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I beat Jak and Daxter II about an hour ago. I am now watching my friend and trusted colleague Don Marco try and retry an optional mission where you have to ride a flying motorcycle through about thirty little purple rings, with a seven-second non-cumulative time limit. Each time you hit a ring, if you have, say, five seconds left, it cuts you back up to seven. Miss one ring -- maybe you fall off a segment of the elevated future-highway after running into one of those fatassed pedestrians -- and there's no way in Satan's refuge you're going to get back up there before the time-limit runs out and that "MISSION FAILED" screen comes up, asking you if you want to try again. The prize for winning this mission is one "Precursor Orb," which looks something like a golden Easter egg. We have thirty-two of them, now. Thirty orbs unlocked Big Head Mode, which accounts for Jak's giant head at the moment.
"Maybe I should turn the big heads off," Don Marco says. "I might be able to concentrate better."
He doesn't turn the mode off. Fourteen more orbs, and we're unlocking Small Head Mode. I wonder if it's worth it.
The challenge Don Marco is enduring at the moment is a fucking bastard, and six worse other things. This is because Jak II, as a videogame, is hard. It's not just hard; it's Battletoads hard. The only reason I was able to beat it in three days is because, unlike Battletoads, which gave very limited lives and even more limited continues, Jak II is at least courteous in its bastardly difficulty. When you die -- and die you shall, if you are human! -- the screen flicks, and you're back at the beginning of the segment where you died. Chances are, you will screech through your teeth about there not being a continue point where there should be. You should probably just relax. I mean, the game is letting you continue without asking you if you want to. It assumes that you're fuming at your recent death, and that you want back at the game -- as the movie hero in the white robe wants back at the man in the black cape who raped his woman in a red dress.
There's this one level where I died two hundred seventy-one times. I don't joke about that number. It was a dark moment, and it mostly wasn't funny. I'm not going to joke about it here. I'm going to be objective in explaining it:
There's a lava pit. You approach it with a few striding steps. Right before you reach it, two little monsters -- Metalheads, the dubious villanic race of the game -- burrow up out of the ground and throw themselves at you. You pull out a gun -- you have four of them, you know -- and kill them. You then jump at the two rocks in the middle of the lava pit. The rocks are very thin. You have to do your Super Mario 64 run-slide-jump long jump to make it onto the first one, and if you do this correctly, you'll land in the middle of the log-like rock. Of course, most of the time, you won't do it correctly. If you land too far to the left of the middle of the rock, Jak explodes and disintegrates. If you do make it, you then have to jump onto the other rock, which is about as hard as jumping onto the first rock, only you have about one-sixth the running distance. Make it, eventually, to the platform after the second rock, and you now face a giant gaping cavern where you have to jump onto a trapeze that hangs from the bottom of a hot-air-balloon-shaped propeller-equipped stone that's sliding down two clothesline-like ropes. When you grab onto this trapeze, Jak starts spinning up and over it as it swings slowly forward and then backward. To compliment this, the rock is, as has been said, slowly rolling forward. The combined optical disillusion of Jak spinning as the rope swings and the platform approaches is very much like the practical bastard son of Alfred Hitchcock's near-patented "Vertigo effect" of dollying the camera forward while zooming backward, only in that film you're not in control of Jimmy Stewart. It's cool, though -- because you can see Jak's shadow on the platform you're supposed to jump onto.
Well, the first platform, anyway.
The second one you need to reach, on the second rock, is made of some sort of mineral found only very, very deep within the earth's core; one that is, I take it, immune to shadows. You can't see your shadow on this rock. Which means you'll short the jump about sixty times.
