Welcome to the inaugural edition of Gamer’s Dayjournal™, my totally serious attempt at a daily chronicle of all the latest gaming news give or take a couple decades. Think or it more as your latest update on whatever game happened across my desk at any given period. While this daily foray into an arbitrary wormhole is sure to set trends and amass a following, if you’re reading this first post then consider yourself a charter member.(Note that charter membership comes with no benefits, intangible or otherwise.)
With that out of the way, let us dive into the uncharted territories of re-charting territories. That is, when to go back to old games in lieu of pulling something from the non-stop deluge of new content constantly being released by the gaming industry.
As a rule, your time is better spent with a good game you haven’t played as opposed to a good game you’re returning to. That is the law of diminishing returns at work, or another way to put it….
Obviously there’s risk to diving into something new. Time is a valuable commodity and there’s always a risk that you’ve set forth on a piece of mediocre debris that will gobble up valuable hours before you realize what you’ve gotten yourself into. (The game industry is actually better about this problem than most; critics seem to have a more consolidated opinion about what makes a ‘good product’ than those for other platforms of media, but this is a topic too expansive for an aside.)
As they say, variety is the spice of life and the most fulfilled go out of their way to discover the new/exciting and leave the nostalgia in their memories where it belongs. With that said, I’m replaying Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time for at least the 5th time.
Ratchet and Clank is up there as far as gaming franchises go for me and CiT is the crème de la crème. At times I’ve felt it’s the best game ever made (if you check the under-kept list on the site, it’s at #2 behind Mass Effect 3) and here I am again, putting off gems like Resident Evil 2, Kingdom Hearts 3, and Red Dead Redemption 2 so I can dust off my PS3 and revisit this bad boy.
I don’t feel shame in returning to CiT because it has the ineffable quality. It’s that quality that brings people back to Star Wars or Lord of the Rings. It’s the quality that comes about when you’ve been playing high quality series for years and it culminates in an experience that just works on every level. There is a chemistry in some stories that leave you at a loss at how to describe why you love it, you just know that you want to revisit it as much as possible.
You know, that ineffable quality.
I can begin to dig at some of the things that work so well in CiT. Clank might be the most likable sidekick in any mascot-platformer. Insomniac smartly waited for this to deploy their first recurring villain and the story explores a past and stakes that were set up in the previous game to great effect, making the conclusion of this game all the more rewarding. (Note: Tools of Destruction, while inferior, did a lot of leg work to make the overall story better. I make myself play it before I replay CiT every time.)
It’s also just a really fun game. Ratchet and Clank always is. Still, this is a journal entry, not a review or retrospective or gushfest. (Okay, it’s kind of a gushfest.)
Future entries can dive into the nuances of what makes this particular game great, but I think there’s an important lesson to learn from just beginning this silly thing:
Embrace the new…. but feel bad about coming back to your old flames every now and then.
Until next time.
If there is a next time
Gamer's Daytimer 