By Shawn Trommeshauser
(Dreaming in Digital)
Ratchet & Clank was developed by Insomniac Games in 2002 for the Sony PlayStation 2 (PS2). In 2012 it was remade for the PlayStation 3, remastered for high-definition televisions and bundled with two of its sequels. Before that time, this company’s biggest claim to fame was Spyro the Dragon on the original PlayStation – another series which I never had the chance to try back in the 90’s. Even though the PS2 was one of the game consoles I played the most, I never got into the 3D platformers of the time. Games like Sly Cooper and Jak & Daxter all looked colourful and amusing. They received good reviews and they were all popular enough to earn several sequels each, but something always put me off about the style.
Perhaps it was seeing too much about them in the magazines and web previews. The character designs didn’t appeal to me. I was disappointed by the 3D platformers of the previous console generation. I felt it was very hard to live up to the standards Nintendo set with Super Mario 64. Whatever the case, I lost interest and ended up skipping all of those series in the PlayStation 2 days.
That all changed over the holidays. I gave the Ratchet & Clank HD remake a spin and after two hours of game-time, I found the opening of the game left me rather unimpressed (it felt very rushed) and the music … I couldn’t remember a single note once I had stopped playing. This game had no background, there was no dialog, and the scene shifts were very abrupt. It left me looking at a black loading screen almost as often as the animated cut scenes.
Continue reading “Looking Back and Going Forward with Ratchet and Clank”
Final Fantasy VI is one of my all-time favourite games. I was still in high school when it was originally released for the Super Nintendo back in 1994 and I can still remember how wrapped up I was in the story. Back then, the game was known as Final Fantasy III in North America. Most of us didn’t know we were missing half of the games in the series until the internet made that sort of information easy to access. We wouldn’t get official releases of the three missing titles for several more years.