Which is no bad thing. Just not much of a new thing. Arsenal is at times annoyingly identical to Commando, which kind of saps the drive to continue playing. What bugs me the most is the visual/physical similarities. Lots of worlds are comprised of graphics and buildings that are lifted wholesale from previous games with little or no improvement. They're even recycling the same Globetrotters' spin animation whenever Ratchet picks up a new item or titanium bolt. Of course, Arsenal adds in a robust online mode, which has to be upping the score substantially.

By contrast, IGN rates the Mario Party series comparatively poorly across the versions and routinely attacks the series for being more of the same thing every year. No Mario Party edition has ever scored higher than 7.9 (except the card game version, oddly enough): 7.9, 7.9, 6.4, 6.9, 7.9, 7.0. IGN disagrees, but I maintain that the worst games in the series are 2 and 4, because both of those had a shallow pool of minigames. Gamerankings.com shows 77.8, 76.6, 73.6, 73.7, 70.7, 72.8. I just don't see how people can think the first Mario Party was the best in the series, especially given the visual upgrades of the GameCube versions and how 6 has dropped in entirely new board game objectives.

I can understand a reviewer preferring Ratchet & Clank to Mario Party, but I think Ratchet (three games in three years) seems to have earned a free pass on sequel scores... whereas Mario Party (six games in six years) is now the sub-franchise everyone loves to hate.

Anyway, I still like Up Your Arsenal; it just feels like I'm playing through Going Commando again. Kind of like using Sonic & Knuckles' LOCK-ON technology to play through Sonic 3 again. And I'm trying to sell it to my pals so we can play online. I did some online play the other night. As usual, the voice chat was hilarious... listening to my team members complain about cheap kills and issue half-hearted tactics instructions. I jumped into one game that was clearly deathmatch, and yet the guys playing insisted that some sort of imaginary teams existed. I started shooting at somebody else of another color and he started yelling "Don't shoot at me! Don't shoot at me!" So I stopped, and sure enough, I was apparantly on his "team." I followed him around just so I could see exactly who I was supposed to kill. The only rationale I can imagine is that they wanted to play teams but maintain voice chat with all players (normal team play restricts voice chat to your own team members.) I eventually gave Rhonda the headset so she could listen in... it's a good time to hear all these voices deep in the game chattering at each other. Very little swearing too.

I was playing until 3:00am last night, going through all the Annihilation Nation arena missions. They've become some of my favorite levels because they're pure combat, held in a circular gladiators' arena. It's just you and the horde piling out of the arena gates. Once you fully upgrade your favorite weapons, these battles become carefully orchestrated ballets of carnage. Tip for the arena mega-monsters: take a maxxed out (level 5) sniper rifle in against the two fatties. You'll erase their health before they can even complete one cycle of attacks. As for Scorpio, the big insect tank thing, I used my V5 Agents of Dread and peppered the floor with V5 Megaturrets. You'll have to avoid his sweeping lasers for about 8 seconds before the ancillary fire takes him down. The V5 weapons make all the difference!

Holy crap that Liquid Nitrogen Gun is so awesome.

And yes, Arsenal does give you bonuses if it can find save files for 1 and 2 on your memory card. So copy all the Ratchet saves into one disk, because it's always nice to get new weapons for free.

Let's end on a down note. Captain Qwark. I hated him in R&C1, I hated him in R&C2, and I continue to hate him in R&C3. He's yet another unfunny cowardly superhero parody. Like Sly Cooper's Bentley and Murray, I would love to see Qwark erased from the mythos. The only thing that saves the character is that Ratchet feels the same way I do, and I'm amused by his exasperated efforts to derail Qwark.