Recordkeeping: Jak 3 COMPLETE!
Sep. 21st, 2014 02:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xyzzysqrlMore notes I took while playing Jak 3. Scattered, nonsensical... but then, what that I do isn't?
Spoilers, by the way. Big ones, eventually.
Remember when this series was about platforming? Jumping on things? I do, even though I'm racing big-ass dune buggies and weird lizard things around, trying to get through rings and checkpoints before other races. Yep, used to be all about jumping... Then I get new dune buggy, which has an enormous suspension. You can hold down a button to make it sort of bow downward... and release the button to make it spring into the air. Soon I'm jumping this dune buggy from island to island.
Oh. I see. Now it's a platformer ABOUT cars.
That is acceptable.
(Eventually I start finding the platformer areas of the game, and there is a lot of that later on. But for a while I was wondering.)
--
In the previous game, you traded collectable thingies from the Metal Heads you blew up for power upgrades. These are "Skull Gems" and I had gotten sort of the impression that they were the brains of the mecha-thingies. In Jak 3, while you can still get them by blowing up the enemies, you can also find five or six at a time just laying around in jars.
Brain jars? Jars stuffed full of brains? I went to the wiki. Oh. It's just their "core" or "life force" in a yellow glowing oval that looks like a jelly bean.
Doesn't explain why there are jars full of them laying around town though. Let's not think about it. Because ew.
--
There's a faction of masked monks in the game. It's a good look, very pale. Sadly I'm not sure if they're the good guys yet or not. They seem very distrustful of Jak, and go on a lot about death.
"Why are you so obsessed with death?" Jak wonders.
"Because of that! The DAY STAR approaches!" the head monk shouts, pointing at the sky. Jak looks straight into the light, of course. I facepalm.
"That's the SUN, lady." I reply to the screen because I am a sane stable person. I'm as antisocial and hole-up-in-the-apartment as the next guy (presuming the next guy is J.D. Salinger) but, really. The sun? I shake my head and take Jak back out into the baking-hot wasteland, sand dunes stretched for miles around him, not a scrap of non-hostile life for miles outside the city walls...
...hm. Okay. Uhm.
Perhaps she has a point. Sometime between doing ring races, shooting robot bugs and whatnot I'll have to find a free minute to nip off and blow up the sun. That will solve all possible problems, I'm sure.
--
Very briefly they remember how to do mid-mission checkpoints. Then they forget again. Maybe the intern responsible was fired.
--
STUN Runner?
Jak 3 is now making me drive an Ancient Precursor Hoverthingie down a circular tunnel filled with stuff to ram into and twin laser blasters that pewpew away. It takes me a wide-eyed moment to realize it's basically STUN Runner, which is kind of cool because STUN Runner is the best arcade driving game ever made. I just... did not expect to be playing STUN Runner here today.
Life is full of surprises.
Later the game has me play an elaborate version of Dodge 'Em except instead of a car I get Daxter's Pac-Man-ified head.
At this point I'm sort of expecting to have to play Q-Bert or Galaga, or tackle a hundred floors of Tower of Druaga or something. But that would never happen. Not in a respectable video game.
--
Do video game developers know what sewers are actually for?
Every time I go into one in a game ... like in Jak 3 ... there's some pipes and some water and some vents that poot out green mist that kills you. I kind of wonder if they've ever BEEN in an actual sewer.
Then I think about how much worse the experience could be, and decide maybe it's a good thing they haven't.
--
Tess is back! The blonde lady who Daxter has a thing for. Three seconds on-screen and she's giving him a landing pass on Planet Cleavage, and then she gets around to filling Jak in on her new job: She makes guns now! And indeed, she'll give him a really nice one.
"Now Jak, I want you to protect my little -baby- Daxter with this. OR I WILL HUNT! YOU! DOWN! AND HURT YOU! RRRREAL BAAAAD." ... "Tee-hee!"
Ah, yandere love.
--
There's a guy on every video game development team. I'll call him Squinky.
(Originally I called him "Steve". Then I realized I know a Steve who works in game development, re-read the following paragraphs, winced, and edited.)
