Mike

Ratchet and Clank: Size Matters

Ratchet and Clank: Size Matters (from henceforth to be know as R&C:SM, okay?) is everything that is wrong with videogames. It's like playing a post-Sands of Time (which will now be known as PoP:SoT, yeah?) platformer and thinking I thought we were past this? It is, in PR terms, an accurate and complete installment of a console franchise on a handheld machine, unstripped and faithful...with fuck all concessions made to the host platform.

I mean, really, isn't it too much to ask the player to use both the analogue nub and the d-pad for movement? The former for general motion, forwards, backwards, left, right, the latter for strafing in a gunfight (of which there are plenty). Isn't it too much to assume the player just knows what to do next? Hands are clapping for the lack of patronising tutorial - the game starts off challenging and goes from there - but to leave the player doing trial-and-error, death-and-restart flailing in the first level is unforgivable.

Also unforgivable are the mini-game style diversions consisting of Sonic Adventure-esque rail sections, hoverboard races (not as cool as it sounds, Back To The Future 2 this is not) and spaceship shizzle, among others (I assume, I lost the will to finish it). On paper they sound good, on screen they look good, in practice they take more piss than a trainee nurse. You're on a rail and the sort of sign you see on westerns for diverting trains comes up. The game assumes you know exactly what to do and that you'll hit it. I twigged it a bit late, missed it, had no chance to atone for my error and died. No worries, R&C:SM says, you'll do better next time. A prompt restart later and I do it and move onto the next section. Should the only way to survive a game be through dying? Ikaruga this is not.

It's infuriating, not least because said section (barely 3 levels in) came after repeated sections of jump-on-platform, platform falls, jump-off-platform tedium. How did I know the platform was going to fall? I didn't, I died, but I didn't make that mistake again. Which comes to the crux of the matter: Should a player fell obligated to constantly guess what the dev is going to throw at them next? PoP:SoT teased the player into improvising, trying, learning, and rarely punished the player for their rashness. It gave the player a climbing frame to scale and only asked for imagination, R&C:SM asks you to think of the most archaic and degenerate cliches in gaming and assume that's what's next.

It's not enough to just be a "full size" game on a bite-sized console. Size matters, it seems, but so does quality. Fucking gash.