If you do make the jump, you then have to shoot some Metalheads on a far-off platform. All of them have homing lasers, so you have to shoot them quickly. Then you make a rather tricky double-jump. Then you climb up to the top of a tower using many grab-and-hang moves. There's another guy with a homing laser waiting right at the top of the tower, so you have to shoot immediately after you pull yourself up, or he's going to shoot you in the face, taking off one unit of health. It doesn't matter that it's only one unit of health, though, because you're going to bounce so far backward from that shot that you'll fall into the lava pit stories beneath your current position, and you're probably going to hit one of the textured rocks thrown into the pit for good measure, which will make you scream even louder to see that you disintegrate all the same, and then you're going to throw a loose, empty bottle of vitamin drink across the room so it hits the ashtray you told your roommate not to leave in your room. If you do make it to the top of this tower, after redoing all of the abovewritten jumps, you then face perhaps the single-hardest moment of Jak II; one that ate up my virtual life times a hundred.
See, there are these really jagged, nasty spiked balls falling out of these trap doors and down a ramped part of the fortress in the lava pit. You shoot an enemy, and then dodge that first spiked ball. That first spiked ball comes out every two seconds. The other spiked ball, the one rolling right down through the pit you're going to need to long-jump over, comes every five seconds. When you stand between the two falling spiked balls, you're so close to the second one that a first-person look reveals the ugly stained metal texture of its rusted barbs. You're expected to double-jump through this.
Anyone who has played and beaten level three of Battletoads -- the single-hardest sequence of that game; the one where you ride hoverbikes through an obstacle course built by a man with double-barreled shotguns for hands itching to play Russian roulette with you going first -- know this: this part of Jak II is that entire level, compressed into a millisecond of gameplay.
I beat it once, and don't want to beat it again.
Well, I mean, I had to beat it again, because the first time I beat it, I ended up shot in the face and knocked backward into that second spiked ball, which then pushed me down the ramp while I jumped and screamed, until I fell, eventually, and disintegrated atop a very hot rock in the lava pit.
That moment, right up there, where the guy I hadn't seen shot me right in the head: it was like that moment in the movie where the hero in black gets shot by a random thug after fulfilling his purpose by extracting his revenge on the villain in white who raped and stabbed his woman in purple. It was that feeling you feel, if you're really attached to the movie, that feeling that might make you moan aloud in a multiplex. "OHHHHH!" If you're a large black woman, lord love them, you might scream "OH NO HE DIDN'T!" You will feel a piece break off the top of your heart, and drill-screw down toward your diaphragm. Part of you will die. When you see that lava-pit jump and those rocks before your eyes again in two seconds, part of you will scream. It'll probably be your clenching fist.
"WHY ISN'T THERE A CONTINUE POINT AFTER THAT FIRST SPIKED BALL?!?!?!?!"
* * *
This game, Jak II, has one difficulty setting, and it is "Legendary."
Yet it has accomplished a curious feat. It has, deep down, made me feel something resembling the richest catharsis. It has made me feel that awful, horrible, heart-ripping feeling that comes from witnessing a tragic story. If what Hideo Kojima told me yesterday is right, and games' stories are not literature so much as ruses to keep the players playing, pressing buttons while they feel literary feelings in their hearts through the thrill of playing, then Jak II is the entire FUCKING tragic library of Shakespeare.
You know, I think, if I didn't have unlimited lives, the game wouldn't have ripped me so sadly.
And you know, also, if I had written this review before beating the game, I would have probably written it in all-caps -- no, all-profane-caps. Bold ones, too. And I would probably have underlined "fuck" every time I used it as a gerund. Like this:
WHAT THE FUCK IS UP WITH THE DOUBLE-JUMP I MEAN WHY IS THERE A DOUBLE-JUMP IN THIS GAME ANYWAY I MEAN IF EVERY FUCKING GAP IS GOING TO REQUIRE A DOUBLE-JUMP WHY NOT JUST MAKE THE SINGLE JUMP LONGER I MEAN ARE DOUBLE-JUMPS COOL OR SOMETHING?