Squinky comes to the design meetings with one goal in mind and one idea on his lips, and somehow it keeps showing up in games.
"Okay, we need to make this level a little more challenging. Any thoughts?"
"Small fast moving enemies that attack from just off-camera."
"Brilliant, Squinky."
Squinky is a soulless rat bastard son of a bitch who will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
Squinky's fingerprints are all over Jak 3. Often the game will innocently swing the camera to the left just before a tiny mechanical scorpion leaps in from the right. Or, say... something will start shooting at you from directly above your head, where the weapon auto-lock stubbornly refuses to go. Of course when you're out in the desert there's an endless inexhaustable supply of bandits in dune buggies with laser blasters.
(I sat and watched them drive up out of the ocean for a while. That was mildly surreal.)
One of my many daydreams is that I someday get access to a cloning machine and Squinky's daily route to work. I will hide myselves along his route and shoot paint-filled ping pong balls at him out of a slingshot all day long. Not to kill. Not even to injure. Merely to annoy.
Maybe to injure a little.
--
Doing a "collect artifacts" dune buggy race. Driving from glow-ball to glow-ball on a very tight timer. Eventually it takes away my minimap entirely to tell me "YOU GOT A PLOT TOKEN" in big screen-filling letters, but -- critically -- the TIMER IS STILL TICKING. When my map comes back, I find I have ten seconds to get to something in the opposite direction of where I've been driving.
I fail.
I'm struggling to think of some trope to compare this to and failing. It may be so obviously a horrible, wrong idea that nobody has ever DONE it before.
I am enjoying this game, I swear. These are minor moments out of a larger whole. It's just that they're jaw-dropping moments that make me question why I'm enjoying the rest of it.
--
Tess is now going on at length about how she and Daxter need a quiet house in the country with a white picket fence, all while rubbing him under the chin so he makes derpy faces. It's so cutesy-poo Jak is kinda cringing. ... Right, this is why I'm enjoying this game. I ship it.
--
Y'know, I never really used a lot of Jak's new toys. I don't think I even shot a couple of the new guns, I kept waiting for "Slow Time" to be used in a puzzle and it never actually was (and you can't use it during races, the one time I WANTED to slow the timer down), the game was so aware I'd never use Dark Fireball otherwise that a tutorial popped up on screen literally every time it was required to move on in the game, there was some kind of shield thing I never really thought about using...
I feel like James Bond coming home with a basket of Q's gizmos he never used and a deeply puzzled expression. Not a failure on the game's part. Just a lack of imagination from me, I suppose.
The power where Jak grows enormous ethereal wings made of pure light was cool. I'll give it that.
Speaking of the guns, though, by the end of the game my most-used gun was easily the three-pronged tracking "needle laser" that pew-pewed like something out of Zone of the Enders. I love this series and all its crazy guns. Boom-ti-yada.
--
Okay, now it's Star Fox. Did they just have like a Naughty Dog Retro Game Night and get real drunk and decide to crib off everything in arm's reach? Then again, this is actually kinda fun. So they get a pass.
--
The Big Bad makes his appearance. It's Erol! You remember Erol? The fellow who got so upset at losing a race that he drove straight at Jak screaming and missed, thus exploding in a fountain of Dark Eco? Well, he's back. Since he's returned from the Dark Eco as Cyber-Erol, he's all scarred and hideously twisted and basically 95% robot, 5% flesh.
It turns out he's the one who called down the Dark Makers (the "Day Star" is their coming ship), he's the one who's been manufacturing robotic Krimson Guardsmen, he's the driving force behind most of the evil acts in this game. I'd like to remind you all that his untimely death happened because he was unable to properly seperate lust from jealousy and attempted to murder Jak because Erol couldn't impress Jak's girlfriend. Now he wants to destroy the world.
I sat here and tried to make that funnier for a while. I give up. He was sexually frustrated and now he wants to end all life and melt the planet down. There you go. That's it. That's all there is.
If someone you know may be a budding supervillain, please have them spayed or neutered before the situation gets out of control.
