Our sterling act of “heroism” has inadvertently done more harm than good. According to the thief we recovered the experiment from, the whole galaxy is in imminent danger.

Now that our ship has been restored, it’s time to investigate this potential risk to the Bogon Galaxy.

Going back to replay these older Ratchet & Clank games, knowing more about the development cycle of them now than I did growing up, it’s fascinating to watch Insomniac learn valuable lessons about player engagement in real time.

Lessons like the fact that players don’t enjoy being nickel-and-dimed just to make story progress. Back in the original Spyro the Dragon, there was little incentive to collect treasure beyond a couple of checks that the balloonists would make before allowing players to travel to the next world. Unless one was going to 100%, there was simply no need to be concerned with the treasure counts.

To correct that, Spyro 2 created Moneybags, an NPC who served as a gem sink, which gave players a reason to gather, save up, and spend gems in order to make progress in the game. That way, even if players don’t go for 100%, they still have a reason to go out of their way to collect the gems scattered about the level.

In the hypercapitalist world of Ratchet & Clank, NPCs all over have plenty of reason to charge us for the items and information we need to make progress throughout the game. And thus, our money sink is still in effect. However, unlike Spyro, we already have something to spend our hard-earned bolts on… weapons!

In other words, our bolt count is being taxed both to make the story progress and to upgrade our armor and arsenal. The fact that we spend on weaponry invalidates the need for the game designers to charge us for raw progression. It wasn’t until Going Commando’s release that this was something they learned, and it is the last game to impose those kinds of money gates.

You’ll see this and other such lessons learned as well, but this was the one that always stood out to me.

The Fusion Festival has begun in Master Duel and with it some phenomenal support for certain archetypes that make use of the mechanic. One of which is the incredible Destroyer Pheonix Enforcer package, which we will make use of.

And the other is the powerful Despia archetype, which is the basis of our deck today.

I don’t know if it’s a problem, but something I’ve started to notice in Master Duel is that almost every deck contains these exact cards.

• 3 Maxx “C”
• 3 Ash Blossom & Joyous Spring
• 1 Destiny HERO – Celestial
• 1 Destiny HERO – Dasher
• 2 Fusion Destiny
• 2 Called By The Grave
  
• 1 Destiny HERO – Destroyer Pheonix Enforcer
• 1 Predaplant Verte Anaconda

With the occasional 2-3 copies of Infinite Impermanence, this 12-15 card package forms between 1/4 to 1/2 of the main deck before we even start to discuss what else belongs in it, and for good reason. Every one of these cards is an absurdly powerful tool that can be used for a huge advantage in the form of card draw, removal, or (usually) disruption.

Beyond that, since we’re a fusion archetype with many boss monsters that have broad, almost generic requirements for fusion, we can run a few copies of Super Polymerization. Like our Fallen of Albaz, it can be used to get around cards that protect themselves from our effects by sacrificing them as the cost for fusion. What makes Super Polymerization even better is that our opponents have no way of responding to it, so we can take care of their omni-negate monster without giving them a chance to use it.

Payoffs like Pheonix Enforcer, Masquerade the Blazing Dragon, and Despian Quaeritis all serve as powerful ways to keep our opponents down so we can threaten lethal. Masquerade’s 600 life point tax on every ability our opponent uses, and Quaeritis can keep them unable to attack us, or otherwise set up a powerful Battle Phase.

And thanks to all of our powerful searches like Aluber the Jester of Despia, Despian Tragedy, and Branded Opening, we should always have access to the tools we need.

It might not be the most powerful deck, that’s still probably Zoodiac Tri-Brigade, but it’s a fun deck.

We’re still hot on the trail of the elusive thief of Megacorp’s latest experiment. After what he did to our little robot buddy, he’s cruisin’ for a brusin’.

There’s a mission to complete, so let’s rough him up and take back what was taken.

We spent a lot of time talking about it, but the twist with Angela, to this day, is the source of great contention for the Ratchet and Clank fandom. Part of it comes from the game itself since she basically becomes almost a completely different character once she’s no longer “The Thief”. More importantly, she looks a lot like Ratchet, to the point many people assume she’s also a lombax. And without going too deeply into it, a significant plot point of the Future games and beyond is that Ratchet is the only lombax remaining in the entire galaxy. Queue the internet dwellers arguing over whether or not she is a lombax, which continues even now.

