Ratchet & Clank Future Weapons Contest: Our Fave Fives #1

Hey everyone,

As you know, voting ended a couple of weeks ago on our Captain Qwark’s My Blaster Runs Hot Ratchet & Clank Future Weapons Contest sponsored by Gadgetron (whew). But as we had over a thousand entries, it was sort of a shame that we could only show our top five favorites. Over the next couple of months as we head towards the reveal of the winning weapon at International Comic-Con this July in San Diego, some members of the Insomniac team are going to reveal their personal five favorites. I’m going to start it off this week with my personal top five that weren’t finalists – and in case you were wondering, I cast my personal vote for the Plasma Sprinkler:

Shockwave Inducer

This was one of our overall top 10 weapons, and was really strongly considered due to the fact that it’s different than many other weapons we’ve done in the past. We’ve never really had an Area of Effect weapon that was centered on Ratchet – and this one would be especially effective against swarmer enemies. The art was also really cool and we thought it had great potential.

The Pixelator

This is a really cool idea that I believe has been tossed around Insomniac in the past. The challenge is you have to create a whole system for what happens to enemies when they become pixilated, which would have been an art and programming nightmare. We thought this was cool, especially in a day and age when Retro gaming is as popular as ever.

Fruit of the Doom

We had a lot of submissions that really focused on the comedy aspect, and this is one of them. We’ve had A LOT of people suggest underwear guns, and this was the one that made me laugh the most due to the clever title and imagery. Unfortunately, the amount of work to give every enemy underwear and animations is a bit much, plus it sort of breaks the game and maybe our ESRB rating too.

Peter Rottentail

Zombies are obviously in with COD:WAW, Left 4 Dead and even the grims in Resistance 2. So what’s better than bringing Zombie bunnies to Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time? This was a completely awesome idea, and was up there in our rankings but would’ve required a full new character and animation set – thus it wasn’t something that was accomplishable. Still hilarious.

Shotgunchuck

This had a very strong argument as our favorite weapon amongst some of us, while others rolled their eyes. To me, the idea of this is so amazingly badass, especially if you could animate the user spinning and whipping the guns around. That said, this weapon doesn’t really fit the Ratchet universe, and would require a ton of hero animation. Thus it didn’t make the finalists group. Still, a very, very strong competitor.

Anyways, that’s all from me. We’ll be back with more of our favorite submissions over the next few weeks. And stay tuned for the return of our podcast, The Full Moon Show, on May 21st.