Baud Attitude

I am so going to hell for ripping off THAT tagline.

I bought the first Ratchet & Clank game years ago, when it was added to Sony’s Greatest Hits line, because I’d seen people raving about the series and figured I should probably own it.

It sat on the shelf for a while.  Note that I didn’t say “and figured I should probably play it.”

Then, I was browsing the PSN marketplace, mostly because I was looking for a LittleBigPlanet demo – this was before I rented and finished it, obviously – and my wife talked me into downloading the demo for Ratchet & Clank Future.

And that was pretty enjoyable, but I didn’t know who any of the characters were, so I decided that I would dig deep into the backlog and give the first game a shot.

Well, obviously, I knew that the metal guy was probably “Clank”, but work with me a bit here.  I’m using exaggeration for effect.

The first game was, well, not as pretty and shiny as the PS3 game, but damn if it didn’t suck me in and make me play it whenever I had a spare half hour or so.

Tonight I brought it to a most satisfactory conclusion.

Now, as I look over the last couple of weeks of blog entries, I notice something important:  I didn’t bitch at any point.  This says a lot about the game – usually I can find SOMETHING that annoys me.  Truth is, it was a really good combination of platforming, very very light puzzling, and lots and lots of blowing stuff the hell up using a wide selection of satisfactory boomsticks.

OK, well, the hoverboard bit, that was painful.

BOTH hoverboard bits.

I had been warned, by the way, about the final boss fight.  There seem to be quite a few veterans of the first game who, upon finding out that you’re playing it for the first time, take care to say that the last boss is a huge difficulty spike compared to the rest of the game, and this is true.  It took me four attempts to beat him, and I was flat broke from re-buying ammo by the time I did.

It didn’t get frustrating, though.  I’m not sure if that’s excellent game design or if Psychonauts just hurt me so badly that I can never again feel pain.

As previously mentioned, I tried Resistance: Fall Of Man recently and quite liked it.

I was getting really fed up about the controls, though, particularly the commands assigned to the L1/L2/R1/R2 buttons, until I realized that I may have, for the last 13 years, been holding Playstation controllers wrong.

Superficially, both modern consoles have four buttons on the edge furthest from the player – the PS3 has L1/L2/R1/R2, the Xbox has LB/LT/RB/RT – but they’re used completely differently.

LB and RB on the Xbox more or less correspond to L1/R1 on the PS3, but they’re not buttons you use frequently during gameplay.  They’re usually mapped to stuff like toggling ammo types or what have you – your index fingers rest on LT/RT most of the time and you only occasionally have to reach up and hit one of the Bs.  Your middle, ring, and pinky fingers are supporting the bottom of the controller.

When you hold the PS3 controller in the same fashion, your index fingers hit L2 and R2.

Resistance has “crouch” on L2 and “secondary weapon” on L1.  This was frustrating.

I couldn’t figure out how I was supposed to use a secondary weapon while crouching, and if I uncrouched it tended to give one of the really rather accurate Chimera a clear shot at me.

I also kept trying to hit R2 to fire.  R2 is weapon select, by the way.

Then I looked at how I was holding the controller, and realized that if, instead of really trying to grip the controller, which took three fingers, I just sort of rested the controller on my ring and pinky fingers, I would have my index fingers on L1/R1 – the “fire” buttons – and my middle fingers on the crouch and weapon select buttons.

It also put my thumbs on the analog sticks in a way that – and this is probably subjective – seemed to give me a lot more fine control.

I’ll try a little more time with this until I really commit to the idea that I’ve been doing things wrong since 1995, but right now it’s looking like that might be the case.

I blame Sony; obviously they made their controllers wrong.

…something like that.

Our PS3 gets frequent use as a Blu-Ray player, but doesn’t get a whole lot of use as a game console, mostly because the games are still so expensive.  There are an awful lot of really decent Xbox 360 games that can be had for $20 or so new, while looking for a $20 game on the PS3 limits you to the likes of, oh, Fantastic Four : Rise Of The Silver Surfer : The Game or – everyone’s favorite – Last Year’s Sports Game.

PS3 game pricing seems to assume that you are (a) a single-console owner and (b) so loyal to the brand that you never ever look at the selection available for Other Consoles.

Rainbow Six Vegas being a PS3 “Greatest Hits” release at $30 when it’s been a $20 game on the 360 for months, for instance, or Bioshock being released for the PS3 at full price after it had already been marked down to $20 for the PC and $30 for the 360.

From a business sense, this is a little more excusable for PS3 exclusives – there’s a huge art budget in creating these games, after all, and if you’re only selling your game on the PS3, you can’t spread that budget across multiple releases.  Even so, I don’t think Heavenly Sword should still be $51 on Amazon, 14 months after release.  It’s a FINE six or seven hours of beating up mans and throwing hats, but it was a Worth Renting when it was released and it remains a Worth Renting to this day.

Obviously this same rant can’t be extended to new releases – PS3 games cost the same as 360 games if they’re released at the same time, after all – but that overlooks one thing.  I’ve played an awful lot of cheap 360 games.  If a game comes out for the PS3 and 360 at the same time, I’m likely to pick up the 360 version just because it’s a more familiar console, which means I have less incentive to get familiar with the PS3, and so on and so forth, it’s a vicious cycle.

Anyway, uh, where was I?

Oh right.

So anyway, a couple of weeks ago, I found Resistance: Fall Of Man on sale for $19, so now I have a second PS3 game to sit next to my copy of Stranglehold.

I tried it out when I got it home, got a bit frustrated with the first level, and put it aside until I could have a friend come over and help me through the tricky bits in co-op mode.

I am not proud, but I make no excuses.  Those Chimera are fiendishly accurate and you have no way to heal yourself.

And yes, I WAS playing on Easy.

As I was saying, I had a friend visit – and, with his help, got through the first level – whereupon we immediately got hit with what I am going to assume was only the first of the game’s Big Reveals.

Here I will take a moment to commend the creators of the game.  The game is played in flashback – the opening dialog is from the point of view of a survivor of the events – and you know right up front that your character disappeared four days after the start of said events.  The Big Reveal at the beginning of level 2 not only serves to give you your first inkling of WHY you’re going to be disappearing, it also puts the rather difficult first level into perspective.

Oh, and you get the ability to heal yourself quickly using items, which wouldn’t necessarily be forgivable in a game set in 1951 – alternate universe or no – but which makes sense after the Big Reveal.

It’s rather neatly done and I’m looking forward to the next things the game throws at me.