I’ve been having a tough time figuring out what I want to play recently, so I thought a good cure for that would be to play something a bit nostalgic. A favourite from my childhood, maybe, and while watching a very fun Ratchet and Clank speedrun from this year’s Summer Games Done Quick, I quickly came to the conclusion that this was the one I wanted to revisit. It had been a while, after all, and despite getting right to the final boss, I never actually managed to beat the game, so I wanted to set myself the challenge of beating it.
I still own my PS2 and my original copy of it, but I also didn’t really want to have to deal with the hassle of setting it up, let alone not have the modern luxury of the PS4 and PS5’s rest mode. Luckily, I also owned the HD collection of the first three games for my PS Vita – remember that old thing? – and that felt like the best way to go about it. It meant I could just lie down on the sofa, or take it with me to bed, and pick it up a little bit at a time, or even on the go. I hadn’t played on my Vita in a while, a console purchase that was arguably a mistake in the grand scheme of things, but over the course of my playthrough of Ratchet and Clank I couldn’t help but think… Sony should make another one of these things.
Yes, I know it didn’t sell all that well, with estimates of around 16 million lifetime units sold, a far cry from the PlayStation Portable’s 80 million. But it really was ahead of its time, a console that could play intensive, home console-like titles, an OLED screen, hell even just having two analogue sticks. It was the Nintendo Switch before the Switch, just without the, you know, switching element. There were other problems too, with easily one of the biggest being that there just weren’t all that many games for it, at least not over in the West (there are a number of Japan-exclusives I’m sad I can’t play due to pesky language barriers).
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