One of the great lessons of modern popular culture is that toilets = funny and bum-bums = funnier. We owe a debt to Messers Nutty and Hankey, to Ren and to Stimpy, to the anonymous genius who wrote that song about "sliding into third." Our lives are richer for them and their contributions. They have brought great joy to countless people.

But.

"Up Your Arsenal"? Does anybody even know what that means?

No, no one does, because it does not mean anything. It is not a legitimate toilet gag, and neither is it a proper bum-bum joke. It is clumsy and half-hearted. You get the feeling the person who wrote it is quietly embarrassed it got this far. Either that or you get the feeling the person who wrote it was not a person at all but a committee of high-priced consultants who specialize in Speaking The Language Of The Early Teen Male Demographic. Xtreem Marketing Wyyzzzzyrds, basically.

You get that feeling all the way through Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal. It is a very competently made game. It has flair and sparkle. It is terrific fun. As you play you will admire the talent of the people who made it. But you will also cringe repeatedly. You will wonder how the execution can be so sharp and so utterly lame at the same time.

This is the third outing for Ratchet and Clank. Ratchet is a sort of space rat, or maybe, if you are feeling charitable, a space lemur. He is a skilled high-tech space mechanic and space pilot and space mercenary. He speaks with a Generic Cartoon Male Teenage Superhero accent: overenthusiastic, slightly squeaky, dripping with confidence. Think Robin. Or think about that idiot announcer who is always telling you that Pizza Pops have MORE STUFF! And when they hit you in the face they burst! And then a dog comes and licks the stuff off! Hey, early teen males, we are wacky! Buy our snacks!

Ratchet is lame on account of his coolness, which feels inauthentic and heavily researched and which carries the stench of multiple passes through focus-group hell. Clank is a space robot who hangs out with Ratchet. He mostly keeps quiet, which is nice.

One day, Dr. Nefarious, who is an evil space robot, launches a campaign to rid the galaxy of flesh-and-blood living things, the idea being that he will eventually find himself ruling over a citizenry of robots. He rounds up some robot death squads and chaos ensues. At this point the authorities call us (as Ratchet and Clank) into action. So we fly out on the good ship Phoenix, heading for anyplace there's danger to fight and derring-do to be displayed. Actually, there is no derring-do. That would be campy and fun but would just not work for Ratchet, alpha-teen lemur. Instead, there is butt kicking.

The actual play experience is a mix of jumping and shooting. We run down corridors and across fields, and evil space robots attack from the ground and the air. We have a big raygun, which shoots powerful blasts of hot death. Along the way we run into wooden crates, which are conveniently stocked with ammunition and sparkly things that make us feel better when we have been shot too many times.

We collect many other kinds of rayguns, which shoot different kinds of death and which occasionally turn our opponents into waterfowl. We shoot wildly, blasting the dickens out of anything that moves and looks like a robot. Then we get a break, and instead of shooting we must bounce on wobbly boards across bottomless chasms. We must jump onto narrow ledges and creep around corners and slide down guylines into enemy territory. It is an excellent platform game crossed with an excellent shooting game. It feels terrific under the thumbs. Pity it keeps reminding us how sassy it is.

A few years ago, a game called Conker's Bad Fur Day featured a cute little squirrel battling a mountain of singing feces, along with seventeen other kinds of squirty fun. It is scheduled for re-release in 2005. Why the mention here? Mostly to remind you that there is still hope for the youth.