is my brother clank this is my other brother clank this is my other brother clink uh are new heart jokes too too old for this podcast could

be i was always more of a bob new heart show guy myself ah okay okay i don't even know what that is okay well there you go So, yeah, they ended up going with more of a furry mascot type character. And basically what they ended up with was kind of a new take on Banjo Kizui, just in sort of the relationship between the characters, where you have Ratchet, who is this furry guy running around with a melee weapon, which is a wrench, you know, straight out of half-life. I guess that would be a crowbar I guess wrench is more like That was beyond good and evil wasn't it

Didn't Jade have a wrench at first? I don't know It doesn't matter I'm getting sidetracked But he runs around Wacking things and shooting things And then in his backpack He's got Clink

Who occasionally he deploys To do stuff And Clink has a more active role Than Cazui for sure But you do kind of get that That sort of character dynamic of like the dominant character and then the secondary character. But I think it works, you know, from what I've admittedly, the limited amount that I've played

of the Ratchet games, like I feel like that balance works out really well. And even if the jokes don't always stick, it's still got like kind of a good-hearted feel. It doesn't try to be too serious. Maybe it tries to be too funny without succeeding. But I think on the whole, they don't, you know, they don't crawl up their arsenal. They, you know, they managed to kind of keep it light and frothy, which I think is a good balance, especially when you look at, you know, like the way the sort of Jack and Daxter sequels went, that was Noddy Dog's kind of character equivalent around this time, the PS2, like, mascot vibe. You had Sucker Punch with Sly Cooper, and then you had Nottie Dog with Jack and Daxter, which went from kind of ugly mascot, plus. platformer, a little light-hearted to, like, super grim, dark and weird.

Like, it went way off the rails. I find it fascinating just how intertwined the Ratchet and Clank series was with the Jack and Dexter series. And, like, I get, I'm not sure in the exact sort of chronology, but I'm pretty sure it was like Jack, the first one, which is basically really obviously just a re-skinned crash game. And then the second, then Ratchet comes out. And the Jack guys go, oh, hey, guns.

So they give guns to Jack And I love that game And I will not hear any criticisms of it Even if they are reasonable But then you start seeing like That Ratchet and Clank pop up in the later Jack games Just as a kind of an Easter egg Like on posters and things

There's a joke in Ratchet and Clank Where they do the celebration dance From Jack and Daxter when they collect one of the items And then Ratchet turns up as a playable character in Jack X And they just really seem like they were gelled really nicely Yeah. So the timeline on that is definitely Jack and Daxter came out first because that was 2001. I remember because specifically my first ever trip to Japan was Christmas 2001. And I remember seeing a Jack and Daxer, like, character stand up in a game shop there. And those were not attractively designed characters, especially in the first game. Like it's they look so weird. Yeah. And it just, they seemed so out of place in that game shop. I was just like, what, what is this?

It's terrible. It just looks so bad here. What's going on? And then what are we talking about? Ratchet and clink, yes. That came out like a year later. But, you know, they are more intertwined than just like alternating releases. Insomniac actually worked with Noddy Dog on some of the tech for Ratchet and Clank.

They did not borrow the Jack and Daxter engine for Ratchet and Clank, like is sometimes reported. but they did get some rendering technology that basically their friends at Nottie Dog were like, yeah, here, let's collaborate on this. And so, yeah, there may have been some back and forth feedback with the sequel for Jack and Daxter. I don't know. But definitely these two studios, you know, they're pretty close and are close enough to share technology kind of within that PlayStation family. So definitely influences going one way and probably the other. hard to know if it was intentional

but yeah like in the beginning of the second Ratchet and Clank for the PS2 it's almost a de-escalation of the stakes which is pretty funny compared to the how Jack 2 diverges where like Ratchet and Clank are just sitting at home they're like

no we save the universe kind of bored right now I love that opening so much yeah that's a real change of pace from Jack 2 which is like well you had an adventure. Now you're in jail for 10 years. Better grow a goatee. What a game. What a great game. But yeah, I don't know if Jack's dark turn was, can really be attributed to Ratchet and Clink.

I think it was more like Grand Theft Auto and just the trends of that era. You know, everything was going darker, more serious, more mature, taking away all the color, adding more guns. So Jack and Daxter was definitely naughty dog saying, like, we got to, we got to chase that dragon. and Ration and Klink, I don't feel ever really did that too much, maybe outside of Deadlocked, which... No, that was what they said about Deadlocked, but if you actually... I'm not saying, like, if you actually, like,

that sounds so haughty. But if you play Deadlocked, it's not really that dark or any more dark than the other ones. It's just visually a little bit grimmer. That's all. Like, in terms of storyline, you've still got death and carnage in the older games. It's just a tiny bit grimmer and deadlocked.

It really is mostly comedic the whole time. Yeah. But I feel that way about Jack, too, as well. So I don't even get started. I'm very happy to be corrected about Deadlocked because the fact that that was basically a multiplayer game was sort of the kiss of death for me. I was like, I'm not interested in this.

So other people, like, who wants other people when you play video games? No, thanks. I need some me time, not you time. So kind of the creative leads behind Ratchet and Clank, I pretty much picked out three, but maybe there's more and I'm just overlooking them. But you have to, you know, give credit to Ted Price. who founded Insomniac, and my impression of Ted Price has always been that he has been much more hands-on with game development. Like, he got into this business because he liked video games and wanted to make video games. And so he's not, you know, like someone who kind of vanished

into the C-suite once they started making money. Like, he's stayed pretty active in game development. So even though he wasn't sort of the creative lead on Ratchen Clank, he definitely had a lot of input into it. And, you know, I'm sure as kind of the head of the company, he also is responsible in some part for sort of shepherding the series along. And, you know, I can imagine there were times when Sony came along and were like, you know, got to go grimmer. Got to go darker. We need, you know, something that's going to be hitting certain, you know, marketing notes. It's achieving certain ends. And that's when they dangled the resistance keychain over on the Right, right. Yes. I feel like, you know, from what I've played and seen of the Ratchet games, they never really strayed from their sort of central mission. And the more recent games, you know, even accounting for the fact that the most recent is a remake, they never really deviated too far from what the original game was about. So that's, you don't, you don't really see that too often. So, you know, I'm sure we have to credit Ted Price for that to some degree. But also a lot of credit, maybe the biggest amount of credit,

goes to the director or creative director for the entire franchise, who's been with it from the start and is still, like, creative co-director, I believe, on Rift in Time. And that's Brian Allgaier. I don't know if I pronounced his name right, but he was someone who kind of started in video games around the time that Insomniac was being founded. He started out making CDI games. So obviously moving over to Insomniac to work on Spiro Games was a big step. up from CDI.

And finally, there's David or David Bourgeois. He's French, so hopefully I got the name right there. But he is an award-winning film composer. He's written all kinds of stuff when won all kinds of awards for the films he's scored, and he's composed most of the Ratchet and Clink soundtracks. So that's, you know, it's good that he's willing to slum it a little bit. Yeah, it feels like with the, at least the first one, I distinctly feel like the entire soundtrack is like kind of the matrix soundtrack or like just very much, all I can hear in my head is propeller head. And over time, they, you know, they've really opened up like what they would do with the instrumentality and the musical choices.

So, yeah, I think he's shown a pretty wide skill scope there. But I would say that, you know, a big part of the series' ability to endure and continue to be appealing does have a lot to do with the sort of creative consistency. You know, it's not a franchise. It is an insomniac series. And the same people have been kind of guiding it and shepherding it from the beginning. So, again, that's really rare, especially in, you know, TidPull franchises like this. I mean, this isn't like Sony's top-tier blockbuster. It doesn't get the same press as a Last of Us or something along those lines.

