Retronauts - 488: Retronauts Episode 488: Jak & Daxter

Episode Date: October 17, 2022

Join Stuart Gipp with guests John Linneman and Thomas Nickel for a hop, skip, and headshot through this fantasy future world. Jak's gonna kill Praxis, and we here at Retronauts are gonna kill praxis. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

You're listening to Retronauts a part of the HyperX Podcast Network. Find us and more great shows like us at podcast.hyperx.com. This week in Retronauts, I'm going to kill Praxis. Hello, welcome to Retronaut's number 488, I think. That's the number I've got on here, and I'm not checking. So if that's wrong, then we're going to have to redo the whole order of all the episodes to make it right. Today's episode, I'm just going to sort of steamroll straight into it, I think. I'm joined by two very excellent people, and I think that the best way to do this,

this would be alphabetical order, or in the order that we're stacked on Zencaste here. So, first of all, I'm going to say hello, hello to you, John. Hello, Stuart. It's good to be back and talk about these excellent games today. Hello, hello. And also, beneath John, only on Zencast, not in terms of status or anything like that. Hello, I am Thomas Nicol. I am a good friend of Johns.

I am a German games journalist and games lecturer, and this is my second appearance. on Retronaut, which I'm quite happy about. So, yeah, nice to be here. It's lovely to have you both. It's all very lovely. It's all very lovely and relaxed. And today we're talking about some very chill games as well, I think, to go with the... Chill in the sense of being hideously difficult at times, but still kind of chill.

And, you know, honestly, I was surprised when I raised the idea of talking about these games. I'm not going to dance around it any longer. You all know what it is because it'll be on the feed. We're talking about Jack and Dexter. And I was a little bit shocked when I put out the feelers to say, hey, who wants to talk Jack and Dexter on Retronauts? And I was met with essentially a quiet, like, you know, peaceful, kind of relaxed silence. Did you hear any crickets chirping, or did you see any tumbleweed going by?

I could hear the distant flutter of the Flutflut's wings. There you go. tie into the to the game's law there. But I was a little bit surprised, but what it did sort of sell to me is these games came along at kind of a weird time

and a weird kind of tone, but we'll get to that, I think. I don't think there's ever been a series that I can think of that has taken as hard of a left turn as this one did. And that's not necessarily a negative. Your mileage may vary on that, but I think it's best just to

kind of dive straight in with the basic first game, which would be, of course, Jack and Dexter in 2001, released on PlayStation 2, which was a game that was, my understanding is that it was started on as named Project Y, and that was while Crash Team Racing was being developed, so pretty early days, because that was, what, 99, though I believe it was, I get some conflicting information there, because apparently it was in development for four years, but that doesn't quite add up if it was begun then, so I suspect that it was, maybe slightly wrong. From what I understand,

they started like pre-production and sort of imagining what it was going to be before that point, but it was in 1999 that they got, from what I've read, the very first PlayStation 2

development kit to reach North America. So, lucky. They were very early to that party. Apparently it was kept under lock and key. I think there was a lot of tinkering going on just to get this tech right, because I mean,

for Nautjog, this was a whole new affair in terms of, of approach to the whole world design. Yeah. It was, yeah, the, the big thing, the big gimmick, it's not a gimmick, but you know what I mean, of this game, was I believe it would be one of the first, if not the first, to have a big sort of streaming, like, I'm not sure if streaming is the right word, but just a huge interconnected kind of open-ish world. I mean, it's not really open world. It's kind of linear stages joined together, but to an extent.

It's not the first, obviously, but it is definitely one of the most ambitious, right? Like, we'd actually seen stuff like this with Legacy of Cain's Soul Reaver. Yeah. I guess I always felt that Jack and Daxter was sort of an extension of the N64-style platform game. Absolutely. With new technology powering it, because Noddy Dog couldn't do this on PlayStation 1, and you could kind of tell that they probably wanted to. You know, crash was very much, it was linear, not just for the,

game design, but out of necessity. The way they render those stages, they're doing a lot of polygun calling and stuff to very carefully hide things, so they're reducing the amount of polygons drawn. But for this, they're like, no, we're going to do what we could not do on the PlayStation

and go really big. Yeah, you know, it feels a bit unleashed to me. Finally, they can do what they wanted to do the whole whole time. Yeah, well, if you look at Crash Bandicoot 3, there's a lot of visiting other bits of levels to, which then

reconnect with them, which feels like they do really want to do this, but they have to do it within this framework that they've got that's reasonably restrictive. You know, the gem stage is where you'll end up halfway through like the Hangam High stage when you finish this gem path and then you know how it is. You all know how crashes

I'm sure. Yeah. I mean, Jack and Daxter, the first one, is very Crash Bandicoat with your moveset and the feel of it and some of the creature designs and stuff. But the game I think it's the most like is Banjo Banzo Cizui or Banjo Tui

except kind of weird knobs on because like Banjo Tui I'm not sure if that's the same year of the year before it had the same similar kind of open world and the fact that you could go into a space in one stage

and end up in a completely different stage and it was actually really impressive at the time but of course That's actually a really good point to it because Banjo games like Conquer these were still coming out on N64 around the time of Jack and Dexter, right? The N-64 was hanging on for dear life. I think Banderthui was 2000, but Conquer, I believe, was 2001, so...

