Start Press: Color Me Impressed

I’ve just finished playing through Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack In Time. And, if you’ll permit me a brief spasm of tongue-lolling, googly-eyed hyperbole, I found it to be one of the most enjoyable, seamlessly constructed, well-written, gorgeously rendered videogames I’ve played in my life. Seriously. Holy crap.

Knowing I’d be writing about it for this column, I set about mulling over what I enjoyed most so I could focus on that particular aspect. Would it be the gleefully oddball weapon design? (Someone at Insomniac deserves a raise for coming up with the funny-looking, blowfishy alien that you coax into belching your enemies to death simply by mashing the right trigger.) Or the brief weapon teaser videos that reminded me of the art style and dark-comedic gags used in the late, great Ren & Stimpy Show? Or the Pixar-grade cutscenes packed with delicious sight gags? Or the imaginative story and gleeful world-building on display? Or the script that deftly juggles inspired wit, heartfelt dramatic tension and adrenalized action sequences. The time-bending puzzles and fun 'n' gun battlefield romps?

So much to fawn over and yet I keep coming back to the game’s dazzlingly luminescent color palette. Exploring Crack In Time’s interstellar universe is like a venturing into a three-dimensional blacklight poster full of staggeringly vivid hues—purples, corals, reds, aquamarines—your eyes have ever feasted on. While I’m not claiming that Insomniac is filled with hippie burnouts, Ratchet dispatches more than a few purple-and-yellow, spotted alien mushroom fiends on his quest to save the universe from Dr. Nefarious. Make of these psychotropic-looking baddies what you will.

I was a huge fan of Fallout 3 and spent north of 80 hours trudging around the Capital Wasteland’s dusty, earth-tone expanse. A whole battalion of first-person shooters have emerged in recent years that do their very best to grey and brown you into feeling the grim, life-smothering, inorganic pall of war. The bleak landscape in these games actively confuses its portrayal of fictional videogame apocalypse with evening-news visions of war-torn, Middle-Eastern desert. Drab me to hell, indeed.

Exhibit A:
 

Exhibit B:

After spending weeks, months and years of my gaming life immersed in the muted worlds of such post-apocalyptic shooters, Crack In Time offered a sort of tangy-sweet raspberry sorbet for my bored-silly eyeballs. It was like watching Sam Mendes’s Jarhead 20 times in a row and then unexpectedly finding myself descending through the atmosphere of James Cameron’s Avatar and catching my first dizzying glimpse of Pandora.

In addition to being gorgeous to look at, Crack In Time’s color palette also serves a purely functional purpose. Since the game takes place in outer space, designers are forced to choose colors that will contrast nicely with a dark background. It’s the same reason Apple’s recent Leopard screensavers opt for bright, glowy purple galaxies. Bright hues pop really nicely against the inky-black darkness of space, like colorfully tinted diamonds on black velvet. While I can’t say I’m hoping for more games set in the uncharted cosmos, I think videogames could stand to employ a much wider color spectrum.

Maybe it all comes back to the industry’s tedious and confounding obsession with the Holy Grail of absolute photorealism. We play games, in part, to relish experiences more titillating than the ones we personally encounter in everyday life. I’m convinced there are still colors my eyes have yet to experience. Do I have to wait for Insomniac’s next Ratchet & Clank installment or will other game studios finally begin showing them to me? Ready, set....

May the best cyan win.