You know, it's not even as big for them for Insomniac as Spider-Man Miles Morales. But it's still, you know, you get the impression that it's still something they believe in. And, you know, even if it's harder to sell a game like this as Sony's sort of person, personality changes and their priorities shift toward just big blockbusters and whatever controversial things Jim Ryan says, you know, they're still kind of keeping it real with Ratchet and clink. So that's something I really admire about the series. And it makes me feel bad that I haven't played more of them. I do worry a little bit that they might be victims of their own success when it comes to the Spider-Man games because, you know, Spider-Man sold

approximately a million-de-billion-de-copies, and Ratchet and Clank 2016 appeared to do well for them, but, like, you know, not on the same scale as Spider-Man, so is someone going to come along and say, like, well, you make this Spider-Man game and it moves this many units, and you make this Ratch and Clank game

and it sells this many units. Why don't you make two Spider-Man games, you know? Yeah, that's, I had that kind of a discussion set aside for the end of the show, but we can talk about that now, which is, like, what do you think the future holds for Ratchet and Clank? you're absolutely right. I mean, Sony has come out very recently and said, we only believe in, you know, blockbuster tier games. That's all we want to invest in. They close down their Japan studios. And they've, they've really said, like, if a game

doesn't deliver epic numbers, then why bother with it? Which, you know, that's frustrating. Because I feel like with a studio like Insomniac, you have, you know, your Spider-Man, Miles Morales, you know, and that's going to be just raking in money hand over fist. And I feel like that should give them the leverage, the latitude to create games that aren't going to be competing with Grand Theft Auto 5 as most profitable game ever, but still, you know, profitable and still successful, just not on the tier of like, you know, we can build an entire platform strategy around this. But I feel like there needs to be room for, you know, not just those tiers of games, but for all tiers of games.

But, you know, from Sony, I feel like there needs to be some of the smaller, like the sort of A-level games as opposed to just AAA. And it sounds like that's not the direction they're going. So I do wonder what that means for Ratchin and Clink in the future, especially, as you mentioned, Insomniac is now owned by Sony. So it doesn't give them the opportunity to, like, say, hey, Nintendo, this is your bread and butter right here. Like, can you imagine how good a Ratchet and Clink game would do on Switch Folks?

You should let us develop for you. That's absolutely not going to happen. So I don't know what that means for Ratchet and Clink. I was surprised that they even got the new game. I thought they were done. I thought after the remake and the movie didn't do very well for them. And the remake was very heavily tied to the movie. I mean, I thought that I was just amazed to see they even got a new Ratchet game.

The issue for me is, and this isn't, again, this is not a popular view, but I feel like as the series went on, the fact that it did stay so structurally similar, I felt it kind of got boring, to be honest. And this new one, if it's going to be the same exact thing, but flashier with a solid state hard drive, and it costs whatever the American equivalent of 70 pounds is, I don't know, I mean, I'll probably play it. but I mean nobody has a PS5 hardly

because you can't get one kids certainly don't have them unless they're being bought them which I imagine they're probably not I don't know it feels like not the best time to put it out I mean it's gonna I mean it'll have legs because apart from sack boy which nobody really cares about this is like the only I guess family friendly

major game on the PS5 from what I can think I mean I guess there's bug snacks No, there's Astros Playroom. Oh, yeah, but that's built into it. That's free. True, true. That is really good. So, I don't know.

I mean, I hope it does well because I do like these games. I just, I also kind of hope that there's more to it than there was the last few. Not that I did, not that I thought the last few were bad games at all, just kind of more of the same. And that does get old, I think. Yeah, like, you know, not everything is lined up well for them here with the overall number of PS5s out there. But hopefully someone would look at, like, the, you know, the attach rate compared, like, how many units sold versus how many are out there. And, like, in that sense, yeah, like, as you said, you know, when this game comes out, their competition will be Astros' Playroom. Because, like, I don't think the people who are going to be playing RE8 and, like, Returnal or even maybe, like, the FF7 DLC are going to really be the same market for as the Ratchet and Clank games.

Oh, well, it's going up against Ball and Wonderworld. Well, so much so much for Ratch and Clink. But I do feel like Sony kind of okayed this rifts in time sort of as a test balloon to like just kind of float it out there and see how it does. And I feel like its performance is going to determine the future of the series. But, you know, something that kind of struck me, I was reading an interview on, I think IGN with Ted Price, who said about the first game, what we were really trying to do was to make each other laugh and have fun. And we weren't thinking about too much about whether or not gamers would find it appealing because we're gamers. And we figured, hey, if this is what gives us incentive to come into work every day and allows us to be creatively free, it's probably going to have an audience.

But I don't know if Sony agrees with that anymore. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's, you know, been really kind of disheartening, like, the smaller scale games that have, it feels like Sony isn't interested in the. nostalgia or, like, remembering what made their systems fun to begin with. And, you know, I'm sure there are a lot of people out there who love, you know, what they're doing right now. So more power to them. But it's, it is still a little, uh, I'm trying to think of like the right word for like, not color, not full of color. Uh, grim, dark, monochromatic, dull. Dower.

Any of those, yes. British. Dower, yes. Just gray. Just so. great. And stodgy. Hey, Lassie, what are you doing here? Timmy's in a well.

Sequelcast 2 and Friends is a podcast looking at movies in a franchise, one film at a time, like Harry Potter, Hellraiser, and The Hobbit. And sometimes the host talk about video games and TV as well. And now it's part of the Greenlit Podcast Network. Oh, Lassie, we don't need to rescue Timmy. He likes the well, well enough, I guess. Darth Vader is Luke's father. Lassie, I told you to play off the spoilers.

And we're back, folks, with another episode of Nasty Labs. It's a show hosted by me, Kinsey Burke, and my dumb-ass friend, Mark. This twice-monthly show about game development, Japan life, being nice to people, and hey, maybe a few other things. Nasty Labs is a product of Chew High Labs Grand Incorporated, and now available for three easy payments of 4269, only on the Greenlit Podcast Network. All right, well, anyway, that's enough lamentations about the future. Let's talk about the past. This is, after all, retronauts, not future-notts. God, who wants to be a future not?

So, so depressing. So let's talk about the games and the characters. We'll start by talking actually about the characters because they're kind of, you know, the driving element here. It's the characters and the guns and then it's all the stuff that happens around them, basically. So obviously, the main characters are Ratchet and Clank. Ratchet is a Lombax, which sounds like a Dr. Seuss creation,

but I assure you it is not. in the first game he is kind of a teenage hothead like just a little bit of a punk and he's sort of hard to like he's kind of mean to clink in my opinion but you know I think they've softened him over time

he's matured and not in like the mature kind of video game him for immature not in that sense but like the you know the sense of he's just meld it out a little and he's not always a jerk then on the other hand you have clank who is a robot He is a tiny robot.

I think people like to compare him to R2D2, but really, the relationship is more like Twiggy and Dr. Theopolis from Buck Rogers. Because he's the little guy who's kind of stuffy and intellectual. Is this a good comparison, or are we into this? I don't know what Dr. Theopoulos is. I'm sorry. Okay. So, Bill, are you familiar with Buck Rogers, the TV series from the late 70s, early 80s? I'm not, I'm familiar with its existence.

I've heard the name. Wow. Could I compare them to Sherman and Mr. Peabody, except Sherman's got like a gun? Yeah, I guess. And Peabody carries Sherman around on his backpack? Yeah, sure. One other, one other character worth mentioning is Captain Quark, who is, I would say, the most common recurring character in the series and is basically Zapp Branigan meets Blasto.

Is that a fair comparison? Black, Zap Brannigan meets, uh, I'm totally blanking on the Toy Story guy. Buzz Lightyear. Buzz Lightyear. Yes. Jeez. Okay.

So kind of that personality, he is beloved by the galaxy, actually kind of a jerk, is working with the main villain in the first game. But they, I guess, rehabilitate him, kind of like the Marvel movies do with villains the characters, or that audiences like. They're like, oh, that genocide he didn't, wasn't that bad. He's lovable. Yeah, he goes from trying to, like, straight up kill you to. being just kind of a stupid waste of space, basically, who it thinks that he's the best. So there are many, many more characters throughout the series, but those are the ones who are basically the mainstays.

