I’ve played more than a few roguelikes, and game modes inspired by them, in my time. Though I would hardly call myself an expert on the genre, I’m always on the lookout for another one that can satisfy me while I listen to a podcast or talk on a Discord call.

And as someone who has played and loved Yacht Club’s Shovel Knight, the idea of translating those mechanics into a roguelike is enough to get my foot in the door.

I admit, when I first attempted to play the game for about an hour prior to stream, I was pretty lukewarm to cold. It’s not that I hated it, but more than I wasn’t sure it was what I was looking for. In general, I dislike being placed under a time limit. I enjoy being able to take my time when I feel the need to, so having a death trap pursue me if I take too long to progress deeper isn’t appealing on the surface.

And yet, during the stream, as I began to get my bearings and understand a bit more about what was going on mechanically, I felt myself enjoying the game more and more, even if vocally I was still expressing skepticism. What can I say? Sometimes I’m just stubborn that way and need more time to process my feelings about what I’m playing.

I’m still learning, having only progressed as far as the second stage, but I feel like if I keep at it I will be able to make it deeper, and more consistently. They did a great job translating Shovel Knight into a roguelike, and he still looks fantastic.

Though the number of other extras included in Up Your Arsenal is lower than it was for previous games in the franchise, owing to its fraught dev cycle even in comparison to its predecessors. Nonetheless, we will discuss them here.

In addition, at the time this game was being developed, one of the hot new accessories that hit the market for the PS2 was the online network modem and adaptor, which gave the console online functionality. For this reason, it was possible to add online multiplayer to the game. I don’t have anyone to play with, but there’s still enough functionality available to talk about it.

It’s pretty easy to make comparisons to Halo when talking about the multiplayer mode, but in fairness, I have it on good authority that translating Ratchet and Clank gameplay into the context of an old-school multiplayer shooter actually resulted in compelling gameplay. There’s still a small, but dedicated community that plays to this day, thanks to emulation.

Really, the most impressive part of it is that it was created at all. Obviously, that made use of some of the assets from it, like the Rangers and several of the maps, in the single-player campaign, but that’s par for the course. If the assets are there, you might as well have use of them.

I’ll want to try to set up a game of it with friends at some point, but until then I’ll appreciate it from afar.

Nefarious’s schemes have gone up in smoke, and the Solana Galaxy has been saved once more. Our heroes can finally relax and enjoy the premier of the latest Secret Agent Clank holofilm.

But just because they’re done doesn’t mean we are. Like Going Commando before it, Up Your Arsenal includes one of the coolest unlockables I have ever seen in a video game: The Insomniac Museum, where cut and unfinished content is given a chance to see the light of day of that curious minds like my own can get just a tiny glimpse into the game design process.

This episode is dedicated solely to that exploration.

Being able to see for ourselves how difficult that first Qwark vid-comic was before Insomniac retooled them to be more friendly is eye-opening. I can absolutely see a scenario where a 10-year-old kid isn’t able to get to the end of the game because they do not have the skill necessary to complete it. Since Insomniac already had a problem with that after some children had difficulty with the Glider segments in Going Commando, I imagine they were extra sensitive to this particular feedback.

Additionally, it’s fun to see what kind of weapons get left on the cutting room floor. Judging by both the museum in this and the previous game, many of the weapons we see get cut are cut because they would balloon the animation budgets for the game just by their existence. This is no longer the case in modern design, at least not to the same extent, because weapons like the Groovatron force the team to make a dancing animation for every enemy in the game, including bosses, but now that they’re no longer limited by the PlayStation 2’s paltry RAM and disc read speeds, that’s probably also been a huge boon.

It’s an incredible snapshot of an era where the game development process was far more resource and technology constrained than it is now. We’ve come a long way since then, for better and for worse.

The Biobliterator threat is still out there, but it needs to recharge before it can fire again. That means this is our chance to take it out of the picture before it turns any more people into robots. Even more fortunate for us, there happens to be a gun big enough to destroy the device on-site.

So let’s finish this fight!

As much as I prefer Going Commando over Up Your Arsenal, it’s hard to deny that it has a much stronger finale than Going Commando did. Even with the best armor we could realistically buy without going into New Game Plus, enemies still deal a respectable amount of damage, and create a reasonable challenge without feeling too overwhelming. It feels like an appropriately scaled final push.