--
Playing the last two games in Big Head mode pays off, as Jak calls for Wastelander back-up and they come roaring into the city, running over enemies in their buggies. "I thought you said never to tackle your enemies head-on." Jak smirks at their leader.
"Well, that all depends on how hard your skull is." the leader smirks back. In reply, Jak lifts his hand up and passes it straight through his enormous cheat-coded forehead repeatedly, as if he were knocking on a much smaller skull somewhere inside it.
I don't stop giggling until the cutscene at the end of the next level, where Jak discovers that the wastelander leader who just died saving his life was his biological father. He'd spent his life searching for his lost son, and died unaware that the "hero" he asked to keep up the search -was- that son.
Ah. Right. I had forgotten I am playing Awkward Tonal Shift: The Series. *wince*
After that it's back into the Precursor Tunnels to play more STUN Runner.
--
With the Great Secrets of the Precursors Revealed (and they are some amazingly silly secrets, clearly written in a design document back before the series took a dive off the Cliffs of Darkness) we fight Evil Dark Metal Red Eyes Black Dragon Cyber-Erol Ver 2.0 and win, saving the day hooray. Daxter gets a wish from the Precursors and wishes for pants.
Tess promptly wishes for "pants just like that" and the whimsical Precursors make her an otter-weasel too, perfectly sized to get in Daxter's pants (as it were). Which is adorable and exactly the kind of ending I wanted, but I'm really not sure the devs WANTED me thinking "Ooh, uhm, that's a bit Furaffinity, isn't it?" Like I'm pretty much positive there's a large slew of fanfic just like that...
Oh well. With that, I wrap up the Jak and Daxter main trilogy. There's three more games: Daxter (the interquel for the two-year gap at the start of Jak 2), Jak X: Combat Racing (I think this has something to do with knitting), and Jak & Daxter: The Lost Frontier (sort of a Jak 4, if such a thing existed).
I'm certainly not going straight on to those, though. What will I do? ...well, tomorrow I will go in for more dental work and spend a lot of time whimpering and wishing I were dead. After that? Who knows, really?
It will probably involve video games though.
Spoilers, by the way. Big ones, eventually.
Remember when this series was about platforming? Jumping on things? I do, even though I'm racing big-ass dune buggies and weird lizard things around, trying to get through rings and checkpoints before other races. Yep, used to be all about jumping... Then I get new dune buggy, which has an enormous suspension. You can hold down a button to make it sort of bow downward... and release the button to make it spring into the air. Soon I'm jumping this dune buggy from island to island.
Oh. I see. Now it's a platformer ABOUT cars.
That is acceptable.
(Eventually I start finding the platformer areas of the game, and there is a lot of that later on. But for a while I was wondering.)
--
In the previous game, you traded collectable thingies from the Metal Heads you blew up for power upgrades. These are "Skull Gems" and I had gotten sort of the impression that they were the brains of the mecha-thingies. In Jak 3, while you can still get them by blowing up the enemies, you can also find five or six at a time just laying around in jars.
Brain jars? Jars stuffed full of brains? I went to the wiki. Oh. It's just their "core" or "life force" in a yellow glowing oval that looks like a jelly bean.
Doesn't explain why there are jars full of them laying around town though. Let's not think about it. Because ew.
--
There's a faction of masked monks in the game. It's a good look, very pale. Sadly I'm not sure if they're the good guys yet or not. They seem very distrustful of Jak, and go on a lot about death.
"Why are you so obsessed with death?" Jak wonders.
"Because of that! The DAY STAR approaches!" the head monk shouts, pointing at the sky. Jak looks straight into the light, of course. I facepalm.
"That's the SUN, lady." I reply to the screen because I am a sane stable person. I'm as antisocial and hole-up-in-the-apartment as the next guy (presuming the next guy is J.D. Salinger) but, really. The sun? I shake my head and take Jak back out into the baking-hot wasteland, sand dunes stretched for miles around him, not a scrap of non-hostile life for miles outside the city walls...
...hm. Okay. Uhm.
Perhaps she has a point. Sometime between doing ring races, shooting robot bugs and whatnot I'll have to find a free minute to nip off and blow up the sun. That will solve all possible problems, I'm sure.
