Kongregate has been around for a while, and it’s finally coming into its own. It’s a gaming portal site that attempts to collect all the flash games on the web and wrap them up in a social networking framework with achievements, friends lists, daily and weekly challenges, and more. It’s all free to participate in, and it’s more compelling than it sounds – I’m increasingly addicted to logging in and playing a few rounds of games like Desktop Tower Defense and Endless Zombie Rampage on my lunch break or after exercising in the evenings. It’s even displaced some of my regular Team Fortress 2 sessions. Many of the games incorporate a variety of challenges and achievements into the Kongregate framework, which earn you points and cards to be used in their upcoming collectible card game. The whole premise is clever, too – they subsidize development for games, they reward game developers with cash for developing popular games, and they reward the players for helping rate these games.

I really hope this succeeds for them on a broad scale. They should work on integration with the gaming consoles to build an even broader audience. Meanwhile, if you want to give it a shot, accounts are free and take only a moment to setup. My username is Tempus on the site, and at present I’m a 4th level… space potato? Who knows what that icon is.

Oh…and this week’s challenge is to win their new Campaign Game, which is sort of a mashup of risk and chess. The chance to watch an animated bobble-head Hillary Clinton bitchslap a bobble-headed Rudy Guiliani makes it worth checking out, trust me.

I finished the latest Ratchet and Clank game last week. This represents a number of firsts for me – first Ratchet and Clank game I’ve finished (despite owning all of them, and despite making it literally to the last boss battle on the first one and far into each of the others in the series), first PS3 game I’ve finished, first next generation console game I’ve finished, and the first game I’ve finished in 2008.

I’ll keep this brief and simply say if you like action adventure games, or have enjoyed previous Ratchet and Clank games, get this game. It’s great, and a nice rebound after the mediocre (but still fun) 4th game. The graphics are fantastic, the trademark humor is there in fine form, the creative weapons are there with some clever new ones (the best being a disco ball grenade – toss it and all the enemies on screen proceed to boogy down while you lay into them), and the level design is good. Best of all from a 40-year old gamer’s perspective, they hit the difficulty level just right. I have less time than I used to and found the game somewhat easier than previous installments, making it possible for me to play through to the end before losing interest or becoming so frustrated that I moved on to something else.

The game is also good enough that it made me pine for more, so now I’m playing through Up Your Arsenal (my previous favorite Ratchet game) again, with an eye on solving it. It’s worth noting you can pick all these previous games up for very cheap ($10-20) and they work fine on PS3 60GB, the model with full backwards compatibility. They even support widescreen/480p.