New Ratchet & Clank Game Announced

Earlier this week at the Game Developers Conference, Sony announced that the next installment in the Ratchet & Clank series, titled A Crack In Time, is due out this fall for the Playstation 3. "A Crack in Time will conclude the story sparked in 2007's Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction and continued last year in the pair's downloadable debut, Ratchet and Clank Future: Quest for Booty. The game will follow the lombax Ratchet as he attempts to save his robotic sidekick, and Sony promises to reveal both their origins and ultimate destinies during the course of the game, teasing the biggest breakup since the Beatles." A trailer for the game has been released as well.

Comments

Sweet!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sweet!!! Another good game in a awesome series

The Clock Blockers

[thebluesgnr]

According to the Insomniac guys on the latest ListenUP podcast their favorite subtitle for the game internally was "Ratchet & Clank: Clock Blockers". Too bad Sony legal didn't like that. :-(

Anyway, people interested in this game should also checkout the weapons contest, it's pretty cool.

Re:The Clock Blockers

[GodLessOne]

I always fancied - Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal!

I love Insomniac

[DreamsAreOkToo]

I've been playing their games since the original Spyro. I think they know what the hell they're doing, make a game fun - don't get caught up in the details.

I hope they can figure out a good franchise with good features, after Ratchet and Clank. Resistance has been OK, but it's already in an overcrowded genre, with a pretty cliche shtick.

Worth posting?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhm... how is this news compared to any other generic platformer being released for consoles? I could understand a major Mario or Final Fantasy game or something from Blizzard or Id being worth posting. Hell, maybe even a GTA game or God of War, or as part of a post that just talked about several announced games at GDC. But Ratchet and Clank? This is like posting about a new Madden game. Ratchet and Clank doesn't even sell as well as Madden. No Ratchet and Clank game has ever brought anything new or innovative to the 3D platform genre or video games in general. It's not a noteworthy game, even on gaming news sites. Why post about it here?

Re:Worth posting?

[Anonymous Coward]

To make people like you post flaming piles of shit posts like you just did, douchebag!

Re:Worth posting?

[spire3661]

Did you even PLAY R&C Future? IT was visually stunning, well crafted and highly polished. Please enlighten me as to what Mario has done to push his genre forward since Mario 64 that you would consider newsworthy.

Re:Worth posting?

[Anonymous Coward]

Galaxy definitely showed evolution of the design, but wasn't revolutionary like Mario 64, and I'm sure most people agree that Sunshine was nothing new.

But being well polished or even fun is not newsworthy. Being a "top 10 3D platformer" in a sea of 999999 other 3D platformers is not newsworthy. Especially not when there have been 9 iterations of the exact same game in the past 8 years, hence my Madden comment. If nothing else, major Mario games at least only come out every 4 years or so instead of more than once per year.

Wolf 3D for iPhone was a way bigger and more interesting story than this, if for no other reason than the link to Carmack's blog-like post about the development process. Even the fact that the source was made available at the time of release would have made that story slashdot worthy.

If you want evidence that this story isn't worth posting, just look at the number of comments, literally half of which are either offtopic or replies to my post complaining about it being posted. That right there tells you no one gives a shit.

Re:Worth posting?

[dr.banes]

Agreed. Again the question begs as to who gives a shit that their is a new Ratchet and Clank game? They are fun diversions but really who cares? They are running it to the ground, with rehash after rehash, sequel after sequel. Is this news just because all the bad press Sony keeps getting?

Re:Worth posting?

[DreamsAreOkToo]

I never know if people are actually going to read my responses, but here it goes.

R&C has been fantastic! But it sounds like this is the last one. I haven't liked Resistance all that much and the genre is crowded (realistic FPS set in a semi-alien near future). Their schtick, with their being alien hives and also people being turned into aliens, is kind of cliche and lame. I feel Gears of War uses the same exact setting.

The guns have cool features in Resistance, but they aren't fun the way they are in R&C.