Like, the main villain of the first game is interesting because at first it seems like, wow, he's got this huge connection to Ratchett's past. Like, he's the guy who's responsible for, you know, Ratchet basically being the furry little orange guy equivalent to the last son of Krypton. He single-handedly destroyed Ratchet's planet. Wow, that's awful, but then he dies at the end of the first game. So, you know, you can't really build on that. So the, I think that actually works out well for the series. So it's not just like Dr. Wiley showing up again every time. I'll get you next time. None of that. It's more like a rogues gallery, like Batman-esque, where like they take turns with the different villains being the head honchos in each game. Mm-hmm. And the first villain is, the first game is Chairman Drek, who basically is an odd world villain. Yeah. He, in his schemes involved the destruction of natural habitats for personal gain. But remember that Ratchet is a Lombax, not a Lorax.

He is not a Dr. Seuss character. You should not get those confused, even though they are suspiciously similar in theme and name. Anyway, so, yeah, Ratchet's, you know, kind of pissed off at this. guy kills him and everyone has a happy ending. So that's not, you know, that's not the only takeaway from the 2002 game. It really was a breath of fresh air when it came out. It was fast-paced, a very fluid action game. Had a really, like, Insomniac is really good at games that feel good. I mean, that's the whole appeal of Spiro, really. Like, you just play it and it feels so easy. And this is the same way, except that instead of being a little dragon-shooting

flame, you're a lizard and a robot, or not a lizard, a Lorax and a robot who hit things with the wrenches and then eventually gain like three dozen guns and blow things up in amazing ways. And all of them are great. It's very similar structurally to the first Spiro in that basically you go from world to world. They're quite, they seem sort of open, but they're quite linear. There is really one path through them and then maybe a second path going the other way. But basically every time you get to a new planet you'll probably have enough bolts to get the next weapon or if you don't you will in a minute

the economy is very sort of balanced in that sense so similar to Spiro or the later Spiro games you're going with each world you've got your different sort of inhabitants of the world so you're talking to them and you're being given like whatever mission it is really structurally similar

they don't really start differentiating themselves for a couple of games yet but it does work I think All right, so the first game in the series introduced a lot of the trademarks. I mean, they would kind of run throughout the series, including obviously the characters, the galactic science fiction setting, the integration of minigames, some of which are good, some of which are not. Do you personally have favorite or least favorite minigame events in this first game or actually any of the games? Well, when we get to the, I'm sorry, go on, Stuart.

No, you go ahead. You go ahead. For the PS3 games, at least, they seem to war. distinctly, like, separate Ratchet and Clank, where it's like, you'll have the Ratchet segment and the Clank segment, and usually that means, like, Ratchet usually plays the same from game to game, but Clank will have, like, a different, puzzly, platformy game that he has to go through each time. And, like, the ones in a Crack and Time and Into the Nexus are pretty solid. Like, the Crack and Time one I really liked is you sort of have to program Clank to walk along certain routes in these rooms and record his movement. And then while the copy of clank goes along that path, you like have to jump along somewhere else. Like, you record clank walking over

and punching a switch. And then the copy goes over and does that. And then you have to jump to where a platform is going to raise up when he hits that switch and then continue across the next part. And it gets pretty like intricate with like three or four copies going at once and while I did enjoy it I also appreciate that they did say like hey this stuff is all optional the only thing you get for it is more money if you don't like it just go left I found the late like the second half of the game those get so difficult for me like the level of thinking that was required was not what I was prepared for I was like I want to break boxes and I want to think um in the going back to this sort of original game I I like the

trespasser minigame where you have to shine lasers to open doors I did enjoy that but I didn't enjoy the... No, that's not the trespassers, that's the lock thing. Is it the trespasser? I don't even know. They have stupid names. Whichever's the thing that opens doors. Then later you get a disguise which disguises you

as an alien and you have to do these weird rhythm action conversations that are really boring and long and hard. I didn't enjoy those very much but the best minigame in the whole series for my money in Ratchet 3 you've got the Quark Vidcom which are 2D side-scrolling levels

that are very much like Mega Man. There's not that many of them, but they're really, really fun. They're really, really fun. I did not play those, but I have seen them being played and was like, yep, okay, that Mega Man comparison,

it's finally come home to roost. Well, in that era, I mean, I'm sure, correct me if I'm wrong, there wasn't really that much 2D platforming going around because Indy hadn't really broken out yet. Right. It was Game Boy Advance or nothing.

yeah basically so it was nice to play a kind of attractive triple a graphic looking 2D thing that handled fairly well i did enjoy that quite a lot and i know there was i think a mini game in the first or like a weapon or something that clink could use where you could send out little drones of himself uh yeah you you command around the sort of gadget butts that you find they're a little bit like munches odyssey but that came later i think uh you can get them to follow you can get them to attack it's very much like kind of an odd world thing, and they're integrated into the levels quite well, I thought. They're never particularly difficult, but they are interesting.

Munches Odyssey was a launch title for Xbox 3, the original Xbox, so yeah, that would have been 2001, so... Oh, wow, okay, well, that was already out then. There we go. It sucks. What's that? Munches Odyssey, it's terrible. All right.

This is not an odd world podcast, though, so... Good. Are you a fan of any of those games? Yeah, I love Odd World. just don't like Munchy's Odyssey. I don't like what they did with it. All right. So yeah, the big thing, like I said, I think I said, is the weapons in Ratchet and Clink. There are more than 30 distinct weapons you can acquire or tools, some of which are, you know, more utility than destructive. But one nice thing about it is you just have them on hand. Like you have, you know, the

ability to use them whenever you want, as opposed to, like, something like Mega Man Legends, where you have, you have, like, a bunch of kind of cool weapons, but you can only take one into the dungeons with you at a time. It's like, what do you want to equip for this mission? So, yeah, you don't have to worry about that. And apparently they had a list of, like, they did brainstorm and it came up with like 70 or more weapon ideas and then whittled it down. But it wasn't a case where they whittled it down to like, well, here's like the five best. They were just like, Here's 30. Here's 35.

Let's just, you know, go crazy. Let's have, you know, basically like a black hole bomb. Let's have, you know, a grappling wire. Interestingly, they said the grappling wire ability was specifically inspired by Spider-Man. So making their sales pitch way back in 2002. Paid off for them. Good stuff. Yeah.

And to your point, Jeremy, about the scarcity of resources. Like, the combat is not built around that. Like, ammo is everywhere. you're encouraged to switch to a bunch of different weapons and try them all out. And while this isn't part of the original game, like they give you strong incentives to, you know, try out all the weapons and level them all up as they get more and more powerful when you deal more damage with them. So it's a, it's fun and you are given fun things to do when you diversify. So this game was remade in 2016, as a tie-in with a movie that apparently came out, amazingly?

Wow, who knew? Yeah. And nobody remembers that movie really. But how would you say the remake compares to the first game? I know, Bill, you were very impressed by the remake enough to want to go back to the original. But, like, what do they change? How is it different? How is it the same? Just, you know, aside from the obvious visual gloss they put over it, like, what's the deal?

Well, in terms of the story, they added a lot more wrapping around what's going on. Like, it's all contextualized as Captain Quark is in prison. and he's retelling the story, but he's giving, like, his editorialized version of what happens in the original Ratch and Clank. Like, you're, so, like, I guess you would say in the original one, you play as Ratch, and you see Ratchett's point of view, but this is him, like, adding in details of what happens and, like, narrating events and, like, sometimes humorously, sometimes less so, like, giving gameplay pointers as you go. and they also like kind of deepen the lore of Ratchet here where it's like in the first game you know you see the cutscene it's just like Clank shows up Ratchet finds Clank they go off an adventure but now it's like Ratchet yearns to be a space ranger he wants to get off this dusty old planet and like you know get out into the galaxy goes out and looks at the twin moons as the Force theme plays basically basically never gets to go into Tashi Station to pick up power converters And, like, the very first thing you do, the way they integrate the tutorial into the game is you're going to a space rangers tryout. And he flunks it because he's just, he's not space rangers material. He's too tiny, you see.

