I have been playing games since 1988 at the wee age of nine and not once have I ever used a glitch or a Game Genie to make my passage in the game easier. I did use the Konami code to play through Contra with my buddies back in the day, but that has been the extent of my dabbling in cheating. Codes used in Grand Theft Auto were part of a couch co-op contest and shouldn’t count, in my opinion. My father refused to buy me a Game Genie because it would make me a cheater, so I had to get good at my games or never see the ending. Get good I did, but that skill seems to have waned since games have become a giant tutorial. Enter Ratchet and Clank HD, a series I’d never played before but want to knock off my bucket list. My quest now began.
This is one of the games that I would start but never finish. I’m sure that my PlayStation 2 memory card has many unfinished saves on it. My PlayStation 3 only has one, but when I restarted my playthrough I noticed that there was a two year gap during my last session. I picked up where I left off with relative ease. I’m pretty smart when I know I’m about to shelf a game for a while. In Ni No Kuni I stopped before a volcano, and in Final Fantasy XIII I stopped before getting into a main town. So I’m smart enough to check a walkthrough to find out what to do next and then carry on like I never stopped. Ratchet and Clank is definitely not as deep or involved as those other two games, but I found where I needed to go relatively quickly, after visiting a few planets I had already beaten, of course.
As I wandered around Blackwater City for the umpteenth time, I came across a shifty looking fellow wanting to sell me a nice weapon. I spoke to him and then remembered why I put away this title for so many years and so many times. I had to come up with 150,000 bolts to purchase this magnificent firepower. I had about 2,000 bolts in my wallet and wondered how in the hell I would be able to buy this item. Every time I had bulked up my bolt supply I had to buy an Info Bot or some sort of weapon needed to pass the planet. Things were looking bleak for me as I came to the end game content, I didn’t know where to turn. Then I remembered the Internet existed and there must be a way to get bolts faster, hidden somewhere within.
I’d heard from a friend that if I get the robot disguise and enter the race I would just be thrown into the race running around. Unfortunately, Insomniac Games fixed that glitch in the new HD version, so I had to keep digging. I found a video on YouTube that showed the bolt glitch still existed, but I had to use another glitch to get to it. Now this is something that I’ve never done before – break a game for a moment to profit in bolts. I had to use my decoy gun to push Ratchet into a wall where I could run through the world. Once I ran through some of the world I would jump onto a building, being careful not to fall through, then jump onto the racetrack. It took me about 5 tries to get it right: on my 4th I made it to the track but ran the wrong way, which triggered the race. Once I finally had it figured out, I stood there with my Taunter and destroyed boxes for hours and hours until I finally hit the magic number.
This little stunt saved me time. I can’t imagine how long it would have taken me to get the 150,000 bolts needed just going from planet to planet. It took about 10 hours of my Xbox One controller sitting on my PS3 controller to get all the bolts required. I never would have been able to accomplish that because there was no way I wanted to sink 30 hours into this platformer. However, if I look at game time now it is probably at 20, thanks to some ingenuity. I’m glad I did it though; I really wanted to beat this game and to destroy the universe’s enemies with my newly purchased R.Y.N.O.! Usually glitches damage gameplay, but this little glitch helped me finish a game.