OKAY REALLY WHAT THE FUCK IS UP WITH THE FUCKING DOUBLE-JUMP I MEAN WHY DO YOU HAVE TO PRESS THE JUMP BUTTON AT EXACTLY THE RIGHT MOMENT AFTER YOUR FIRST JUMP I MEAN WHY CAN'T YOU EXECUTE THE DOUBLE-JUMP ANY TIME YOU FUCKING WANT TO LIKE WHEN YOU'RE ON YOUR DOWNWARD ARC I MEAN IS IT NOT FUCKING UNREALISTIC ENOUGH THAT THIS GUY CAN JUMP ON THIN FUCKING AIR AFTER HE'S ALREADY JUMPED ONCE OR AM I JUST CRAZY OR WHAT?
Okay, Don Marco is reading the above two paragraphs here, and laughing like a son of a bitch, so I take it that kind of stuff is pretty funny to people who have already played the game. As our reviews here on insertcredit.com tend to run months late anyway (on more than one level), and most of the people reading the articles tend to have already played the games or never plan to play the games, I might as well write one more thing like that, for good measure, because three is a good number, anyway:
WHY THE FUCK DOES THE LONG JUMP HAVE TO RESULT FROM JAK FIRST ROLLING I MEAN HOW THE FUCK DOES ROLLING MAKE HIM JUMP EVEN LONGER I MEAN HOW DOES JUMPING AFTER A FUCKING FORWARD ROLL OR A SOMERSAULT OR WHATEVER MAKE YOU JUMP FARTHER I MEAN WERE THEY THAT FUCKING AFRAID OF BEING SUED BY NINTENDO FOR MAKING THE LONG JUMP A SLIDE?
Yes, if you play Jak II on your PlayStation2, you too will become capable of writing things like the above passages. At many points, you will feel that the game is impossible, or else at least too hard, and you will wish loudly that some fictional person should FUCKING die, and you will wish it like a gangster in a movie.
You will go through literary anger if you choose to play this game. You will not cry, as you did when you ran out of continues on World 8 of Super Mario Bros. 3 the first time you got there. You are grown-up, now. The game is grown-up, too.
Yet if you beat this game, you come out feeling enlightened. You forgive it for being so damned rock-hard. You then walk around the city a little bit, taking on the optional missions, and marveling, maybe with a friend, probably over a one-point-five-liter bottle of Coca-Cola from the local ACE discount supermarket:
"This game really does look great in the daytime, doesn't it?"
It's true. No friend would disagree with that statement. The game really does look good. The graphics are crisp and clean. The futuristic buildings of Haven City are sharp in their definitions. Add to this a few dozen hovering car-like vehicles of at least seven different types, and pedestrians, some of them armored and with guns, and make it all move, and you get something mostly breathtaking.
The thing is, the day-night cycle: it has to go. Well, I mean, it's too late to get rid of it now, now that I done beat the game and everything, like with a wiffle ball bat and everything, I mean, it was crying. Still, I'm telling you this for future reference: Maybe there are levels where it being nighttime has something to do with the plot or something, and that's cool -- make those levels nighttime levels. All the rest of the time, make it either broad daylight or dusk. Please. For the sake of the plastic of many PlayStation2 controllers, just -- do it.
This day-night cycle, though, is something important to bring up. It's more than superficial. It is, in fact, a very integrated example of the deep problems with Jak II as a game. Because, see, here's the kicker: the day-night cycle is borrowed from Grand Theft Auto. My proof that it's borrowed from Grand Theft Auto is something not really like proof at all. It's more like me dancing around getting down to proving it. Still, in my dancing, I'll probably bring up a lot of points that, as points, will be pointedly made. So look:
There are optional missions in this game. Many of them involve flying through multiple rings while making demonic screeching noises through your teeth. Many more of them involve running to a mysterious location on the map in under seven seconds. The thing is, these missions, while fun (if you like screaming), are kind of generic. The rewards for these missions, as I mentioned briefly above, are Precursor Orbs, which, when collected, allow you to do things like expand the size of Jak's head or remove his goatee. Grand Theft Auto has similar mini-missions, except many of them involve you killing Haitians or whatnot. The mini-missions in Grand Theft Auto, also, are usually tied to specific pieces of real-estate -- a car dealership requires you to find and steal a certain car, for example. Sometimes, you activate a mini-mission by picking up a ringing payphone and talking with a sweaty-sounding drug-dealer. These missions, like picking up dropped bags of cocaine, usually seem like something a sweaty-sounding drug dealer would ask someone to do via a mysterious ringing payphone.