So the rest of the game is, like, him, like, getting further wrapped up in the space rangers and, like, still following the same overall beats of the story, but him, like, doing it with a little bit more tension between him and clank, him having, like, he lies. and says he is a space ranger to Clank when they first meet and Clank being a naive little robot who just walked off an assembly line believes him and then just with the another big thing they change with the game which is more mechanical is they don't make you buy the upgrades anymore

which I, when I went back and played the original I was like, you're making me buy the propeller pack but I want to buy a gun. I can't buy a gun anymore. You make you buy the... So when I played the remake, I went back and played the original Then I went back and played a little bit more of the remake just to re-familiarize myself, and I was like, oh, thank God, they don't make me do that anymore, good.

I hate to admit it, but I think I do think, I mean, as much I loved the original from playing it when I was younger, I do think the remake is more fun, if only because it takes the quality of life stuff that came later in the series and applies it to the first game. You know, you've got proper lock strafe, you've got proper quick select wheel, you can level up your weapons, which you can't in the first game. develop your health, et cetera. It's basically the first game if it had been made after the third game, I think. And it does work really well. The only bad thing about it, and this is, I say bad as in broadly sort of game community speaking, is it until recently it ran at 30 frames per second, not 60 like the original, but now it does run at 60 on a PS5 because they patched it.

And it's great at 60. It's beautiful. Insomniac stopped making its PS4 games, I think even PS3 games, to run 60 frames per second because they felt, please don't let the gamers hear this, but they felt that it doesn't really impact sales or reviews. They feel like it's better to have games that look great

and handle well than games that have silky smooth frame rates. Do not tell the gamers, they will be so angry. But yeah, the remake is interesting. It sounds like they really kind of came up with a good

pretext for it. It's basically Roshaman and Klank, which is that's that that's that's that's that's pretty good i like that i like you know kind of taking this long-running character sort of the uh who's you know kind of a spoiler character you know a nemesis almost in the first game and giving him something to do beyond just like hey i'm a bad guy well you beat me i'm going to go away yeah and they found uh pretty good ways to like nod at the other games that had come later but could not be included, like, with their references to it where when they, when Ratchet goes to apply for

the Space Rangers, apparently he's been a little bit roguish in the past that we, that had not been revealed before. And it's like, didn't you like break time and like stop, you know, harbor a dangerous dimension altar? And he's like, I had good reasons for doing that. Wink and a nudge to like the old stories from the old games. okay so the the framing device takes place like later in continuity it's not um like immediately after the events of the first game i think it's fudged enough that you don't really know if that makes sense it's kind of there isn't like a specific sort of canon for it not from what i can recall anyway but it is implied that they are they are giving themselves the leeway of saying this is

a retelling this is not the canon new beginning of the series because the new game rift apart seems to be basically the next game after Nexus, I think. They're just disregarding the big gap between it and Nexus. If I had to guess, they were looking for a way to, like, if the movie took off and if the game broke, you know, records, like, they could jettison all the other continuity. But now that, like, the movie is barely remembered, they can be like, okay, we'll go back and just pretend that this stuff still happened. Well, in terms of the quality of life,

stuff. I'm always a big fan of remakes that do that, where they basically pull in the content, the structure, the, you know, the design, the story of the original game or an older game, but apply just, you know, improvements

and advancements to those. Like, I think Tomb Raider anniversary was a pretty good example of that where they basically took the, you know, the PS2, PS3 generation type improvements that we saw in the Tomb Raider games with like Underworld and

whatever the one was before that. Legend. Team Raider legend was the first. There you go. That's the one. So they basically took that framework and then said, okay, but what if we did this with, you know, the actual content of the first game, which in my opinion was, you know, probably the most interesting and intriguing of the Tomb Raider games just because it

was so, you know, it had that kind of like solemnity, that, that Metroidist quality, where you were just like, hey, I'm just a girl in a cave. Sometimes I got to shoot bats, but mostly I'm just exploring. You feel really vulnerable, I think. Even though you are tooled up, you feel really vulnerable. Like in Metroid, even though you're in a power armor suit, you feel that anything could come out of anywhere and get you. Right.

At any point, you could accidentally take a bad jump in land and that acid would not be able to jump out and, like, fall in a tall pillar or something and just die. Yeah, and the original Tomb Raider was like that, like, hey, you see this interesting statue? Why don't you go climb on it? Oh, it turns you into gold and you're dead. Oh, too bad.

So a little bit mean. But, yeah, like, this sounds very much along those same lines. I don't want to turn this into a Tomb Raider podcast either, but it does put me in mind of that. And that's always, you know, a good standard to kind of live up to. The only thing other than what I've already mentioned that I didn't like about the remake is, as something Bill to alluded to, it has that thing that a lot of modern games do, and it sounds so fogish, but it tells you what to do all the time. It's constantly just like invoice over, and Ratchet found out that the weak spot of the boss was this point, shoot this point now with your gun, you know? And the original game did

have tall tips, but it wasn't quite so on the nose about it. And I do find that kind of stuff quite frustrating, because the game isn't even remotely difficult. Like, sometimes they do realize what they're doing, like they're like, and Ratchet realized he cannot breathe underwater, you know, stuff like that insipid. But like, there are times where, where it is sincere, and it's like, okay, I get it. Yeah, I shoot the thing. Thank you. So it's kind of doing the Prince of Persia thing, the reboot, the Sands of Time thing, where you're telling the story and like, no, no, that's not how it happened when you die.

I don't think it does anything that's sort of clever, though. That's a good example you mentioned with the water, because I was playing this quite recently, and there's a section in Retchat and Clank One where you'd go down into a tunnel and the water starts rising. And it's genuinely quite tense because you obviously have to keep ahead of the rising water, but then there's a section at the end of that where you have to swim no matter what. And you'll only have enough air if you've been keeping sort of ahead of where you need to be. And in the remake, that same section is in there. But the whole time it's happening, either the voiceover or the characters are going like,

oh, oh no, the water's rising, oh boy. And it just kind of takes some of the – I just feel kind of like, you know, I get it. I know that this is a tense situation because I'm playing it. I'm in it right now. I don't need to be like, have that hammered over my head like this. But again, it doesn't really matter that much. It's fine. I will always appreciate the remake for simplifying the, like,

long jump or propeller jump mechanics where... Oh, yeah, yeah. The original feels like the instructions to a dance you do at a wedding, where it's like, first you start running, then you press R1. Then you press triangle and release R1. It's like, in the original, it's the same basic command. as the long jump in Mario, but without the visual sort of feedback or makes that feel so tactile. So yeah, I do agree that they improved it by just sticking on R2.

All right. So we've had a lot to say about the first game, but we should talk about the sequels and just kind of track the evolution of the series. I think we have plenty of time for that. And it sounds like you've played most of them. So in 2003, we got Going Commando. Basically, this was an annual franchise for nearly a decade. Actually, for more than a decade. Looks like 11, 12 years. So what did Going Commando bring to the franchise? besides, you know, a continuation of the story. Well, that was the one that first added the upgradeable weapons and health, which adds, like, I cannot overstate how important that was to the series for me, because once you have a reason to use all the weapons, you will use all of them. You will not just stick with the best, like the Devastator, like in the first game. In this one, you use everything, because you want to know when you level it up, it's going to turn into something insane.