No, Conquer was definitely before Jack and Dexter, because when I think back, what I worked back then, when I, back then in the day, I was working for a magazine called Players, which was a PS2 magazine. Yeah. And one of the last things I wrote was a preview for the first Jack and Dexter before I left, due to something good with my life. And at that time, I already owned a copy of Conquer. It's definitely older. Oh, yeah. I mean, Conquer came out earlier in 2001, and Jack came out, I guess, late in the year.

So it would have been the same year. Conker kind of ate its lunch a little bit in a weird way, especially in terms of recognition, because that was the game that was winning the platformer awards that year. Whereas Jack, because they were just like, that squirrel just said shit. Like, to give it all of the awards, give it a BAFTA. It's kind of funny, though, as we'll get to later, when we talk about another game, Conquer built a lot of those movie reference things in there. Oh, yes, absolutely.

Well, yeah, we have to discuss that, I think. Oh, God. The circle is closing. The thing about Jack and Daxter though, that I want to talk about first with the development side is... Yeah, yeah. So Noddy Dog was already pretty renowned for their technology in the PS1, but for Jack and Daxter,

they essentially built this LISP-based programming language that they called the game-oriented assembly LISP. And the big feature here was that they were actually able to compile directly onto a PS2 in a way that during development they could make it, say, change

to a piece of code and then almost immediately see the code take shape on the system. Whereas in crash, you know, they're actually you make the changes, you recompile it, you copy it over the dev kit, you know, it takes time just to see if the little change

you made work. And they really wanted to create something where they could make rapid changes and see those results immediately. And I think that whole development pipeline that they created there for the code specifically was one of the key reasons they were able to produce such a big, complex game at that time. And that time actually, this was the same release period as something like Grand Theft Auto 3. And Grand Theft Auto 3 was very popular, of course. Yeah, I wonder if anything came of that. Yeah. Technologically speaking,

GTA3 was pretty bad looking, I would say, compared to Jack and Daxter, which was a 60-frame per second, you know, just these beautifully detailed environments, very expressive characters, they really pushed it far. One thing that, I mean, this is kind of an emulation point, so it might not be entirely relevant, but something that amuses me about Jack and Dax, having been playing it on PCSX2 recently, for in preparation. Well, actually, it wasn't in preparation. I was just playing it because I like it.

But then I thought, hey, Prognor's episode. See, that's the process, folks. That's how we come to our ideas. it has a kind of pixelish sort of blurfish filter over it the whole game which on a PS2 on a CRT or even on just like a standard high-definition television is not noticeable really but when you emulate it because it's emulating that same thing at like much higher resolution it looks blurry as hell

so it's like an interlacing kind of thing I'm not sure how it works but I find it quite funny the other games don't have that but this one it does I don't know how it works, but it's interesting. So I can actually explain that. Yeah, that would be cool. They used an early method of displaying on PlayStation 2 called field rendering, which is essentially they took advantage of the interlaced nature of TVs. And so every frame was actually only half a frame vertically.

So you would have like 640 by 224 pixels per frame, and it would rapidly alternate between those two frames to build the complete picture. And during the early days of PS2 games, that was the only display mode available. And that's what caused. people to talk about the quote unquote jaggies. But after that point,

more options opened up and developers were targeting, you know, full frame buffer rendering. And by Jack 2, they would do 480P, wide screen, all that kind of stuff. So that's the reason why Jack 1 has such a different look to it, because they were using that interlaced display mode. Yeah, I'm not sure

if it was Jack 2. I know Jack 3 has got progressive scan, but I don't know about Jack 2. It does. It does. It's not in the menu, is it? You've got to hold some combination of buttons to make it work. Oh, it might be the power version's different because in the US version, I was just testing it. It does

have progressive scan right in the menu. Oh, okay. It's not in the power version. They're also checked. Oh, okay. I missed it completely. I need to replay the whole game again now. That's a shame. I've got to replay this game that I love. Damn. Crap. Something I want to mention as well in terms of the whole banjo