The missions in Jak II are activated by pressing the triangle button in front of a flat stone protrusion with a hologram looking something like a hammer striking a key. One of the rebel leaders from the beginning of the game, a guy who is no longer important in the story, tells you "Now it's time to test your knowledge of the city!" Then you hurry to the point marked on the map, and are awarded with a Precursor Orb when, on your sixtieth try, you finally win.
IF THIS GUY HAS ALL THE PRECURSOR ORBS, AND 200 OF THEM WILL UNLOCK HERO MODE, WHICH MAKES ME INVINCIBLE, WHY IS HE MAKING ME DO ALL THESE FUCKING INANE THINGS TO GET THEM, I MEAN DOES HE NOT WANT ME TO WIN WITH THE MOST POWER AVAILABLE OR WHAT?
So yeah -- there are little missions to unlock secrets. However, the missions have no place in the story, which this game has proven, on many occasions, it cares for very deeply. In Super Mario 64, the game that birthed the subgenre to which Jak II's beautiful platform levels belong, the story is a wallpaper -- you come to Princess Peach's castle to enjoy a cake and a party, and she's missing, so you unlock her captivity by finding the mystical stars. That game can be fruity in its concept because it looks like that kind of game, with brightly colored characters and bouncy carousel music. Jak II is dark, and it wouldn't be dark without a reason unless it was trying to be goofy about it. And it's not trying merely to be goofy with these side missions because there's no irony in them, and I know there's no irony in them because the game is very pointed with its irony. It employs its irony through Daxter. Namely, Daxter is funny. Some people called him the Jar-Jar Binks of videogames, and I disagree after playing Jak II. Whereas "Star Wars: Episode One" would have been clean like a surgical scalpel without Jar-Jar, Jak II would be much more than clean -- it would be bland, and even too serious -- without Daxter. He's the only character who takes any pride in what's going on, if you don't count the time Jak says "We kicked the Baron's ass." He says that, though, mostly in self-defense: the revolution leader who will send you on these fetchy little side missions, should you wear testicles of steel in your knickers and actually beat the game, is angry at you for storming the palace without his advising, and you have to tell him what your goal was. He then curses you for having your face printed all over wanted posters in the city, for being too much of a hero for the people.
And there's another problem, there.
Jak is a hero to the people, right? He's a hero, one might be able to deduce, because the city needs a hero, because the instruction manual introductory text refers to the Baron of the city as an "evil" Baron. The entire city is under the rule of this fearsome Baron's fearsome Crimson Guards, of whom you kill many in your quest to get revenge. The Crimson Guards of Haven City are a lot like Grand Theft Auto's police officers, in that they all look the same and will attack you if you shoot them. However, there is a bewildering piece of... bewilderment at work here. Which is to say: The Guards, in the storyline, exist to kill random civilians and spread terror, yet if you should run into a civilian on your jet-board, they will shoot you as a criminal. Not only this: you, Jak, exist as a hero to the people, yet your main method of transportation in the city involves throwing them out of their cars and onto the pavement many dangerous meters beneath.
