TPA 86

My folks and I celebrated Christmas yesterday with presents and a quick Bible read. As soon as I got home I popped the game I received into my console and waited for it to load. While I was waiting, I played a little bit of Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy, a favorite of mine. Usually Jak 2 is the one I consider the best but recently I've been admiring the original game more for it's asthetics and the love put into it. There's a vast gap between the two games. Jak 2 features guns, sexy women, violence, slavery, death, and grand theft auto. A vastly difference between the first one. It's as if Jak 2 is wearing the first game's skin like a wolf wearing sheep's clothing. I got a hold of the first Jak game after reading a magazine about the second one. I couldn't play the second without playing the first so I went to my local Gamestop and picked up a copy. Jak and Daxter is the old tale of two friends going on an adventure. After Daxter falls into a pot of dark eco, the energy source of the poeple, he transforms into a small ottsel. The series features mix creatures like yakows or wumpbees, mixes of animal names that feels lazy to me. The  two boys head out to find out what's happened to the other eco sages and find a solution to Daxter's problem. Jak doesn't talk at all except for a few grunts which is fine because Daxter speaks enough for both of them. He offers unsolicited advice, cracks jokes and makes these silly speeches after each time you die. "Say 'good night' Jak" or "I'll say something really nice at the funeral like 'How am I gonna change back now?'" It comes off as irritating and makes you wish you could shut him up. But Daxter's quips have always been at a level where they are just annoying enough to not make you want to stop the game. In Jak 2, the boys play off each other but that's a different story. You can see the effort that went into the first game. This coming off the heals of the studio making the Crash Team Racing and the Crash Bandicoot games. The Crash games served as Sony's mascot while the racing game became a rival to Mario Kart. So Jak and Daxter had to live up to their previous efforts. Jak and Daxter uses a new type of code called G.O.L.D. which allowed the developers to connect the levels with little to no loading. The graphics were amazing for the time with fantastic facial animations that weren't possible in the last console. It's a testament to how different the PS1 and 2 were from each other. If you were to look at the PS4 and 5 and tell me their games were different, I doubt I'd be able to tell. Jak is a collectathon meaning you'll be picking up Precursor Orbs and Power Cells to power your Zoomer to let you get from one world to the next. Each world was themed a different way with characters who mostly wanted 90 precursor orbs or wanted you to do some task for them. In the end you'd wind up with another Power Cell to your collection which would unlock a secret cutscene if you got all 100 of them. I think there's actually 101 cells but it's been a long time. The game is happy go lucky. Everyone is smiling or making a joke and the worst feeling someone experiences is melodrama. Even the villains aren't killed but "defeated" and locked up. There's no bad thoughts here. Which is why the sequel was such a shock. Jak 2 starts with Jak being tortured after being flung to a different city through a portal. After Daxter rescues him, Jak discovers that he has Dark Eco powes, different from Daxter's transformation. The lore seems loosey goosey when it comes to what happens to you when you're exposed to eco. Even Jak's previous ability to interact with Precursor items is taken away from him and in place he can transform into a monster with claws and black eyes. For a kid back then, this was a huge jump. It came at the perfect time because I was becoming a teen and the game seemed to reflect that change in tone. The world was dark and gritty as opposed to the first game. Jak 2 took a lot of inspiration from the GTA series and the Tony Hawk games. You explore an open world city and can hijack any zoomer you can find. You're also gifted guns with which you can use to go on a rampage (which I often did to let off some steam) or use the hover board to skate around. Everyone's grumpy and for good reason, the Baron who tortured you rules the city with an iron fist and the people are at threat of being killed by these beasts called Metal Heads. Gameplay has remained mostly the same with jumping and punching still intact. In fact, you have the same move set you had from the last game. The biggest difference is the guns you have which you can combo with the guns. While Jak 2 remains one of my favorite games, it has definately aged over time. It feels like the developers were afraid to go forward with their original design and thought the future would be GTA and Tony Hawk. These are nice additions to the game's world but they don't seem to fit in as well. The game infulenced me so much that I made my own paper and pen version with dozens of vehicles, powers, and hover boards to use. I called it "Darrk and Recourse." The story of a failed weapon experiment and a sassy droid. So it was like I was combining Jak and Daxter with Ratchet and Clank. I should talk about the latter series some time. For now, I'll end it here with my fond memories of Jak and Daxter and wondering what could have been.