So, Final Fantasy XIV continues to fill the role of “new MMO which is consuming all available gaming time”, but I’ve actually made some time to finish up a goal I accidentally set myself a few years back.

Looking at my PSN download history, I apparently downloaded the demo for “Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction” on November 9th, 2008. My other download that day was “Still Alive” for Rock Band, if that helps cement the era we’re talking about.

I really liked the demo, but I hadn’t played any of the other games in the series, so I could tell that I was missing many of the gags. So, instead of buying that, I played the first PS2 Ratchet & Clank game, and it was pretty good, enough to convince me to buy ToD.

But, obviously, there were still several games between that and the Future series, so I didn’t jump directly into the PS3 game. Instead, I tried to immediately start the second R&C PS2 game, which didn’t work out very well. It took me a year or so to get back to it, but I finally started that in October of 2009. Around this time, a second R&C Future game came out, which meant a price drop on “Quest for Booty”, the download-only sequel, and I bought it.

I played the THIRD R&C game in the summer of 2011. So, roughly three years after trying that Tools of Destruction demo, I was at the point where I was sufficiently seeped in series lore to give it a go… and found that I was completely burned out on the games. I put it aside again.

Skip ahead to September of THIS year, though, and Tools of Destruction finally comes back off the shelf as something I can play on Saturday mornings, and that took four weekends to play through, and then Quest for Booty took up the Saturday morning after THAT, and now I am finally caught up to Ratchet & Clank as of, roughly, late 2008.

To add an extra bit of shame to the whole affair, “Quest for Booty” ends with a Shocking Reveal that the Real Big Bad Guy was someone who I’d completely forgotten. I had to go to Wikipedia to realize that he was the primary antagonist from one of the PS2 games, so all the time I spent catching up with the series was more or less a waste of time in that regard.

In any other regard, it was far from a waste of time. While there were some spots of frustration here and there in the five games I played, they were consistently a high-quality mix of light platforming and heavy weaponry.

That last phrase sounds suspiciously familiar and I may have stolen it from somewhere.

There are two more games in the Future series, “A Crack in Time” and “Into the Nexus”, and I don’t own either. I’ve sworn off buying any more PS3 games, though, so I may just need to let the Quest for Booty cliffhanger go and assume that it all worked out in the end.