playing the first ratchet&clank again after sinking so many hours into the other games, this feels like a totally different beast compared to the later games in the series. not even meaning the whole expanded (and weirdly handled) lore and epic cinematic angle the more modern games went for, i mean even compared to Going Commando and Up Your Arsenal, R&C1 feels pretty different just in how it plays.

while the games after R&C1 would be more of "shooter with platformer elements", R&C1 itself feels more "platformer with shooter elements". yeah, obvious difference is that there's no strafe, but the game in general just feels more slower-paced than the later titles. weapons feel more like tools instead of solely a means to blast enemies, and you end up figuring out which weapons are best for which stages/enemies. the health system also makes things more challenging; all enemies take away a single sphere of health, but the amount of spheres you have (8 at max) gives combat a lot more of a risky venture, especially if you're just going to do a wrench-only run. ratchet can't rely on armor, he's only got clank, his weapons, and his natural lombax agility.

doesn't mean R&C1 is "bad" by any stretch, though it is weird to come back to after being so used to the later games. and i'm gonna be real, i don't think mikey kelley ratchet is as mean as people make him out to be; definitely a jerk to clank at times, but the guy nearly got stuck in a deathtrap because clank blindly trusted people, give him a little slack.

that being said, R&C1 isn't without its shortcomings. wasn't a big fan of hoverboarding (especially since the skillpoints related to it were nightmarish), flying segments are pretty dull, and honestly the whole game itself can be really merciless at times with the scarce checkpoints it gives. though the top offender goes to clank's slow-ass gameplay, and it took until the ps3 era for clank's areas to not feel like a complete slog.

still a fun time overall, and the presentation, music, writing, and visuals still stand proud alongside the rest of the series. okay maybe this game has a leg up on the later games' writing. look, i'm still iffy on the whole direction of making ratchet "the super special last of his kind" thing. let the guy just be a lil mechanic who likes guns, that's what i know him best as.

also tesla claw goated

I'm probably giving this a higher rating than it truly deserves but there's just something about playing an RPG with such little documentation that I had to go on a Neopets fansite called "JellyNeo" to learn how to level up my Meowclops that made for a uniquely fun experience. This is a bizarre, cryptic mess of weird design choices that's also strangely charming. Far too hard for its target audience, but also nostalgic as hell. This is a definite recommend if you're one of those people who thinks the first Digimon World is fun. (Me. I'm people)

The very premise of this game goes off the rails the moment they decided to make a Neopets game where you don't actually play as a Neopet. On the web browser game, your pet Neopets could be equipped with smaller animals called Petpets, which were meant to just be little critters while your Neopet was a sapient creature with advanced human thoughts and feelings. As you can probably guess from the title, this is a diet Diablo game where you play as the pet of a Neopet, who was transported into a parallel world where the Petpets are anthropomorphic after your Very Heavily Romani Coded Neopet owner is cornered by an evil Neopet and their equally evil pet dog. The evil Neopet says a slur. The evil Neopet's evil dog also falls in that same parallel world and also becomes anthropomorphic. Now it's up to you to both save Petaria and escape Petaria to get back to Neopia and become a housepet again.

Oh, and one of the Petpets you can choose for your character is a Krawk. For those unfamiliar with the website, Krawks are very rare petpets that you can turn into Neopets and are implied to be baby Neopets. So your Krawk petpet from Neopia enters Petaria and becomes more anthropomorphic and starts wearing clothes and speaking when a Krawk can already become more anthropomorphic in Neopia by transforming into a Neopet.

If this sounds confusing, don't worry, it gets even better once you run into the actual creator of this parallel world, who is a Neopet that holds the Wand of Wishing and used this mystical power to craft an entire planet out of nothing and essentially became a god purely out of boredom. A yellow monkey in a fancy coat (fine, a Mynci) just casually strolls up to you 15 hours into the game and tells you about how he has lived for thousands of years on this world where the pets of Neopets walk on two legs and craft temples and statues in his likeness while I'm sitting there, wondering to myself "they literally could've just made a video game about the locales on the Neopets website but no, they had to Get Weird about it".

Like the premise of this game, the game design feels crafted on pure whimsy and vibes rather than what works. You can only visit 80% of the locales once and that includes multiple towns, potentially locking you out of very crucial progress. All items including money are finite, shopkeepers remember what items you sell them and have a limit on what you can sell them, and leveling up is tied to money rather than an experience system, which means you can never fully power up your animal monstrosity. To level up, you have to pay money to enter a battle arena and have a rematch with a story boss. This all sounds stupid and convoluted, but there is a natural charisma to a game that somehow manages to cram a square block into a round hole and say "this is an RPG!".

My favorite strange design choice? For some reason, enemy corpses never fade and there's a finite amount of enemy spawns, so this children's game gets a touch macabre when you're backtracking through the woods in complete silence and keep stepping on those bandits you killed two hours ago.

This game legit feels like someone made a ROM hack of the PS1 Spyro games, only it's a licensed Muppet title and you play as Robin, the frog Muppet whose most notable role was Tiny Tim in The Muppet Christmas Carol. The levels look like Spyro, the enemies look like Spyro, collecting all the Monster Energy feels like the gems in Spyro, and you even get a glide that feels like Spyro with the platforming based around gliding from higher spots in the level since you lack a double jump. It's utterly shameless in how much of it is cribbed from the Insomniac Spyro games.

However! While it is, indeed, a shameless Spyro clone with a Muppet-themed coat of paint, it playing and looking almost exactly like the PS1 Spyro games actually made me love this game. It helps that the soundtrack kicks ass and they actually got the Muppet performers to voice their characters.