It’s also fun to see all the gadgets (sans the one-time use Warp Pad) make their way into the final push too. This is more or less the final “hoo-rah” for gadgets in the series going forward. As the franchise doubles down on its more combat-focused direction, gadgets take less of the focus. Aside from the Swingshot and Grindboots, which have become standard tools in Ratchet’s arsenal, most of these tools are just minigames that serve as brief distractions before we return to the real platforming/combat hybrid action he’s known for.

Part of this is due to the shift in design. You’ll have noticed even in this game that levels are far more linear than they were back in Going Commando or the original game. Players may not know which path in a level was the “correct” path, but they knew each of those paths led to otherwise worthwhile on the other end. When levels become more linear, there’s less reason to use gadgets as gates than ensure players have completed certain objectives before they can continue their adventures.

It’s all part of the series’s growing pains. As it settles into its niche, it learns a lot from the early experimentation it did in this trilogy.

Some decks are brought together through powerful synergies that make it tough for opponents to stop them. They’ll play powerful cards, but their true strength is the way each effect plays off of the others. And then, there are decks that slam a bunch of powerful cards together into a strong mana curve and win through the sheer value generated by each card.

That’s what we’re playing today: Mono-black. A deck that comes together through the simple fact that each of its cards is individually worth incredible value.

There’s no real way to get around it: A lot of the power of this deck comes from the fact that black has access to many incredibly powerful value pieces like Invoke Despair, The Meathook Massacre, Sheoldred, the Apocalypse, and Liliana of the Veil. Each of them either creates a massive tempo swing/card advantage or presents an inevitability that our opponent must answer or otherwise die.

Even the lower end of our curve represents value, with beaters like Evolved Sleeper, Tenacious Underdog, and Reckoner Bankbuster. All of these cards are great plays in both the early and late game, presenting cheap threats that can draw us additional cards as the match goes long.

Each of the cards is powerful in a vacuum. Put enough of them in the deck and get them to stick on the board, and it’s easy to outvalue the opponent.

And yet, my heart yearns for blue, my true love. I’ll need to work on building one of those mono-blue counterspell piles.

(PS: It’s hilarious that Meathook Massacre got banned in the time since I recorded this. I don’t think it hits the deck too bad because we can find replacement cards, but it *is* a hit.)

Qwark’s vid comic has revealed the location of a secret hideout that he once used to disappear after escaping from Dr. Nefarious long ago, and it seems likely that’s where he’s holding up now.

Let’s go to him, and give the coward a piece of our minds.

That final clank section would have been a much smoother experience if I just exercised some patience. Almost all of the deaths I experienced there were the direct result of trying to rush. As they say, nothing wastes time more than trying to save time.

And of course, we can’t have a home base that we return to multiple times over the course of the game without a section where it’s invaded by the enemy. That’s not a criticism, but merely an observation. These types are spaces are ones that players start to treat as sacred/safe because the game has taught them that they are. When enemies attack us in our safe space, it feels like a violation of the “rules”, which heightens the impact.

That said, the actual invasion is over in the span of a few minutes, which takes a lot of the wind out of its sales. It would’ve been nice to linger a bit more on it, but there is always a danger that it would overstay its welcome.

Despite Qwark’s bumbling and cowardice, he did succeed in getting us a valuable data disk for Al to decrypt. In the meantime, a secret fifth issue of his four-part vid comic has come to light. With no better leads, we might as well check it out.

Obviously, the HUD (and the skill points menu if we ever looked at it) spoiled that there was a fifth vid comic before we ever got to this point in the story, but they still do a good job with its presentation. Using Slim Cognito as the narrator is a smart choice because we already associate him with the black market and under-the-table merchandise. It sells the illicit nature of the comic without having to compromise the presentation. Admittedly, it doesn’t make sense for Qwark to keep the comic in his possession, but that’s not really important in the grand scheme of things.

