davidn

Somehow my memory had filed the Ratchet and Clank games - starring as they do a fluffy protagonist and robot sidekick very reminiscent of Gir - as very innocent, which made it a bit of a surprise to be continually reminded of their underlying air of sort of cheerful wrongness. For a start, the third game happens to be called (I promise you) Up Your Arsenal (the European releases, for whatever reason, decided they couldn't call games things like that and they were simply numbered). And throughout the game there's a sort of Futuramaish humour that would show a universe that would really seem quite tragic if it wasn't played for laughs - like the announcements in the background that say "All life forms please report to section B for execution" and (the current highlight) an upbeat sort of Europop song about exterminating everyone. I hadn't actually realized that she was meant to be Britney Spears until much later. Such is my awareness of popular culture.

I also didn't know that the series had grown quite so extensively since the last time I saw it - even though I thought of it as a very new series, it's now over six years old. Once again, time's going past too quickly. Anyway, the games have extended on to the PS3, and they've chosen to call the latest one Quest for Booty. Just as well there are no innuendoish misinterpretations to get out of that, then.

I've been playing Mother 3 on the train a lot recently, and was mildly surprised after eight hours to find that I seem to have reached the start of the game that I thought that I was playing when I made the first post about it. It's incredible how it gets you to feel nostalgic for the game up to that point, having to walk around and see what's changed in the three-year time gap between chapters 3 and 4.

After the introduction section, which was the only part of the game that I'd seen when I announced I was playing it, it takes you away from the family that you're asked to name, then jumps about between characters far more often than you would have any right to expect - mostly in the sense that a chapter will end (usually with the conclusion "and they were all dead") and you'll pick up the story with a new set of characters, each of whom has some different connection to the town that the game is set in. It's only now that I'm on chapter 4 that the game seems that this time it might have settled down and that I'll be staying with a central character - the belated introduction of the concept of money being a fairly large indicator of that. But we'll see.

Finally, no matter how validly thematic the title is, I just can't take the new action/horror game from the creators of Half-Life seriously at all if they've chosen to call it Left 4 Dead. Ace.