For those not in the know, the 1999 hit System Shock 2 is one of the granddaddys of gaming – one of the best (and scariest) games ever made and the inspiration for many that followed – ever wondered where BioShock came from?

But for years, rights and trademark issues have made getting a working legal copy has been extremely difficult. Until now. Yesterday it was unveiled at Good Old Games – the re-release of one of the monoliths of gaming.

Check out this interview with the guys who made it happen here at Rock, Paper, Shotgun. And then go and buy it immediately.

I come to this magnificent website today, because my conscience leaves me no other choice. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the old design and style of post: This way of playing old games and ranting about them is still fun! This business of deleting our content without warning, removing our history and achievements. Of injecting poisonous drugs of space into the mailboxes of people normally humane. Of sending men home with no news of retro madness leaving them physically handicapped and psychologically deranged. This act cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love.

This means war!

On Thursday the 27th of December 2012 the men of the UCHG awoke as normal. They went about their daily business blissfully unaware of the horror that was lying in wait. It was at 14:26 that the alarm was raised – The life they once knew was plunged into the dark abyss and threatened with total annihilation.

“UCHG is down. Any ideas what went wrong?”

 

“Erm, too much to out in a text, sent an email…”

There were no screams. There was no time. Only darkness, and then, nothing. The very servers that housed the UCHG had been wiped clean.

During the dark days that followed some thoughtful conversations were had. How much was lost? Can we come back from this? Who is to blame?! It was decided that they had come too far, given so much of their lives and had too much fun to back down now. So what of this war mentioned above? This is not a war of conventional violence but more a war of defiance.

The UCHG has dragged itself back from the brink. It is back bigger, better, faster and stronger. There is even talk of it being harder.

The new page design and sections are here for your enjoyment. The content will continue to come with videos, pics and posts. A chunk of UCHG goodness may have been lost forever, but so long as there is breath in their lungs, the madness will continue.

The UCHG lives on!

The Ratchet & Clank series is now pretty well known, and has spawned a hell of a lot of games — cur­rently stand­ing at around 12 in all, with re-releases and ‘HD remakes’ still turn­ing up for the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion of con­soles. It’s a pop­u­lar series — and of course there’s good rea­son for that. Let’s look at 2 of the 3 that fea­ture in the 1001 list –

1001 No.62: ‘Ratchet & Clank’ (PS2, 2002)

The orig­i­nal game in the series was a rel­a­tively early PS2 title, com­ing out 2 years after the PS2 itself. But you’d never know it — it looks great, and even play­ing through it today I was sur­prised at the fram­er­ate and gen­er­ally impres­sive look of the game. The voice act­ing is well done, and the char­ac­ters of Ratchet (a weird kinda rab­bit alien thing) and Clank (a lit­tle robot dude) are rather love­able — it’s a nice comedic duo, and you do warm to them.

The premise is pretty sim­ple — you’re just some rab­bit thing mind­ing his busi­ness, when (with the arrival of Clank) you get caught up in a galac­tic strug­gle to save the uni­verse from a crazed evil alien, whose plan it is to build all over other people’s plan­ets. Basically a mad prop­erty developer.

It’s essen­tially just a plat­former, but with many dif­fer­ent kinds of fun weapons — so many that some­times it’s a pain just to cycle through them all. It’s sim­plis­tic, slightly lengthy if any­thing, but fun — and cer­tainly not with­out its chal­lenges. You can see why the series really took off, as it man­ages to tread that line of frus­tra­tion vs reward, with plenty of vari­ety to keep you hooked. You hop from planet to planet, shoot­ing bad guys and col­lect­ing 1000’s of bolts, which act as currency.

1001 No.63: ‘Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction’ (PS3, 2007)

This new instal­ment of the series was the first to appear on the PS3, and so as expected takes advan­tage of the increased abil­i­ties of the sys­tem — it looks fan­tas­tic, and plays superbly. All the ele­ments are still there from the pre­vi­ous game — it’s the same kind of shooter/platformer, with an even big­ger arse­nal, more stuff to kill, more bolts to col­lect, and more plan­ets to visit. The sto­ry­line is noth­ing spe­cial either — another case of ‘save the galaxy’, this time from a crea­ture who seems deter­mined to exter­mi­nate your species.

On one hand you could say it is far too sim­i­lar, that it’s just ‘more of the same’ — and I’m pretty con­fi­dent that every Ratchet & Clank game plays pretty iden­ti­cally — but why change a win­ning for­mula? Obviously there are always a few new fea­tures, new weapons, etc — but it’s like any major gam­ing series — Zelda, Mario, Sonic — it’s consistent.

That’s not to say I’d put Ratchet & Clank up there with those giants of gam­ing — it’s great, sure — but it still does just feel like it’s miss­ing that spe­cial some­thing that would make it a real clas­sic series. Saying that, I will still give the many other titles a go someday…