Why can you steal cars at all, you wonder? Well, because that's what you can do in Grand Theft Auto. That's how you get around the city -- by stealing cars. Now, I have said, of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, that I feel no pride for my cars when I steal them. I don't mind when they blow up, or get shot up. I don't mind taking them off bridges. This is okay, however, as all of Grand Theft Auto takes place in that gritty city world where you drive around in stolen cars listening to eighties music on the radio. The story is non-existent (no, don't try to tell me Vice City's popsicle-sticks-glued-with-yogurt statue of a Scorcese picture is a "story," because I will shotgun your kneecaps) and the characters aren't people we should care about so much as blank slates for us to doodle on with motorcycles.
I said, in my review of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and it was a glowing one, that I long for one of these go-anywhere, do-anything games in a modern setting that endows me with pride for my automobile. I want a game where I am a normal guy, and I can't steal cars; however, I can own one, maybe even own one bought after saving up a lot of money through fighting RPG-style random battles? I want to do things like forget where I parked that car, and go all around the city looking for it, teeth clenched like an asshole, mashing buttons on my game controller because of my own damned fault. To me, that's the future of freedom in videogames. Shame on Jak II on two levels, then, for giving me a wondrous Jet Board, which can be used at any time (even during the final boss fight!) with a click of the R2 button, and not letting me use it as my main method of transportation in the over-world. I get bumped off that Jet Board whenever I run into a Crimson Guard on the streets. I don't get bumped off it when I run into an enemy in the Strip Mine level. Why is this, really?
Haven City is a place full of Crimson Guards. You bump into one of them, and your radar starts flashing red. Now all of the Crimson Guards -- even the more advanced ones, the yellow ones, who aren't very crimson at all -- will start following you and shooting you with their cattle prods
WHY THE HELL DO THEIR WEAPONS HAVE TO FUCKING LIFT ME UP IN THE AIR AND FREEZE ME LIKE THAT IF IT DOESN'T DO MORE DAMAGE I MEAN JUST FUCKING SHOOT ME WITH A FUCKING GUN AND LEAVE IT AT THAT
and turrets will pop out of nowhere and shoot you with laser-machineguns. This makes the city, if nothing else, a mildly interesting place to get around in. I mean, it's not easy. It's not impossible, either. A lot of people were jumping on forums and complaining about the difficulty, saying things like how it's not fun to navigate around the city because it's too big and you have to go so slow, otherwise you hit guards and then get chased and shot at. To these people, I wonder: what do you want, no traffic? No people at all? Do you want to be able to just drive uncontested from point to point? Do you want to go "WHEEE" and all that shit? Do you want the game to capture the way you felt when you first rode the horse Epona in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time? If so, would you mind explaining why?
I, for one, kind of like Epona in Zelda. She's a good horse. She's got a good skull on her neckbone. That horse marks the first time that kind of transportation was used in a videogame. You can leave Epona on one corner of the map, and then run far away, beat a dungeon, and come back to the main map, only to see Epona is still in the place you left her. There's a song you can play on your Ocarina of Time to call her over to where you are, and it works nicely. When you see her running from out of the 64-bit mist, you feel a kind of pride for that pony, all eleven polygons of it. It's like the airship in the first Final Fantasy, only it's alive, and it can jump over fences and everything. It has a little power-meter system, shaped like carrots, which you can use mostly to some effect, and to little consequence.
That, however, is not important. Epona was an experiment. It was a way for Miyamoto to experiment with large game worlds, and how people get around in them. The folks at Rockstar North must have played that, and thought big ideas for how to fit obstacles and challenge into that kind of big-world-transportation. Naughty Dog should have looked back to the original source for their inspiration, however; a vehicle that earns our utter respect and devotion to protection would have fit into Jak II's rock-hard twitchy gameplay setup.
I mean, that is, if you have to get around the city at all. I mean, if there has to be a city at all.
Well, I suppose there does have to be a city. Naughty Dog is devoted to giving us the biggest 3D-platform-game hub we've ever seen, a hundred times bigger than Super Mario 64's castle, a thousand times more logical than Banjo-Kazooie's maze of forests and swamps; it's a city, with a stadium district, slums, a downtown, a central square, canals, and highways, and even farming fields growing alien crops. There are no prostitutes to kill, though you occasionally run into elf-girls in tight white tank-tops. There are fat guys who seem to cluster around the accelerator gates on every street race, too, if that counts for anything.