Additionally, we also hit another one of the big innovations that Going Commando brought to the series, which is the larger sprawling open space with a ton of collectibles that can be cashed in for bolts. These worlds often become a place to grind for early-game experience for our weaponry, and many games in the series to come would make use of this concept. It’s another example of the series forging its own identity separate from the other mascot platformers on the PS2.

It’s part of why this game is so foundational for what’s to come.

How good can a game that only costs three dollars realistically be? Well… as of the time of writing, I’ve played it for over 22 hours, and I’m still having as much fun as I did at the start.

This is Vampire Survivors, a game that is far better than it has any right to be.

It’s such a simple concept, but it’s one that has a ton of depth hidden within it. The fact that our weapons fire off automatically means that we can focus entirely on our character’s movements to make sure they stay out of danger for as long as possible, positioning so that when they do fire they do maximum damage.

And the more we play, the more characters, weapons, and passives we unlock to further diversify each run. The loop is damn near addicting.

If anything here was of interest to you, please spend the $3 and give it a try.

With our help, the sly raccoon and his friends have restored his family’s honor and legacy. That taken care of, it is now time to return to the galaxy’s greatest heroic duo for another incredible interplanetary adventure.

Welcome to Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando.

You can find Mike Stout and Tony Garcia’s Developer Commentary Let’s Play here.
And Golden Bolt’s retrospective on Going Commando here.

This is probably my personal favorite game in the whole franchise, as it introduced many of the concepts that would become core to its identity going forward. Aspects like experience for Ratchet and his guns, and the ability to strafe, dramatically improve the feel of combat while staying true to the general control scheme.

And that enables the series to pivot more in a combat-focused direction. While we’re still doing a lot of platforming, there are more and more varied fights scattered through the levels. At this point, we also have another series staple, the arena, which functions as an entire arena dedicated to pure gunplay. It’s a strong direction and identity for the series since its selling point was always a diversity of weaponry, which provided a unique identity to stand apart who its contemporaries.

I look forward to exploring more of this game, and I hope you join me for the adventure.

We’re almost ready to knock the Panda King off of his mountain and stop him from extorting any more mountain villages. And once he’s done, the true mastermind behind the Fiendish Five is next on the list: The enigmatic Clockwerk.

Tonight, we finish up with Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus.

Thanks to Resbit for their video of the Master Thief Sprints and the Behind the Scenes video unlocked by doing them all.

We’ve discussed it before, but one of the weaknesses of the original Sly Cooper, that gets worse as the game progresses, is the oversaturation of mini-games. It starts out innocently enough with the odd twin-stick shooter section in Raleigh’s hub. And yet, in Ms. Ruby’s and Panda King’s hub worlds, almost half the levels are mini-games.

Which is part of what makes the finale against Clockwerk so frustrating. Only two of the stages, out of the seven, are pure platforming challenges, one of which is pretty short. The vast majority of the time here is spent doing minigames in order to advance the story. And they’re usually some of the toughest minigames of their archetype.

It also points to how pointless the lives system is (and why it was ditched in the future) because there are no checkpoints in any of these levels. If we perish or fail, we will need to restart from the beginning anyway.

Fortunately, the climb to the top of the tower and the ensuing boss fight are both strong enough to make up for the rest, ending the game on a climactic high note. It was a pleasure to play this game again, and share it with you all.

Next time, we return to Ratchet and Clank in Going Commando!

This is the story of a streamer named Brandon. Brandon was a curious sort, streaming games to a limited audience consisting mostly of his close friends. And one day, when he had already decided to stream more Crystalline Conflict from Final Fantasy XIV, Brandon noticed that The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe had been released on the same day.

Though it concerned him that he had started writing about himself in the third person, Brandon knew that was just the effect that The Stanley Parable has on people who play it.

The Stanley Parable has been, and always will be, almost mandatory reading for anyone who dips their toes in the sphere of games criticism. Even today, nine years later, there are so few other games around that tackle the concept of choice and consequence so directly, interrogating the tension that exists between the player and the game itself.

It is often said that video games are, at their core, a conversation between the player and the designer, and Stanley Parable literalizes this concept to its most logical extreme, with a narrator taking the role of an overbearing designer who can’t stand that the player might not always agree with the direction he wants to take the story. And we can go along with him, or try to poke holes to see what we might be able to get away with.

