Spring Cleaning Time

A few weeks ago, Vicki and I resumed playing Ratchet & Clank: A Crack in Time, which had gotten abandoned when Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 online gaming began dominating our PS/3 and my life. When my head finally came up from that experience, I was pretty burned out on gaming and it's taken awhile before I got back in the mood.

Insomniac Games did a fairly good job on this latest Ratchet & Clank offering, I'd say. The weapons were fun, as usual for R&C, although perhaps a little overpowered for some of the enemy AI that you face (the Buzz Blades and Spikes, in particular, often allowed Vicki to decimate an angry horde without even breaking a sweat). I found some of the environmental designs repetitive, as I swear I spotted the exact same layout on more than one planet... but it was still fun to level up the weapons and discover each new wacky character than Ratchet and Clank interact with. The humour in that game is some of the best I've seen in anything I've played.

Once we wrapped that up toward the end of the week, I put Modern Warfare 2 back in and decided to finish up its single player campaign. I was about 2/3 of the way through, I'd reckon in hindsight, meaning that it didn't take me long yesterday to get to the final gruesome scene. Along the way, Washington, D.C. was hit by an EMP and the White House came under attack, but hey! Better it happen in a video game than in real life!

Now I'm trying to figure out what to play next. I had thought about redoing the first Resistance game after watching a retrospective on it that some of the Insomniac guys held (them again!)... until I remembered that my copy is at Tammy's apartment in Toronto, while she's in the middle of a six-week long trip to Africa! So much for that idea. Maybe in August.

I may pop in my Killzone 2 disc and see how its campaign feels the second time through, as I played it in two distinct parts originally (with something else in the middle). I definitely enjoyed it the first time through, despite taking an extended break for a while.

Ah, decisions, decisions...

[Update later that evening: I decided to revisit Killzone 2 but to play it through on the second hardest difficulty this time (rather than the third hardest, aka the second easiest, that I completed it on previously). I've already died more times than I can count, but that's actually a good thing as it's making it quite a different experience for me.]