The level entrances in this game, too, are logical things that would make sense in any world. They're merely doors in the sides of buildings. Some of them are big doors in the sides of big walls, though hell -- they all make sense as what they are. They don't need Super Mario 64's telltale paintings. They're marked on the radar in a Grand Theft Auto fashion, and then entered by approaching the door and opening it. There's sometimes a little hallway that serves as a nonchalant loading screen, and I like this. When you enter the levels themselves, though you'll find there are sometimes central landmarks (a giant tree in the forest level, an empty atrium in the temple level) there's nothing that approaches landmarks like the giant tanker boat or submerged robot shark in Banjo-Kazooie or even the Ferris Wheel of Super Mario Sunshine. This, however, is a good thing. It is a sign that the designers were making levels with more inspiration in mind than "Hey, let's make a level revolving around a giant 3D beaver dam." In doing so, they've created these wonderful, rich stages that you can quite honestly get lost in -- again and again -- and die in -- over and over. Each time you enter a stage, you do so because it's marked on the map as your next objective, and if you enter, you have a specific goal you have to accomplish.
Accomplishing the goal sometimes means doing things other games might consider impossible. The level I conquered after seventy-seven tries on the E3 demo, which appears about 80% of the way through the game, is a good example of the latter: ride your jet-board up a towering construction site, between roving chainsaws and grinding down rails, transferring to moving platforms, and not dying. There's another level where you have to grind the railings surrounding a giant drill bit. The goal is to cut the cables holding up the drill, and you can do this, mostly -- if you can avoid the hundreds of guards lobbing grenades at you.
There are some segments within levels that have you piloting this little mine-cart thing with unlimited ammunition, shooting down airships. Those levels kind of work. The levels that don't work are the ones involving the Titan Suit, a hulking, slow-moving robot suit that was put in the game because the designers wanted to test your ability to play slowly and frustratingly. The suit can pick up blocks, or just push them, and there's even a delightful level underwater in which you have about ten seconds of air supply and need to make it to columns of bubbles while these big spiked mines follow you everywhere.
I'm thinking, now, with my head, about these levels, and why I like them so much. More than most of them were inanely frustrating. Many, many of them were inspired genius. It's just -- which ones were genius, and which ones were just stupidly annoying? I can't quite remember.
And this is not exactly a problem.
The thing is, Jak II was put together with much thought. Cars were thrown into the hectic Haven City so that the feature to hijack any automobile might be printed on the back of the box, and confuse parents who were supposed to pick up Grand Theft Auto for the Holidays and were lured in by Jak II's "T" rating. The game has guns because it knows that, if it implements them flawlessly, it will blow away all chances of anyone caring about Ratchet and Clank 2. And yes, the guns are good. They aim well. They handle like dreams. The Peace Maker charge-up blaster-multi-killer rifle is a little underused, and thrown into your hands at around the same time as the Titan Suit, which you'll only use three times in the game. You don't, actually, have to use the Peace Maker even once, which is curious. I used it once, though -- against the final boss, a giant thing that looks almost exactly like Metroid Prime, the final boss of Metroid Prime. No kidding. It didn't do me too well, though -- I got my ass ripped off about three seconds after I hit him with it.
Thinking back, now, I'm wondering -- what has prepared me to give this game the blisteringly high score I'm going to give it? Every good thing I bring up about it seems to deteriorate into a diss of some sort. This game is a truly philosophically-defeating beast.
I like it.
