Ratchet and Clank 3 and Timesplitters (3) Future Perfect fit the (double) bill. They were released within 6 months of each other and have a lot interesting resonance points that serve as a revealing snapshot of latter PS2-era design sensibilities.
They’re both the third part of a trilogy and are most obviously connected by the ‘What-if ness’ of the approach to weapons of both series. While many shooters are concerned with a balanced or realistically accurate arsenal these games opted for loadouts that pursued the quest for ‘what if’. Similar to the design principle behind a lot of Devil May Cry weaponry, weapons usually followed a train of thought of ‘what if the gun fires other guns?’, ‘what if the gun fires a miniature black hole?’, ‘what if the gun is an assault rifle with 64 bullets and fires them all in a single second?’, ‘what if the Minority Report stungun was a gun?’, ‘What if you just threw a brick?’, ‘what if a gun sprayed liquid nitrogen?’ etc. Neither game’s weapons were particularly well-balanced, they were just fun to mix together and use. Timesplitters 3 even had a rudimentary gravity gun (singleplayer only) which was likely inspired by Half-life 2, 6 months prior.
They both fell in a period where comedy (or at least a humorous tone) was still generally acceptable for a high profile console release. They’re both ostensibly about a goofy villain scientist trying to bring about genocide but its treated with a schlocky mix of humour and heroism. The games aren’t laugh out loud funny, their mirth is characterised by light parody of pulp fiction, corporate culture, and superhero narratives. Timesplitters 3 skews irreverently rompy and Ratchet 3 is more Saturday morning which may have something to do with the games being British and American respectively. They aren’t ‘comedy games’ but comedy is present.
In some ways they’re developmentally inverse. Timesplitters spent a lot of time shoring up its multiplayer features while Ratchet was previously exclusively singleplayer. In these two trilogy-capstones they both extend further into what they lacked in previous instalments. Ratchet 3’s multiplayer feels like a prototype as its too grindy and doesn’t support enough players to make it interesting. Timesplitters 3 was probably one of the only console shooters to rival Halo in multiplayer offerings but it was always more of a party game. The co-op was extremely solid though and the singleplayer leaned heavily into a cutscene-laden time-travel plot. Both games introduce vehicles into the flow of gameplay for the first time in their series but in both cases they feel prototypical and last-minute. I have a theory that the second entry of game trilogies is usually the ‘purest’ since it solves all the usability shortcomings of the first game but avoids the feature bloat of the third.
TS3 and RnC3 differ in their futures despite taking similar paths. The next IP from Insomniac and Free Radical were both grim and gritty shooters (Resistance and Haze), devoid of character but still featuring a few ‘what-ifs’. Insomniac stuck with interesting weapon design but Haze went all in on super-serious drug soldier overdose mechanics and playing dead. Haze wasn’t bad idea-wise but it was clearly plagued by development troubles. Why the dawn of HD consoles led to so many darker IP is another story. TS3 and RnC3 were probably some of the last ‘best’ games of their respective series but in Timesplitters’ case this is because of studio death whereas Ratchet died multiple creative deaths (the reboot and Tools of Destruction). Deadlocked/Gladiator, Nexus and Crack in Time were OK though.