Well, it took me a while to write this up. One of the games that we got for Christmas last year was the immensely-titled Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time (without playing the one before it first, which may have been a mistake) and, though it was surprisingly glitchy in some places - crates falling through the floor, smacking against bad collision spots in the hoverboot sections, and so on - I enjoyed it a lot. It's rather difficult to believe that it's been nearly ten years since the first game, because I still think of it as a very new series.

Bearing in mind here that I might have missed out on a lot of the evolution of the games seeing as I last played the second one and this is about the seventh, it was surprising to me that for a significant amount of the game you play as the two characters separately, in two different level styles. Clank's levels are more puzzle-based, though they provide you with the opportinuty to skip past the really taxing ones if you're a bit dim, and Ratchet's play in the usual jumping around and shooting action from the rest of the series. In fact it was a strange realization for me that the game is much more a third person shooter than it is a platformer - the inclusion of sparkly things to collect as well as the furry protagonist seem to just steer your brain platformerwards, even though the emphasis is very much on using the cover you have available and fighting off robots with the various weapons that you have in your arsenal.

The weapons range from the normal space lasers to the patently bizarre ones like the weapon that's made out of a sonically deadly frog or the one that causes everyone in the vicinity to get distracted by a sudden and unexpected disco. In fact, there's almost too much emphasis on the weird ones this time around - I don't think I've ever played another game where I've found I have a severe shortage of ammunition that'll just go in a straight line where I'm pointing it (you have a limit of 75 shots for your basic shooter) - though this is alleviated a little once you get the razor-gun, which serves as a decent all-round weapon.

The platform elements do come in to play as well, though - each planet is very different from the last, and has unique mechanics of its own. One of the highlights is a section where you have to use a nectar-gun (see paragraph above) to distract a swarm of tiny carnivorous insects that eat Ratchet alive if they so much as touch him. Whenever you're in a spot when you're in danger of them getting to you, the music changes to a skin-crawling Flight of the Bumblebee string motif that makes things incredibly stressful, and it's one of the very few things that I can instantly identify as something that's going to be mentioned in nostalgia posts twenty years from now on the subject of things in games that used to scare the life out of people when they were younger.

Again, I don't know when this happened to the series, but the simple planet selection from the earlier games has turned into being able to fly freely around different star systems and complete miniature missions for people unrelated to the main storyline - it seems like everything's steering in the direction of becoming a sandbox game now. It's done well, though, even though the moon missions can be irritating - you even get a Grand Theft Auto-style radio with occasional news broadcasts that mention what's been happening in the game. It gave me one of the weirdest senses of something being totally out of place when the first of these happened to use the same theme music as the ITV News at Ten.

But the biggest draw of the game for me was the story sections - you can spout about how gameplay matters above things self-proclaimed hardcore classic gamers are wilfully blind to like graphics or storyline all you like, but these FMVs are amazing. It's interesting to think how cutscenes have evolved over time - if you think back to the era around the original PS, these pre-rendered cutscenes felt like real rewards when they came up (in games like Final Fantasy 7-9, for example) because they were so many worlds apart from what the in-game rendering looked like. On the PS2, that feeling diminished because the games looked closer to what we'd got used to seeing as pre-rendered scenes. Now, you play amongst something that looks slightly better than a pre-rendered PS1 environment, and the cut-scenes have been upgraded to miniature Pixar films. At least, I was going to say that until I Googled the comparison and found that everyone else on the Internet had said that about this game already - but the cinematics really are very well presented and genuinely funny in a lot of places. Dr Nefarious in particular is an amazing pantomime villain, with his John Cleese walk and voice that sounds like the world's most comically manic Dalek - I think his crowning moment is the explanation of his plans for the Great Clock. (And I find it difficult to get past the fact that Ratchet's voice is Tidus from FFX.)