Because they, not only do they level up, they also have evolved into, like, much more powerful, more exciting, interesting versions of themselves, and that went a long way. This was also much harder, so you needed to have those upgrades as well. So when you say upgrades to weapons, like it's not just better firepower, it's like actual material changes to the weapons. Yeah, annoyingly, I can't think of any examples off the top of my head. It introduces the bouncer, which is my favorite ratchet and clank weapon ever, where you fire it, it's like a sort of largeish, maybe sort of soccer ball-sized projectile

that splits into about six small versions of itself that make this fantastic clang-a-lang sound while they're all over the place like ding, ding, ding, ding, like a Pachinko machine or something. But it's a Pichinko machine of death, basically. And once you level it up,

once you get the mega-bouncer, instead of a six, you'll be shooting, say, like, 28 of them. And if you fire it into a room, it's just complete, like, cacophony, and then everything's dead, and it just never stops feeling awesome to use. I actually can't believe that I've never played a game from Japan that has some sort of weaponized Pachinko in it.

That's amazing. So it sounds like we beat them at their own technology. No, that sounds very satisfying, like the idea of upgrading weapons like that and having such unusual weapons is very satisfying, too. They had in the first ratchet there was a gun that, turns your enemies into chickens. That was about as out there as they got, I think. The second game had, I want to say sheep,

that was kind of a thing for a while. You would get a gun that turned your enemies into a different animal, different sort of farm-yard animal. But, yeah, going commando is just, it's very similar gameplay-wise, but the fact that they did add these systems on top of it did make it a lot more compelling, I think, personally. Bill, you've played these more recently,

I think, I assume. Do you have any thoughts on on what Going Commando brought to the series? Nothing specific, I'm afraid. Just, I guess what I thought starting out, jumping from Going Commando from the original is like, it's pretty heavy combat elements at the start. And like there's, it's more just like you're diving right in.

There's not any like introduction. It's like, you know, hey, you know who these characters are. You know why you're here. Let's just go and play some games. and shoot the robots. And I think the leap for me started with Up Your Arsenal, where, like, that was the first one where it really felt like, ooh, this, okay, this is starting to feel like more of a modern 3D action game

where the camera is, like, really responsive, and combat's starting to feel really smooth and responsive and slick and stuff like that. Okay, well, we can jump ahead to Up Your Arsenal. That's 2004's game. Yeah, so good. That was the third game in the series. What did that one bring to the mix? Instruct me, inform me.

It was kind of another focus shift because the platforming has been reduced a little bit here. It's much more based around shooting. There's a lot more, as you said, the camera is a lot more responsive. It's a lot more like a third-person shooter. It normally is now. you can put the aiming targeting you can put it on the shoulder buttons like a modern game

it's got even more leveling up even more weapons postgame mega weapons challenge mode those 2D levels I mentioned already the hub stage set on a starship makes you feel like I guess there's something happening in the plot you're going back to this location with this team and you feel like you're part of a team and it's actually quite funny the script is quite amusing. It's still obsessed with crotch jokes, but there are some genuinely funny cutscenes. The one that stands out for me, sorry for the spoilers. There's a part of the game where they think that Quark is dead, that he's kind of sacrificed himself for the mission, and they have a funeral for him, and it's the funniest funeral I've ever seen. Because, you know, funerals are usually just laugh a minute. You can't spell funeral without fun. That's true. I feel like there's a Prince Philip joke in there somewhere, but I'm not going to make it. It's too soon. It's too soon to make a joke about that racist old zombie. It's too soon.

All right, Bill, you mentioned really liking up your arsenal and really feeling it was a big leap over the previous games. So in what sense do you feel that's the case? The main thing that jumped out to me was the camera controls. Like in the first couple of games, like I'm, you know, for the time having played other games in that era, like I can understand. how we got there, but the camera movement feels more like a suggestion. Like, you want to go right? I can give you about 10 degrees right. Okay.

You want more? But in this up your arsenal, now it's really starting to feel like, okay, we can like get a full accounting of the battle. Like the number of enemies feels like it's up, like there's more happening on screen

when you're running around, but the game is still handling it well, and like the frame rate isn't dropping. That's really where it shined to me. Expanded on something they introduced in Going Commando, which is the whole battle arena gameplay, because Up Your Arsenal has a battle arena you can visit sort of optionally eventually, where you'll basically go through a series of round-based, well, gladiator trials, I guess, combat trials with different

rules and different rewards if you complete them. And it's just a really great way to keep you playing the game because the last one of those trials is 100 rounds and the rules change in every single round and it's absolutely brutal and the only way you're going to do it is if you've already been through

the game on challenge mode a couple of times and leveled up all your stuff and giving yourself max health and it just feels really good and really rewarding to get stuck in because it's the first time that you're not wrestling with the controls to do so because you could strafe in going Commando, but it just didn't feel good.

But in this game, you can set yourself to default, like, third-person shooter controls, and it feels fantastic. Great game. And most importantly, like, we really get into the deep lore of Secret Agent Clank. Yes, exactly. Right. That eventually became its own game, which apparently,

Stuart, you do not like. To me, it's the worst ratchet game, or the worst game in the series, it sucks. I really didn't enjoy it. It's not really a ratchet game. It's a Clank game, and the Clank levels are fun. as a bit of variety, but not for a whole game and certainly not for stealth. No chance. No thank you. Yeah, so fill me in. What is Secret Agent Clink exactly, like the concept? This is one of the games

that I demoed. Man, it must have been Tokyo Game Show like 2007. I think it was one of those events that Sony had at their studios back when they cared to invite for us to do things aside from, you know, like straining them on a boat to look at not, or actually not look at Vitas. Yeah, so, like, I got that it was kind of a mini-game collection for PSP, but what's the, not minigame, but like, I don't know, sort of a mission-based, bite-sized kind of adventure for PSP, trying to figure out what to do with a portable system, but the overall concept, like, where does that come from? It's a, no, I can't remember the exact context, but, yeah, it's, I think it's the show that Clank is the star of in universe. Is that right, Bill? It's been a while since I've played it. yes yeah clank stars in a in a series secret agent clank in the universe and is like you know galactically famous which and wretches kind of salty about it yeah but then they's they're because it's basically a gag that they span off into its own game and they should not have all right

So you mentioned the arena element, which is basically the jumping off point for the fourth game deadlocked. I feel like when you have these game series, the point where they hit the fourth game is usually where things start to get a little weird. They're like, what are you, like Gears of War IV, Halo 4. um deadlocked like they they kind of start looking around and saying what how do we freshen this up we've done three of the same thing and uh so with with deadlocked they went for the arena shooter element really played down the story i remember you know seeing previews of it

um seeing preview builds of it at work and watching people play and just thinking like this doesn't have the stuff that interests me like i you know what what little time i've spent with a series this isn't going to be the one to pull me in. It's one of those games where I totally get why people don't like it. I think it's great. I really enjoyed this one. It is all mechanics, though, and I think that the actual shooting is really tight and really good.

The fact that it is multiplayer with split screen for the whole campaign is a big draw for me because I still love split screen gaming. There's lots to do, and it's one of the only ratchet games that's actually hard because you can turn the difficulty up really, really high. and just have a lot of fun with it. But all the same, it's not Halo, it's not Half-Life 2. You know, it's not, and it kind of is more in competition with those games than it is with a ratchet game,

and it can't help but look not as good compared to more contemporary third-person shooters, I guess. It's not bad, but I get away. It's not liked. Bill, did you spend time with this one, or did you just say, eh? I forewint all the PSP games, the Secret Agent Clanks, the Deadlocked, The size matters is... I thought Deadlocked was a PS2 game. Oh, I'm sorry.

You're probably right about that. People don't even know this game. That's how unknown it is. No shame in it. It's the disruptor of the series. Yeah, it's the Jack X of the series. And I love Jack X. The only guy he does.