* * *
A lot of people criticized Sonic Adventure 2, saying the game would have been a million times better without the Knuckles and Rogue levels. In the Sonic and Shadow levels, you have to run upward, and toward your goal. These are fun, and fast. The Tails and Eggman levels require you to pilot these hideous robot suits and boringly shoot tiny enemies in order to open gates and sleepwalk to the end of the track. Rogue and Knuckle's levels require you to run around in circles, sometimes falling into bottomless pits, until an indicator at the top of the screen starts blinking. If it's blinking rapidly enough, you dig, and it reveals an emerald piece which you then collect because it's what you're supposed to collect. These levels are gaping holes in the game that will make you cry and throw your controller simultaneously. The Tails and Eggman levels will simply make you yawn. When playing as Sonic, you're on the edge of your seat, thinking yeah, this kicks ass.
Now, for the people who say that the Sonic levels alone would have made the game great -- I say no. I say, absolutely not. No, no -- they would have made the game far worse.
Understand that I hate the emerald hunts more than your sister hates me. Knowing that, know this: the producers of Sonic Adventure 2 felt a deep disturbance in their game. The first Sonic Adventure had an overworld hub where nothing bad ever happened, and you just mostly stumbled around looking for the entrances to your next stages, which are hidden in the most foolish ways, like by putting a key from one side of the map into a hole in the other. Sonic Adventure 2 knew that these levels had to go. It also knew that it needed something to fill a great void, and that time could never know what that something was. Whatever they would have done to Sonic Adventure 2, it would have still viciously, spiritually disappointed its fans.
The truth is, that game was all about forward motion. The Sonic stages told this. The Knuckles stages tried to mix it up, because the story told in the game's forward motion was too big for its britches. The game was flawed in concept, in content, and in execution, and it is a black mark on all game history for the flawed engine that pulls its forward motion forward.
Now I surprise you by saying that Jak II is perfect because it is about forward motion. Because the game has eliminates the standard of extra lives, and just makes the playing experience about repeating failed segments Looney-Tunes-style until they're over, we are able to enjoy the game's story the way Hideo Kojima would want us to. Hideo Kojima, however, dislikes continues to the point where he even tells me he hates them. When I told him about Jak II, and I said how hard it was, and I told him that it lets you continue from the beginning of a failed level with minimal pause in the action, he asked, "Is the game telling a story?" I replied, "Yes, it is." He said, "Well, there you go." If the game wants you to experience the whole of the story, it has to make certain allowances for that.
I told him, "The story's nothing special, though. It's nothing that hasn't been covered in anime or movies or comic books. The big paradoxical twist is evident from not even six hours in. The story continues just to continue." And he asked, "Yet, are you compelled to play?" And I said, "Well, yeah." He put his hand behind his head, and then pulled on his ear a little bit. "It is a difficult balance," he answered, at last, and that was the end of the issue.
Jak II's story persists merely to persist, and its game persists merely to persistently anger you. When you beat the game and are left grinding around the railings in the palace district on a two-minute time-limit collecting little globs of green goo you've never seen in your life in hopes of winning an egg that will let you, with ten more tasks completed, view the game's first act of cut scenes, you really have to wonder -- do you want to watch those cut scenes apart from the game?
Here I could say that Jak II commits another mistake by making its cut-scene-viewer available at 75 secret orbs and its mission select mode available at 145. I could say that the game sorely misunderestimates how much more fun its action stages are than its cut scenes, or all the inane shit around getting into the action stages.
And by "inane shit" I mean stuff like the races mentioned above, the ones integral to the story, the ones which start out with eight contestants and end with usually around three because even the PlayStation2's massive CPU can't handle the damned jumping shortcuts.
...
Naughty Dog, as a developer, got started with a game called Rings of Power, as far as I can remember. That's a game I actually own, you know. It's a boggy Genesis simulation game with a very low fun-factor. However, the game became halfway infamous because of a code published in Ultra Game Players magazine. That magazine, not being condescending, published a screen shot of the result of the code, saying that its effect was nothing you couldn't find in the magazines in your parents' closet. Basically, the code, if performed quickly enough, changed the cartoon dog at the developer's logo to a naked woman with stringy crayon-yellow hair and hot-red nipples.