--
Very briefly they remember how to do mid-mission checkpoints. Then they forget again. Maybe the intern responsible was fired.
--
STUN Runner?
Jak 3 is now making me drive an Ancient Precursor Hoverthingie down a circular tunnel filled with stuff to ram into and twin laser blasters that pewpew away. It takes me a wide-eyed moment to realize it's basically STUN Runner, which is kind of cool because STUN Runner is the best arcade driving game ever made. I just... did not expect to be playing STUN Runner here today.
Life is full of surprises.
Later the game has me play an elaborate version of Dodge 'Em except instead of a car I get Daxter's Pac-Man-ified head.
At this point I'm sort of expecting to have to play Q-Bert or Galaga, or tackle a hundred floors of Tower of Druaga or something. But that would never happen. Not in a respectable video game.
--
Do video game developers know what sewers are actually for?
Every time I go into one in a game ... like in Jak 3 ... there's some pipes and some water and some vents that poot out green mist that kills you. I kind of wonder if they've ever BEEN in an actual sewer.
Then I think about how much worse the experience could be, and decide maybe it's a good thing they haven't.
--
Tess is back! The blonde lady who Daxter has a thing for. Three seconds on-screen and she's giving him a landing pass on Planet Cleavage, and then she gets around to filling Jak in on her new job: She makes guns now! And indeed, she'll give him a really nice one.
"Now Jak, I want you to protect my little -baby- Daxter with this. OR I WILL HUNT! YOU! DOWN! AND HURT YOU! RRRREAL BAAAAD." ... "Tee-hee!"
Ah, yandere love.
--
There's a guy on every video game development team. I'll call him Squinky.
(Originally I called him "Steve". Then I realized I know a Steve who works in game development, re-read the following paragraphs, winced, and edited.)
Squinky comes to the design meetings with one goal in mind and one idea on his lips, and somehow it keeps showing up in games.
"Okay, we need to make this level a little more challenging. Any thoughts?"
"Small fast moving enemies that attack from just off-camera."
"Brilliant, Squinky."
Squinky is a soulless rat bastard son of a bitch who will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
Squinky's fingerprints are all over Jak 3. Often the game will innocently swing the camera to the left just before a tiny mechanical scorpion leaps in from the right. Or, say... something will start shooting at you from directly above your head, where the weapon auto-lock stubbornly refuses to go. Of course when you're out in the desert there's an endless inexhaustable supply of bandits in dune buggies with laser blasters.
(I sat and watched them drive up out of the ocean for a while. That was mildly surreal.)
One of my many daydreams is that I someday get access to a cloning machine and Squinky's daily route to work. I will hide myselves along his route and shoot paint-filled ping pong balls at him out of a slingshot all day long. Not to kill. Not even to injure. Merely to annoy.
Maybe to injure a little.
--
Doing a "collect artifacts" dune buggy race. Driving from glow-ball to glow-ball on a very tight timer. Eventually it takes away my minimap entirely to tell me "YOU GOT A PLOT TOKEN" in big screen-filling letters, but -- critically -- the TIMER IS STILL TICKING. When my map comes back, I find I have ten seconds to get to something in the opposite direction of where I've been driving.
I fail.
I'm struggling to think of some trope to compare this to and failing. It may be so obviously a horrible, wrong idea that nobody has ever DONE it before.
I am enjoying this game, I swear. These are minor moments out of a larger whole. It's just that they're jaw-dropping moments that make me question why I'm enjoying the rest of it.
--
Tess is now going on at length about how she and Daxter need a quiet house in the country with a white picket fence, all while rubbing him under the chin so he makes derpy faces. It's so cutesy-poo Jak is kinda cringing. ... Right, this is why I'm enjoying this game. I ship it.
--
Y'know, I never really used a lot of Jak's new toys. I don't think I even shot a couple of the new guns, I kept waiting for "Slow Time" to be used in a puzzle and it never actually was (and you can't use it during races, the one time I WANTED to slow the timer down), the game was so aware I'd never use Dark Fireball otherwise that a tutorial popped up on screen literally every time it was required to move on in the game, there was some kind of shield thing I never really thought about using...