Someone's got to. You know, they put a joke in The Last of Us left behind where Ellie plays on a Jack X arcade machine and then says it sucks, and then you get a trophy that says, says, like, can't win them all. And I was like, I resent that. I resent that so much, naughty dog. Don't be ashamed of your awesome jack carting game. Okay, so Deadlocked was the first game not to have a smutty subtitle. So, Stuart, would you like to grace us with your pick here? Oh,

I think you did already, actually. Yeah, lock blocked, but then I remembered that crack in time was originally called Clock Blocked. Oh, don't. It's not as good. Um, I also, like I come up with this, it was hot under the collar, but it sucks. I've just not done a good job here. And I feel like I've let retronauts down, and I'm sorry. It's okay. There's probably an innuendo there about showering with a friend or something, since it's co-op, but I don't know what that is.

All right. So you get on, you actually, okay, the series skipped a year at lay fallow for 2006, and came back in 2007 with the first non-Playstation 2, lease, a PlayStation portable game that brought back the smutty innuendo subtitle. That is Retch and Clink size matters for PSP. And as probably should be expected, I do remember looking at this one and, you know, it's a first-party Sony PSP games, so it looked freaking amazing, like for the platform. You know, Sony's stuff was right up there with Square Inix, just like, hey, look at what we can do with this hardware. Even if the game's not great,

you cannot believe that you can hold a game like this in your hands. It's so beautiful. It's really good for what it is, which is a smaller scale ratchet game that they crammed onto the PSP. I thought they did a darned good job. It's short and it's not difficult and it's got fewer of basically everything, as you'd expect. But for a handheld game, it's super impressive, I think. The only problem with it, is there's a glitch where basically every time from, I think, Ratchet 2 onwards, every time you beat the game, you can play it again in challenge mode, and it gets harder, and it scales up.

Your multiplier for how many bolts you get. And I believe in this game there's some glitch where it gets harder, but it doesn't scale up. So after a while, it just stops working properly, and you stop getting the reward you're supposed to get, which is really, really weird. I don't know if there's a way to circumvent it, and I don't know if what I've just described

is an entirely accurate description of the problem. Some will be able to leave a comment and, you know, call me a fat idiot or something and that would be fine. Okay. So that was the first PSP game, but it did make its way to PlayStation 2 as often happened for Sony first party games.

I think God of War also showed up on PS2. They were like, you know, let's milk this. Also, you know, PSP games to kind of develop at that spec, it required a pretty hefty investment. And I don't think PSP games always necessarily made back the investment. I think those were more like prestige pieces.

So, you know, putting them on a platform that was basically the best selling, most installed platform of all time, that's a pretty good way to guarantee you're probably going to recoup your losses because it's not that big an effort to backport from PSP to PS2 and, you know, you've got 120, 150 million kids just die into playing, probably.

Size Matters came out on PSP. There was another Sony platform out there, the PlayStation 3, and those of us who got second jobs so that we could afford to buy one, could play Tools of Destruction, the first PS3 game for the series. And Bill, I know you've played this one because you said so. I did say so, yes, yeah. This is the first game I checked out after the PS4 one. And, like, now having the further context of the other games to work from, like, I think it does continue, like, the evolution from the original trilogy, like, bringing up the fidelity, the feel of the combat's improved.

And I think they did a good job bringing the story further along, too. Like, you know, the story doesn't have to be the main focus of everything here, but it's nice to have a little bit of stakes for the main character. Like, you know, Ratchet, up until this point, kind of just floated along. He's just like, up, Clank shows up. I go off and I save the universe. And now it's like he has like an emotional attachment to the things that are happening around him and like exploring the mystery of what happened to his people. So this is what kind of kept the momentum going and got me to keep trying out the other PS3 games

with mixed results. Do they all live in a little bottle in a tiny? city called Camdor? Yes. Yes, they do. And Ratchet has to sit in his, you know, ice house constantly and watch over it with his many robotic counterparts. You know, that's what the Snyder movies are missing is Candor.

Yeah, in the middleways and one. All right. So, Stuart, how do you feel about this one? You said that PS3 is where things kind of started to trail off for you? Yeah, but this game. game for me isn't where that started. I think this is a really rather good one. It feels like a continuation of the gameplay from Up Your Arsenal. It doesn't have much in the way of, I guess, gimmickery. It's basically a much nicer looking ratchet game. And honestly, apart from the fact that

it's sort of sub-H-D, it still looks really remarkable, I think. Looks like a really, really nice-looking game. I wish they'd stick it on the PS4 or PS5, but, you know, I don't know. They don't and to care about their legacy, so they probably won't. But it's difficult for me to say much about it, because it's basically just more of the same, but it's good. It is a good one. I did enjoy this one quite a lot. The only thing that I did get on with is one of the weapons uses the six-axis,

and it controls like crap, because it's basically... I think it was the tornado. You fire a tornado, and you have to move the tornado by tilting your controller. And as much as I advocate gyro controls, I advocate them once they became good and they were not good at this point unfortunately, they were bad.

So basically, whenever I play it I look like my mom trying to play a video game where she thinks that turning the controller clockwise and handy clockwise makes the character move. Yeah, likewise they gin up a few different scenarios where Ratchet never having done this before in a game

has to like skydive down from a high distance. Oh, it's forgotten about that stuff, yeah. And you have to use the sixth axis to move out of the way of missile. rushing up at you. Yeah, that sounds like something I would hate. I really did my best to avoid games of that era with six-axis gimmicks. Like, motion control gimmicks worked okay on Wii because the controller was really designed

around it, but the six-axis wasn't. It was just like a thing they grafted onto it. You weren't a big fan of layer, then? I was absolutely not. They did patch it to be playable normally, right? I don't have a clue. Okay. So moving beyond Tools of Destruction, there's a game that I think I've heard of before, but I know nothing about it, which is Quest for Booty. What is this? This game is so unremarkable. It didn't even get a physical release in the U.S.

It's a bit of a sort of prologue to Cracken Time. It bridges Tools of Destruction and Cracken Time with a sort of pirate-based storyline, which I think spins out of tools. because those pirates appear in that game, I think. Yeah. But it's a weird one because there's not much shooting in it. It's mostly doing platforming and kind of puzzling because clank's not in it at all if memory serves. He does not show up in this game apart from maybe in cutscenes because he's been separated from Ratcher

at the end of tools of destruction. Sorry for spoilers. Now, I used to have a physical copy of this, which I then got rid of, and I regret it because the price is soaring now because they're going to shut the PlayStation store. You won't be able to get this anymore. Yeah, well, at least I've still got my 3D dot game heroes, which I'm going to rest higher on.

So, yeah. Good deal. Yeah, so this, okay, so the reason I haven't heard about this one is because it's like an interquel, like a little filler between two games, I guess they couldn't get away from that annual release schedule. They had a 2007 game and then crack in time in 2009. They were like, oh, we've got to do something in between.

But I think clearly we've moved being, that now that it's been five years between the remake and uh rift in time so that's good but but how does this lead into crack in time what is what is crack in time all about someone wrote in here it's the most Pixar-ish of the lot yeah it's really now this is for me this this is one of the most acclaimed games in this series so this actually is one of my jip pot takes so strap in um i don't like this game and i wish i did because they really clearly threw everything into it. They put so much effort and love into it,

and you can tell what they care about it deeply. But unfortunately, in making it a lot more movie-like, they strip out, in my opinion, a lot of the character in favor of emotion and drama. And there's nothing wrong with those things, and some of the moments in the game, I think, actually do kind of work. But the thing is, Ratchet and Clank,

they're not that interesting as characters. They're kind of just ciphers. They're just kind of there. And I like them because they're fun, but you don't, and I'm speaking for myself, obviously, I don't really care about them. And when they get separated, yeah, it's a shame, but then there's this whole story about Ratchett's dad or something, and I don't really care about that either. And they really, really want you to care.