The rest, as they say they say, is history.
Naughty Dog's next game, Way of the Warrior, published by Crystal Dynamics for Panasonic 3DO, capitalized on the current trend of fighting games starring digitized characters. In later years, someone would accuse Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin of throwing the game together in their basement, and their official answer to this would be "We didn't have a basement -- we did it in our garage." That game starred many, many, too many chunky digital characters who looked kind of like ninjas or kung-fu fighters. The game was (is?) violently bloody, with fighters who explode in giant red messes with little prodding. It is nearly unplayably bad, and almost never fun. I remember it fondly.
Their next game, and their first hit, was Crash Bandicoot. Crash has almost exactly the same mouth portion as Sonic the Hedgehog. He is your basic Mascot Character Based Remotely on an Obscure Animal. His attacks include spinning around and breaking boxes. He can jump on enemies, too. His goal is, almost always, directly forward of where you start. Which means a whole lot of running upward.
With the advent of PlayStation2, Naughty Dog announced they were abandoning Crash Bandicoot, who in some strange way had become the PlayStation's unneeded mascot of sorts. Konami took over the making of that game, and they've been blest with some mighty nice cookie-cutters, just as Naughty Dog has been blest with buckets of money. They used that money to set about making a game that would define them as an artistic force. That game was Jak and Daxter, about a boy adventurer and his rabid orange rat. It was, as the mulletheads who frequented my college part-time-job game store would have you know, a "one of them free-roaming games." One can call it an artistic success for Naughty Dog in that it began a story that promised continuity, and even hinted at its own sequel thoroughly in its ending. The most artistically-achieved portion of the game, come to think of it -- and come to think of it seriously -- might be that the fuzzy animal creature, Daxter, is actually not any animal that exists exactly in this real world.
What prompted them to make Rings of Power is the only thing that is not clear to me as I write this. It's the only thing without a simple, clear, well-documented reason. I take it, after playing Jak II from 0% through to 108% in thirty-one hours and forty-eight minutes, that they made that game that was no great game at all because they wanted to make any game, no matter what it was. The company started with a lot of love, for videogames, even, and it continues to move diagonally into the flow of time as a company that will, in the future, do something great.
Its latest effort, Jak II, is a hard-as-nails three-dimensional platform game with lots of guns, a full thirty-something hours of replayable stages, lots of vehicles, a wide heap of exuberance, a silly story that's more involved than your typical save-the-princess quest, and a really good French audio track. It's not easy, though it's not angry about not being easy. Its levels are playable, and as levels, will be played, and they let you take your time, no matter how tight the time limits are. You might quit, and end up hating the game if you do so, or you might just keep playing right through to the end and begin to retroactively love levels that you'd sworn upon completion you would never play again.
It reminds me not of Goldeneye for Nintendo 64, nor of Mission: Impossible for that same system; rather, it reminds me of the difference between the two games, and how those "videogame journalists" who take their positions as "social institutions" too seriously jumped the gun and called the latter game a "killer" of the former one because you could navigate through a net of lasers while hanging from dental floss in the latter, even though the latter game was full of challenges you'd swear to never play again, and then never play again, and the former was full of things you played immediately again upon completing them.
Blest with the near-impossibly difficulty that cursed Rare's 1991 monsterpiece Battletoads and the foresight of a team who, contrary to the rumors, does not hate you, Jak II is the product of people who love something, and who will some day in the next five years be loved back with more than money.
I like your game a lot. Thank you for letting me play it.
ROGERS AND KOJIMA GIVE JAK II ONE THUMBS-UP AND ONE ROCK
--tim rogers
hates the smell of this part of the city
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-- a 3D platform game with guns and extreme difficulty and lots of carjacking in its hub world. It is noble and risky in what it wants to conceptually attempt.