So, to reiterate my original post, I've loved all of Insomniac's games, but if Resistance is what their new games will be like, after R&C is done, that's too bad. :(

Re:Worth posting?

[Anonymous Coward]

24 hrs later, 16 comments. Literally a third of which are this thread bitching about the story being posted at all. This has to be the lowest number of comments for a slashdot article in months.

I hope Soulskill and the other slashdot editors learn something from this.

Disapponited with Quest for Booty

[spire3661]

None of your weapons or skills carried over from R&C Future, was a very short game, not enough time to get back to the level you were at in Future. I probably wont be picking this up as I really dont feel like starting over AGAIN. I realize that game makers have to allow for a learning curve in almost every installment, but i just felt really weak and limited in Quest for Booty, with not enough time to 'ahem' ratchet up the weaponry, as it were.

Re:Disapponited with Quest for Booty

[cadrell0]

Have you played any of the other Ratchet and Clank games? There was never any carry over from the previous game, so it would be absurd to think that this would change after the 5th game in the series. Would the game really be fun if on the first level you had the mega rocket launcher that kills everything on the screen? And they usually give some reason for you not having all of your weapons (sometimes it is a little weak, but it is there). And yes I know that you can sometimes access the weapons you had in a prior game, but it usually costs a decent amount of bolts and you can't get those on the first level.

I do agree that Quest for Booty was too short for $15, but that's not going to stop me from getting the new game.

Re:Disapponited with Quest for Booty

[geminidomino]

Have you played any of the other Ratchet and Clank games? There was never any carry over from the previous game, so it would be absurd to think that this would change after the 5th game in the series.

Not entirely true. I think it was in "Up your Arsenal" (the one where R&C get sucked into another part of the Galaxy) if you had a savegame for the previous game on the save card, all of the Gadgetron weapons from the first game could be purchased eventually (but weren't able to level up like the new ones), some of them even for free.

New Open-Source Train Simulator openBVE goes v1.0

[distantbody]

2009-03-26 (If Ratchet & Clank game is important, then a new open-souce simulator is doubly so, Slashdot editors and off-topic moderators be damned)

The free and open source 3d train simulator, openBVE, has just turned the big v1.0.

openBVE was born in April 2008 as a replacement to the popular freeware programs BVE Trainsim 2 & 4. The lack of compatibility between BVE Trainsim 2 & 4 and the developmental uncertainty of the 5th version (originally named Boso View Express by the sole Japanese developer Mackoy) lead one resolute user to start openBVE.

Michelle has made great progress with her new code, and whilst the current installation procedure and basic 'getting started' instructions are rough, her communication on the openBVE forum and her great developer documentation all indicate openBVE will continue to get better.

(Link to openBVE website omitted due to already unreliable servers)(P.S. Michelle has not licensed her work under a specific OSS license, but rather uses the phrase "anti-copyright"

Hackers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Was the best movie of all time.

Re:New Open-Source Train Simulator openBVE goes v1

[spire3661]

Thanks for ensuring that I will NEVER even look at this. Good job. Im sure quite a few of the fellow denizens of this realm will agree.

Re:New Open-Source Train Simulator openBVE goes v1

[Daemonax]

That looks awesome. But without having a well defined license this program won't be able to be included in the repositories of many distros. That's really sad. :-\ I hope that she'll reconsider for utilitarian reasons at least.

How to of Gaming

[Anonymous Coward]

1.Create limber hero and snarky but helpful sidekick.

2.Build beautiful elaborate living breathing worlds.

3.Sell ryno's to blow it all to hell.

4.profit

Love the series

[AioKits]

R&C is one of the few series I'll pick up on release days. It lets you go from powerful to OMFG OVER 9000! over the course of the game play which appeals to my more destructive side. The humor spices up the game and isn't used as the primary vehicle to push the story along. Look forward to another romp with the Lombax and his robot buddy.

That said, when is Sucker Punch releasing another Sly Cooper? That was a seriously fun series.