They really want it to be a huge deal. And it just never feels like it because the whole of the rest of the series is just them laughing at the plumber's ass crack for 10 games. Um, so it's like, okay, we suddenly, you've gone from the plumber's crack to, oh, I've got... Plumbing the depths of your emotions. Plumbing the, yeah, exactly, a crack in time, a crack in time. Um, yeah, it's one of those things where it's obviously, it's obviously put a lot of effort into it and people who say this is my favorite one, I'm kind of like, yep, I totally get it. But it's, it's not my favorite. I feel like it loses a lot of character, um, in favor of, I guess, the more kind of PlayStation Studio.

kind of worthiness, if that makes sense. Yeah, so I'm going to be the one of the people who says, yep, this is my favorite one. So you have a very lukewarm take to counterbalance Stewart's hot take. Yeah, yeah. Excellent. So I do agree that the story is a little overwrought and doesn't really enhance the going zom. Like the main thing is like they introduce a father figure for a ratchet. His name is Azimuth, and he is another lobbacks.

and, you know, it's like they're working together to try and bring back all the other Lombaxes from wherever they went, but why is Asmeth not with the other Lombaxes? Oh, he has a dark story to that. And, you know, you can take or leave that. But I think the stuff in between all the story moments, like, that's really where they did, like, really make it into something bigger and more ambitious than what Ratchet and Clank had been before. Like, with the, the space fair segments before, you know, you just kind of like, when you were going from one world to a next, it was a menu. You, you know, when you scroll through a menu, you go to the planet, there's a cutscene, you're there. But now you go to a system and you can fly around the system, you can land on the moons and do it as like a singular objective on the moon. You can have space-based missions, like you'll, you know, the enemies in this game, like they'll, you know, launch a fighter patrol at you and you have to like defeat 20 of them and stuff like that. And like adding light open world elements like I thought that was pretty cool like it made the game feel

bigger the world feel more lived in and then when you get into the traditional ratchet and clank stuff I feel like that's even better than before and like they they added a new upgrade for this game the jet boots and that in addition to like the you know the swing line and the rail grinding you already had just makes it even more fun to traverse these worlds that like it's a joy to have to you know, a jet between point A and point B on the map now. And, like, I think since then, they've scaled back some of the wild ideas they had for this one, and I kind of miss that. I think they kind of do need to explore some of the stuff again, maybe in Rift Apart,

or, you know, we'll see if there's any future entries after Rift Apart, but, like, something that does shake up the formula a little bit. I don't know why I keep calling Rift Apart Rift in Time. I'm sorry. That's not my only takeaway from this. But no, it does sound like a very enjoyable game to play. I kind of regret having missed down on it, even though I would probably just press, you know, whatever you press to skip past the cutscenes because they sound kind of interminable. But the concept of like a kind of an open exploratory almost ratchet and clink, that kind of hits the one point that is an instant winner for me. So I will have to look at it. this one up. It doesn't quite hang together for me, but because the aforementioned space battles, for example, it's like sometimes you just

want to go to a planet and you can't because you've got to shoot down 25 fighters and then their mother ship before you can do that. And the space battles aren't difficult and they're not particularly interesting either. They start easy and then you get more upgrades for your ship and they just become easier. So on

a scale of gummy ship, like one to gummy ship, where do you rate these space battles? Oh, God, sorry, wait, Gummy Ship is the top, Mark? No, it's like, I guess, you know, for super-enoying, superfluous, like, don't include this. Because if one is nothing and the Gummy Ship, I mean, that's one to two, what you're basically saying. I don't know, they're okay, they're fine, I'd probably give them a five, they're a pass, but I just don't want to do them, and you've got to keep doing them, unfortunately. I thought that the Jet Boots were cool, but what they essentially amounted to, in my humble opinion, is because you can,

move so much faster and further so quickly, they just make the planets really big with a lot of space to jet across where normally you'd have a kind of a tight little combat arena, it's just like vast. And there are some moments where that scale pays off. There's a really great bit towards the end of the game where you

go back in time to a battleground in the middle of the battle, which is really tricky and fun and good, and then you return to the present having changed history. That stuff works, but they don't really do a lot with it. It really just set pieces like that.

But again, it's clearly polished to the nth degree. It's clearly a great game. It's just not to my personal tastes, unfortunately. For whatever this is worth, this is probably nearly peak Ratchet and clank fatigue, I'd imagine. Like, this is where, like,

this is, like, what, the eighth or ninth entry in the series, so... Yeah. Yeah. Right. Well, in the next two games clearly reflect that because they are not more of the same. They are almost unrecognizable. So you have all for one and full frontal assault from 2011. 11 and 2012. I can't believe that they called the game full frontal assault.

Like, full frontal, yes, funny. Full frontal assault, not funny, horrible. Like, they're really unpleasant. In the UK it's called Q-Force, and I'm not surprised, because that's vile. Like, I mean, you know, all the other stuff is like, ha-ha-ha-underpants, going commando, how-up your arsenal, and now it's full-frontal assault. That is not a pleasant image for anyone to experience. I don't think they should have called this game.

I really hadn't thought about it that much. I'm sorry. It's just, it's really unpleasant. I want to flag up that that was a misfire. But, you know, it's described here as a DLC Heavy Tower Defense-ish game with split screen. So to me, that's like bright colors on a poison lizard. Like, the name is basically saying like, hey, this is bad. Avoid this. I could be wrong.

Like, maybe it's fun to play. But all of these points that are described here sounds. and extremely unappealing to me. Yeah, it's, I don't know, if you've played Orks Must Die, it's very much like that, in that you are a third-person character running around a tower defense game laying your turrets manually rather than clicking them like you would in something like,

I don't know, blooms or any other given tower defense game. And it is fun, especially in multiplayer, but the, and I hate to say it, but the hit to the frame rate makes it feel less polished than the previous games. We knew we'd make a gamer out of you yet. Yeah, well, the thing is when your whole series has been so smooth and so felt so good to play, when they suddenly have it, it does kind of jar, especially since it's such a high AAA quality series before this.

I think it was because it was also a Vita game, it's designed to fit onto that system as well. But it runs really poorly on the Vita. So, yeah, I don't, it's okay, it's fine. There's a lot of, like, DLC minions and different things you can buy, which is, yeah, that's kind of the era, you know, that's that era for you. Not anymore, they don't do DLC anymore, it's finished. Yeah, it's good. They finally moved away from that.

Just package games, no add-on content. So there's also the top-down-ish multiplayer game all for one. It's, this sounds, like the description of it kind of sounds like those Tomb Raider or Hitman sort of spinoffs where it's like an isometric action game. Is that anything like what this is? Well, Laramcroft and the Guardian of Light is great. It's really, really great. It's a really wonderful co-op puzzle game.

And in my experience, Ratchank Clank, awful one is super boring and crappy. I could not get on with it at all. I couldn't even think what... The only thing I can think off to compare it to is Disney Universe and no one's played Disney Universe. It's a bit like a Lego game, but not as good.

You basically run around with only a few weapons, and there are four of you bashing crates and bashing enemies, but it does not have a ratchet feel. It just is not that entertaining, unfortunately. It's not as good as Fuse, which is a very much hated game by Ensonniac, which I loved.

So, yeah, play Fuse instead. at. Bill, any thoughts on these, or did you skip them? I skip them. Okay. I'm happy to call Stuart the definitive voice on these games. Awesome. And then finally, one last game before we wrap up this episode, and that is 2013's Into

the Nexus, which, you know, that is a four-year gap from a crack in time. So finally, they really are kind of moving away from the annual approach and giving these games a little more time to bake, but I don't know really that much about Into the Nexus. This one totally flew past my radar, just no radar whatsoever. Oh, because it's a PS3 game, at least after the PS4 launch. That'll do it. Yeah, I've only played the first couple of hours of this. It's the only one I've not actually finished, apart from the remake, which I will be resolving.