I appreciate Up Your Arsenal for still acknowledging and remembering that Captain Qwark is responsible for some truly horrific crimes in the name of staying famous and popular. I’ve said it before countless times, but despite the fact he remains a prominent character in the series for comic relief purposes, they never really reckon with the fact he’s done little to make up for what he’s done before. And that’s before we get to the (non-canon) theatrically reimaging of the first game’s story which further softens him.

It’s something that always struck me as awkward. And I know this is a story meant for kids, but it still rubs me the wrong way.

It’s complete madness. Somehow, Dr. Nefarious has discovered a way to transform organic life forms into evil robots, and he’s used it on the citizens and invading tyrannoids in Metropolis. It’s only a matter of time before he uses it a second time, so it’s up to us to stop him.

We’re going to try something a little different for the rest of this Let’s Play into our next game. Instead of uploading the entire VOD as one video, we’ll break it down into smaller, slightly (but only slightly) more digestible chunks. I find as I write these that the sheer number of topics to discuss can often make it overwhelming, so hopefully, that will stop being a problem.

Something I forgot to talk about during the recording is how, in retrospect, Captain Qwark faking his own death makes him look even worse. Since he said he would meet the team back at the shuttle, and they dutifully waited for him to return until Clunk hit the launch button, it’s entirely possible that he could have killed Ratchet and Scrunch by convincing them he really was going to return. Fortunately for us, Dr. Nefarious’s double agent saved the day by leaving Qwark to die, but he could not have known that would happen.

I’m not saying that Captain Qwark is the worst person alive, but I’m implying it.

After we finished with our Limited pool, I still had a solid half-hour to game a few games in Arena, so I brought out the deck I’ve been using to grind my dailies, courtesy of Saffron Olive from MTG Goldfish. He was able to craft a reasonably strong mono-red burn deck that used only common and uncommon cards available in the current standard. This means that I can run it while saving my valuable rare and mythic wildcards for decks I would want to try out in the current metagame.

And because it’s a mono-red deck, it’s very easy to quickly jam a ton of games with it on the Arena ladder.

It’s good to know that no matter how many times Standard rotates, what cards are in the format, or what the most popular decks tend to be, there will always be mono red, and it will always be one of the most accessible decks in the format (which is why they changed the face of Magic from Jace to Chandra).

And honestly, when grinding out dailies in Arena, a deck like this is probably one of the better ones a player can run. It is far easier to accumulate the number of wins one needs to cap their weekly experience when they can play 5 or so games in the span of 20-25 minutes. Just through the sheer volume of matches alone, they will accumulate wins rapidly.

It also helps that the deck is fast enough that many opponents will be caught completely off guard by its rapid-fire pace. It’s impressive how quickly life totals melt in the face of attack after attack. And if you can pull off the dream of a Turn 1 Kumano Faces Kakkazan into a Turn 2 Phoenix Chick, you’re already most of the way to an easy win.

If you’re looking to get back into Arena like I was, I can wholeheartedly recommend building this to start.

I must confess that I never thought I would return to MTG: Arena ever again. Wizards of the Coast and the Arena team never fixed the problems that I had with the economy and impossibly slow rate at which cards are acquired for anything other than a Limited player. Problems that have been effectively solved by other games like Legends of Runeterra and YuGiOh: Master Duel.

But as it turns out, I’m a huge simp for Ajani. And even if they turn him into a villain, I can’t help but want to play if they print a new card for my favorite leonin planeswalker.

Thankfully, I had enough Sealed tokens saved up from old prerelease Arena codes that I was able to use as an entry point to return to the game.

We didn’t have the best luck in this Sealed pool, but out of all the Limited formats I have tried and bounced off of over the years, this is the one that finally stuck with me. (Before you ask, I was not playing prerelease events or Arena during the time Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty dropped. I hear that is another legendarily fun limited format.)

I’m not sure what’s different about this Limited format compared to so many of the others I’ve played, but I’m able to create at least decent Limited decks that perform well. It’s been far more approachable for me that something like an Ixalan format like the one of my first pre-release. It could simply be that I’ve gotten better at reading Sealed pools, but I also think another part of it is the flexible mana bases we can construct in this format.

I can’t say how long I’ll keep up with the game, but considering I’m close to building Mono-Black Midrange for Standard I imagine I’ll be back for a least some time as long as I free to play it.