And this premise lends itself very well to remakes and revisions, probably until the end of time. I played The Stanley Parable back when it was just a Half-Life 2 mod, a few years before it became its own game, and seeing how far it’s come since those days is something to behold. May it continue as one of the coolest living documents in video game history.

The clever raccoon had been busy, infiltrating the eye of the storm to take out Raleigh the frog at its source, swiping his section of the legendary Thievius Raccoonus. And with him dealt with, we’ve set our sights upon Mesa City and its musclehead master, Muggshot.

Let’s show him why you never skip leg day.

Since it was a topic of conversation in the stream, I went ahead a looked up how the vaults, and the powerups we unlock by opening them, work under the hood mechanically. According to the Sly fan wiki, I was correct in saying that the codes for each vault were fixed. Since Bentley’s VA has to record lines for each of them, and since they often take the context of the level into account, it only makes sense for them to be fixed.

However, the contents of each vault are not fixed, at least not by location. Instead, the abilities we get are allocated in a fixed order, checking for what we already have unlocked and giving us the next item on the list, and this check is performed when we load into a level. The exception is the third vault for every hub world, where we’re instead given the ability to scan for clues and breakables in that hub’s levels. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about that since Ms. Ruby’s and the Panda King’s hub worlds each contain only four vaults, meaning that we can only reap that reward for a single level in each of them. That seems like a paltry reward, but then again we don’t really make much use of the powers anyway.

Something else that I mentioned was how awkward it can be to play through Ms. Ruby’s stage knowing what I know now, compared to what I knew way back in 2002. In particular, the fact that we as a western civilization misappropriated a lot from the “Vodou” belief system that originated in Haiti. It’s admittedly nothing new, and hardly the game’s fault since 2002 wasn’t an era where that type of cultural sensitivity was the norm. Even I made the mistake of calling it an organized religion in the stream when it’s more of a loose coalition of centuries-old traditions. Still, it’s worth pointing out and calling out so that we don’t repeat those mistakes.

Believe it not, since that first stream I did on Master Duel over two months ago, I’ve actually kept with it. In time, through daily quests and theme events, I finally secured enough currency to build a top-tier meta deck to climb through the ranks.

That’s right, we’re playing Zoodiac Tri-Brigade.

Not only is it a powerful deck, but its skeleton, minus the staples that belong in almost any deck, are mostly Normal and Rare (for MTG players, common and uncommon) rarity, making it a relatively cheap and easy deck to construct. And once one does, it does be easy to port those higher rarity cards into future decks. Now, there’s nothing stopping those decks from taking a lot of Super Rare and Ultra Rare card points to construct, but that’s a whole separate issue.

As for Yu-Gi-Oh itself, I sadly don’t have much more to add than I did back in that first stream. That said, I have gotten more comfortable with the state of the game as it exists now, mostly because I’ve been playing more rounds and consuming more content. Having just that much more of a grounding on the modern meta makes it easier to tell when I can afford to wait, or when I need to use disruption to end a combo prematurely.

It’s a lot easier now to see why people adore the game still, to this day.

Fresh off the debut game of one of the most legendary franchises of the PS2 generation, it’s time to exit the lofty heights of the Solana Galaxy and play something a little more down to Earth. Let’s play as one cunning, devious, Sly Cooper and the Thevius Raccoonus.

The first thing to notice with Sly Cooper is how snappy the opening is. It feels like the intro to a heist movie with the way it’s shot and edited, opening directly into the gameplay the moment we hit Start (which was uncommon at the time). We spent no more than 10 minutes from the time we hit start to the end of the introduction level, and in that time the game has already told us all we need to know about our protagonist, his supporting cast, our goal, and the world this game is set in. The brevity must be commended.

And as a turns out, a world ripe with thievery is also a world that enables a ton of diverse platforming challenges. Most of what a player would do in a typical platformer can integrate the flavor of pulling off a heist or sneaking into a securely guarded location almost effortlessly. The presentation goes a long way in that respect since Sly’s design looks like a typically masked burglar and his voice actor’s performance reminds one of something like George Clooney in Ocean’s 11. There’s also an environmental presentation, with the alarm systems that act as platforming obstacles and music that fades out when sneaking undetected and turns frantic when we’ve been caught.

It’s a shame that the series is in limbo right now because even today it still looks and plays unbelievably well.