I feel like James Bond coming home with a basket of Q's gizmos he never used and a deeply puzzled expression. Not a failure on the game's part. Just a lack of imagination from me, I suppose.
The power where Jak grows enormous ethereal wings made of pure light was cool. I'll give it that.
Speaking of the guns, though, by the end of the game my most-used gun was easily the three-pronged tracking "needle laser" that pew-pewed like something out of Zone of the Enders. I love this series and all its crazy guns. Boom-ti-yada.
--
Okay, now it's Star Fox. Did they just have like a Naughty Dog Retro Game Night and get real drunk and decide to crib off everything in arm's reach? Then again, this is actually kinda fun. So they get a pass.
--
The Big Bad makes his appearance. It's Erol! You remember Erol? The fellow who got so upset at losing a race that he drove straight at Jak screaming and missed, thus exploding in a fountain of Dark Eco? Well, he's back. Since he's returned from the Dark Eco as Cyber-Erol, he's all scarred and hideously twisted and basically 95% robot, 5% flesh.
It turns out he's the one who called down the Dark Makers (the "Day Star" is their coming ship), he's the one who's been manufacturing robotic Krimson Guardsmen, he's the driving force behind most of the evil acts in this game. I'd like to remind you all that his untimely death happened because he was unable to properly seperate lust from jealousy and attempted to murder Jak because Erol couldn't impress Jak's girlfriend. Now he wants to destroy the world.
I sat here and tried to make that funnier for a while. I give up. He was sexually frustrated and now he wants to end all life and melt the planet down. There you go. That's it. That's all there is.
If someone you know may be a budding supervillain, please have them spayed or neutered before the situation gets out of control.
--
Playing the last two games in Big Head mode pays off, as Jak calls for Wastelander back-up and they come roaring into the city, running over enemies in their buggies. "I thought you said never to tackle your enemies head-on." Jak smirks at their leader.
"Well, that all depends on how hard your skull is." the leader smirks back. In reply, Jak lifts his hand up and passes it straight through his enormous cheat-coded forehead repeatedly, as if he were knocking on a much smaller skull somewhere inside it.
I don't stop giggling until the cutscene at the end of the next level, where Jak discovers that the wastelander leader who just died saving his life was his biological father. He'd spent his life searching for his lost son, and died unaware that the "hero" he asked to keep up the search -was- that son.
Ah. Right. I had forgotten I am playing Awkward Tonal Shift: The Series. *wince*
After that it's back into the Precursor Tunnels to play more STUN Runner.
--
With the Great Secrets of the Precursors Revealed (and they are some amazingly silly secrets, clearly written in a design document back before the series took a dive off the Cliffs of Darkness) we fight Evil Dark Metal Red Eyes Black Dragon Cyber-Erol Ver 2.0 and win, saving the day hooray. Daxter gets a wish from the Precursors and wishes for pants.
Tess promptly wishes for "pants just like that" and the whimsical Precursors make her an otter-weasel too, perfectly sized to get in Daxter's pants (as it were). Which is adorable and exactly the kind of ending I wanted, but I'm really not sure the devs WANTED me thinking "Ooh, uhm, that's a bit Furaffinity, isn't it?" Like I'm pretty much positive there's a large slew of fanfic just like that...
Oh well. With that, I wrap up the Jak and Daxter main trilogy. There's three more games: Daxter (the interquel for the two-year gap at the start of Jak 2), Jak X: Combat Racing (I think this has something to do with knitting), and Jak & Daxter: The Lost Frontier (sort of a Jak 4, if such a thing existed).
I'm certainly not going straight on to those, though. What will I do? ...well, tomorrow I will go in for more dental work and spend a lot of time whimpering and wishing I were dead. After that? Who knows, really?
It will probably involve video games though.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2014-09-21 10:46 pm (UTC)Good luck at the dentalperson!
I'm terrified of them, myself.
no subject
Date: 2014-09-21 10:51 pm (UTC)Still, welcome.