The only reason I didn't finish it is because my PS3 died. but I don't really understand why they put it out in the state that it's in because yeah the half frame rate is the same as Q4 so I refuse to call it its name but it doesn't feel like a 30 it feels really flaky to me it looks fantastic it looks impressive as hell even now for a PS3 game but the performance took a huge hit this is this to me a lot of people talk about something like deadlocked being grimmer but this felt like

the grimmest one to me because I'm pretty sure this game opens with a couple of your allies getting killed and they've been around since tools of destruction and it's not played for laughs or anything like that. It's quite serious. The villain in this game from what I've seen of them seems quite genuinely threatening compared

to the other villains as well. There's a really interesting story going on which one day I would love to finish because it seemed to play fine, just bad performance and that was a bit of a bummer but I will finish it one day. Yeah, you know, if you played a couple hours, you're basically halfway through the game, really. I mean, it seems to have come at a strange point for Insomniac because, you know, the PS4 was out. They were probably very deeply invested in Sunset Overdrive at the time.

So I'm wondering how much people power they even had to put behind this game, really. And yeah, to Stewart's point, I mean, just, yeah, the frame rate is kind of a letdown, especially I'd come directly from a crack in time like a day ago. And I was like, oh, whoa. and the story is like we were talking earlier about there aren't really any this is the closest they get to like taking a serious tone with the series where it's like two characters do die in the first hour the characters the villains have kind of like a a burtonesque malevolence to them where they're like kind of creepy and like a little off kilter and like the one segment as Ratchet, like, going through the orphanage where they used to live, and it's, you know,

it's played pretty seriously, like, you know, it kind of feels like they were thinking this might be the last one, like, maybe I'm using too much hindsight bias there, but like, does it have a tone of sort of finality to it of just kind of like, I don't know, with the end of the game, if you don't mind me, just go in there. Oh, not in the slightest, we're talking about Ratchet and Clank, I don't care. It's like, they pretty much, you know, close the book on, throughout the PS3 games, the story had been, like, Ratchet looking for the Lombaxes. And they're like, he's like, eh, I'm good.

I don't need to look for them anymore. I'm going to, you know, hang around and hang out with Talwin. We're going to be buds. They don't go so far as I say they'll be dating. But they're like, you know, and the gameplay itself is fine. Like, it's, you know, more Ratchet and Clank, although it's very abbreviated. like they also devote a decent amount of time to another clank minigame which is kind of interesting and has like a gravity inversion 2D side-scrolling platforming thing it looks a lot like inside

I don't know if there was a timing would match up for that but it distinctly reminded me of like the stark black and white of inside maybe limbo maybe limbo is more appropriate Hmm. Yeah, so from that point, we go on to the remake, which we all already discussed, and then the upcoming Rift Apart, I got it right this time. I didn't call it Jack and Daxter either. So that comes out, as of this podcast, I think next week, or if you're listening to this on Patreon, in like a week and a half. So not too long at all.

And we'll see, I guess, from there, what happens with Ratchin and Clink. It kind of sounds like, you know, between the last two sort of core games before the remake, they were really sort of pushing this in a specific direction and trying to make it more like, you know, to build the gravitas of the story and maybe make it a little more serious. So I'll be curious to see if they take that approach with riffs apart. Who knows when I will actually be able to play that because I've had zero luck sourcing a PS5 to the point that I pretty much gave up. Like when it turned out to be way easier for me to get a vaccine than a PS5, I feel like maybe something's a little screwed up here. But, you know, bless those of you who did manage to find one.

and hopefully, you know, it will do well enough that the series will continue to have, you know, some staying power, some lasting power. And, well, that's a good innuendo. They could be just called Ratchet and Clink lasting power. Yeah, because, you know, I do think it is a series with a nice legacy. Even though I'm not extremely experienced with the games,

I do, I have enjoyed what I've played of them. And I would like for the AAA space, as it to still have games that are fun and have personality and color and things like that. They don't all have to be, you know, gun sims. I mean, yeah, I guess there are guns in Ratch and Clink, but it's not like murder guns. It's like goofy sci-fi suck everyone into another dimension kind of guns. There's no, there's no like melee killing blows or anything like that, at least not that I'm aware of. It's a pleasant other dimension.

It's nice. They have a good time. Very good. Incidentally, I did manage to get a PS5, and if anyone would like to come over and look at it, it will cost you 15 pounds. All right. I'll be over on the next boat. Anyway, I think that is it for this episode of Retronauts. We actually talked a lot more and a lot longer than I expected, which, you know, considering I have so little basis of knowledge for these games, I was a little worried.

But nope, nope, we definitely filled out some time. So that's what people are after is just, you know, fill some time for us. And we did it. So I have to think both of you, especially Bill, who requested this topic. And also, Stuart, who has the seasoned wisdom of, you know, of experience to bring to this conversation. Both of you were the pillars of this episode and propped it up, even though it was crumbling all around me. So thank you both. Bill, again, thank you for supporting.

the show and for, you know, just continuing to patronize us, but not in like a patronizing way and a patronage kind of way. Well, actually. Right. Anyway, so that wraps it up for Retronauts. And, okay, this episode of Retronauts, the show is not over. This is not the final episode. Just to be clear, Retronauts is not wrapped up.

You can't end Retronauts before you do the James Pond episode. That's true. That's what we're holding out for. It's like Arthur Dent. Okay, I'm not going to get into that. Episode 500, 24 hours of millennium software, vector dean mascot platformers. Exactly. So Retronauts is not over, and you can continue enjoying the show in many places.

Retronauts.com on podcatchers such as Apple Music, not on Spotify because they're bad and we don't do them. But you can also listen to us on Patreon if you go to Facebook. patreon.com slash Retronauts. For $3 a month, you get every episode that we publish, no, sorry, every Monday episode that we publish, every episode we publish on Mondays. There we go. You get that for $3 a month, a week in advance with a higher bit rate quality, no promotions or advertisements or anything like that. If you go an extra two bucks, you also get episodes every other Friday that are patron exclusive, as well as a patron exclusive column and mini podcast by Diamond Fight every single weekend. So that's, you know, like more than doubling

your value, honestly, for the extra two bucks. So anyway, that's my pitch, patreon.com slash retronauts. Gentlemen, share your pitches. Bill, I know you have a podcast. I do, yes. It's called So Many Bits. It is on a bit of a hiatus, but there is an extensive archive of episodes featuring me interviewing different indie game devs about their work and their craft. I might be putting out one with a spoiler cast about a recent game with a lot of spoilers in it, so look for that coming up soon. I'm also on Twitch, twitch.tv.tv slash so many bits, typically Wednesday and Thursday nights, at 8 p.m. Central time, if you want to stop by. All right. And Stuart, you have more than one podcast. I do. I have two podcasts. The number one

podcast is Annie Mani Chat, which is me and my dear friend Luke Fletcher reviewing every single episode of Animaniacs, which I hate. I hate Animaniacs. I hate that he's making. me watch it but we're up to episode 20 and we're never going to stop this is my whole life now um i also do a podcast called arsholvania which is me and andy hamilton of various gaming outlets fame where we come up with the worst take imaginable on a particular subject or video game and then we tweet the take and then we laugh at all the people who think that the take is real it's essentially making the video games community worse but in a fun way i hope and you can find those things by going to

at Stupacabra on Twitter and looking at the link tree that's there because I don't want to read out the links. All right. And finally, you can find me, Jeremy Parrish, on Twitter doing the GameSpite thing, that's my handle. You can find me on YouTube doing the Jeremy Parrish thing.

That is also my handle there, Jeremy Parrish. And, of course, doing Retronauts. I'll also limited run games. There's a bunch of fires, and I've got irons and all of them. Just like video games, That's the stuff that I do. It's, yeah, there's a lot of it.

So anyway, if you like video games and you like me, there's a lot of stuff about video games that you can enjoy on the internet, much of it for free. So thanks for listening. Thanks again, Bill for sponsoring this episode. Thanks again, Stuart, for making this episode not a wasteland of my empty lack of knowledge. And thank you, everyone out there for listening to this episode. We will be back in a week with another podcast because

As I said before, Retronauts is not over. It will never end, ever. Thank you. Thank you.