I had some time today to sit down with “Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time“. It seems like an all around improvement, the controls seem noticeably more responsive (not that they were bad before, but they feel really tight now), and the animations seem crisp and more polished.

I’ve played long enough to see some of Clank’s time based puzzles and long enough to hit a spot that made me scratch my head a little bit. I can see how these have the potential to introduce some very complicated/fun puzzles down the road. I understand they are much like the puzzles in braid, but while I played Braid I didn’t get all that far, so the time pieces still feel like a very fresh, and refreshing element to platform puzzling.

I’ve opted to play through on hard difficulty on the initial play through, if Uncharted 2 has taught me anything is that I may be easily convinced to do some trophy hunting on really good games, so I’m more or less playing hard to avoid having to get that trophy (if there even is a trophy for that) some other time. It hasn’t been terribly challenging yet, although I have died a few times due to carelessness that probably wouldn’t have killed me on normal difficulty. I’ve been having some fun with the side missions on the various moons in each area… each seems to present either a platforming or arena like challenge rewarding you with gold bolts or Zoni (which are used to upgrade your ship). The space travel isn’t all that great but I can see why they’d throw it in there for some change of pace every now and then.

This has so far been an excellent addition to the franchise, and I can’t wait to see what happens next.

First and foremost, I’m playing this on PC, I choose PC for this title because I’m not really playing anything on PC at the moment, and It will give me something to do when I don’t have access to the PS3. That said, there are certainly some aspects of this game that seem to be better laid out to play with a controller in your hand. Particularly anything that has a menu. Most things you’d expect to be able to click on and perform some sort of interaction with or some button would activate that you can click on with your mouse, but you can’t, it’s mostly click and hit some predefined keystroke. For example, in your friends list, to invite someone, first you click on them, and then you hit “I” to invite. In an intuitive interface, I’d expect a double click, or even a right click context menu to invite a friend to a game would be expected. When it comes to accessing menus in combat (which you may have to if you’ve unloaded all your ammo in all of your equipped weapons), you’re taking your hand off the mouse to navigate things that should generally be a simple click and drag action.

Secondly… It uses gamespy… why?.. I feel like I’m playing Quake 2 again. On top of that I spent the first couple hours of my game time last night troubleshooting connection problems. I’m hoping it was related to a spike in usage due to the launch. Once I got connected all was well. The voice communication is bad… my advice is to setup a vent server somewhere (on your personal machine is fine), you’ll never have more than 4 people connected anyway the bandwidth consumption is next to negligible. I literally did this in less than a minute yesterday including the time it took to download and install the software, and configure my router for traffic), and saves a ton of headache with the lack of features in the in-game system.

No trade system? No way to show off your items to people in the game? whats the point of loot hording if the only way you can show someone what you have is to take a screenshot and find some place to host it and then convince someone to go look at it, or simply drop it and hope they don’t steal it from you.

Those sound like a lot of gripes, none of these are deal-breakers for me, I’ll probably only be playing online with friends I trust so whatever, I’ll get used to the menus I guess, and the network problems went away, and there is an interim solution for the VC problem. It’s certainly worth getting over because the game is really fun, especially playing co-op. Getting a huge crit with a sniper rifle is satisfying,  and scrambling to down a huge swarm of baddies creates some great panic moments. If this keeps up, I’ll have trouble not recommending this game to anyone, though I would probably recommend the console version to anyone outside of my circle (otherwise they need to get PC version so we can play).

Big week for games!

DJ Hero: Guilty pleasure of mine, I’ve been looking forward to this one, although I’ve got some reservations, I’m not convinced this going to be great but I’m very hopeful. The guitar hero franchise was successful because of the fun group/party setting. I don’t see how this is going to have the same appeal.

Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time:  I was late to this franchise, in fact I didn’t finish Tools of Destruction until a couple months ago… I figured I’d grab it when it went greatest hits, and I had a GREAT time, and I’m generally not big on platformers. I quickly grabbed and finished a quest for booty and since I’ve been looking forward to this one… I’m sure it won’t let me down.

Borderlands: This was out last week for consoles, but I’m going to grab it for PC… looking forward to this too, very unique experience from what I can tell.

Tekken 6: The Tekken franchise has been my favorite fighting series since the original playstation days, for some reason, this one is making me especially anxious.

Forza Motorsport 3: Good simulation racing franchise, I’d be all over this if I was still 360 exclusive, but with the talk of gran turismo 5 on the horizon I think I’ll pass.

I should have lots to talk about this week, I wonder if I’ll have time to…