comparison, because I do think it's essentially just banjo this game. It's not criticism of it. It's something that I found that makes it maybe not stand out as much as it could have because in terms of collectibles, because it is a collector mark, but it's not a super, massive major sort of collectathon like you'd get

from like DK64. No. But like the power cells are jiggies. The prequester orbs are music notes essentially and the scout flies of the Gingos. It's the same exact progression more or less. You get everything you're doing is working towards getting these

power cells. Um, You don't need all of them to finish the game, but you do need all of them to see the final ending, which hasn't been resolved in any of the sequels. Apparently, I don't think I've ever managed to get all of them, to be honest. I think I finished Jack 1. It's my least favorite of the lot, but it's still great. That's how good this series is. Interesting. So I have to say, it's my favorite of the lot, to be honest. Yeah. It's not that there's anything necessarily wrong with it. It's that I really liked the sequels. like the story and such really got its claws into me when I was at the exact right age to enjoy it.

Since you just mentioned a banjo, I think from my experience, when I played Jack for the first time, it felt like banjo, but it felt like a very breezy, open banjo. I mean, I like the N64 platformers. They are nice. I played a lot of conker and stuff like that, but they always feel a bit

cramped to me and a bit struggling against the hardware. They're doing stuff. The hardware isn't really supposed to do in that quality. and playing Jack for the first time it felt like okay though this is what a game like this should look and should feel like

with the high frame rate and this large open worlds that really gives you room to breathe and to walk around and it's not as cramped as the N64 games yeah it was the first example of that too like there hadn't been a game like this at this scale that was so smooth

it's interesting that they've created what see it's not the only reason I personally wouldn't call it open world is because it's not what I come to understand of an open world, which is what Jack 2 and 3 give, which is kind of almost negative because to say open world and me to think, well, actually there's too much stuff to do. There's too much fun stuff. It's not open world unless you're traveling doing essentially nothing for a great period of time. But no, it is, it is in that respect like that. And there is this breeziness to it, which is sort of exacerbated by some of the missions that you do, which are just, quite simple, like, the one where you have to sort of scare away the seagulls, so they fly onto different spots, and then eventually they'll drop a power cell for you, weird stuff like that. There's a lot of chasing of animals in this game. Do you know what vibes I got when I played it again a few days ago?

I got a lot of vibes from Mario Odyssey, to be honest, because the way the power cells are doled out, it also feels, oh, nice, I just found another one without even trying to go for that. I just did something cool and something I wanted to try out, and here's my reward for that, like the moons in Odyssey, which is a good approach, I think. You're right. Mario Odyssey actually does tend to be more like Banjo and Jack compared to Super Mario 64, where Mario 64 stars were essentially defined levels, right? It wasn't specifically wonder around, look for the star. It's like, okay, I'm going to do this, I'm going to follow this objective, and then the end point of that level is you get a star, where Jack and Banjo and them, or more like, well, they're scattered around and you're going to have to do some platforming and some light puzzling in combat

along the way to kind of stumble upon them, but they're just kind of waiting for you usually. If memory serves, while there are obviously gates, there's not that many choke points. Like, you need a certain amount of cells to get the Zuma to get across Lava Canyon. Yeah, stuff like that. And there are a few boss battles,

and I think there's like three in the game, and one of them is completely optional, which is the plant bus, the giant-like... That was a strength, I think, you're right, where you did kind of have this freedom to just explore and have fun, but it wasn't like modern open world where it was just, you know,

it felt doable, I guess you could say. It was stuff to do... It's not busy work. Right. It wasn't, like, overwhelming with stuff to do. Yeah, even finding the precursor orbs isn't super taxing. They're not exactly well hidden in this one. Yeah, I did that with friends.

We got all of them in the end, which was quite fun. Yeah, and it helps that there's quite a lot of blue eco which makes collecting things even more fun because they just fly into your body when you have it. Bomba's mission is simple, make the most comfortable clothes ever, and match every item sold with an equal item donated. So when you buy Bombas, you are also giving to someone in need. That's right, Bomba designed their socks, shirts, and underwear to be the clothes you can't wait to put on every day.

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Daxter gets knocked into a pool of dark eco and comes back out looking like he does, as we know him now. And what is he in Otsell? That's what it's called in game. Otter and a weasel kind of combined into one and not a creature. Now, I want to say

something real quick, just to get this out of the way. I think there's going to have to be spoilers in this episode for Jack, because I want to talk about the Outsal thing, and Jack 3, that becomes a big deal. And it's one of my all-time favorite plot points in any game ever. It's one of the most perfect things I've ever seen in a game, and I can't wait to talk about it, I have to say. So I guess I read this in an interview a while

ago, where they talked about the whole Daxter, the point of Daxter was actually to allow them to create comedic moments without potentially annoying the player, and they actually cited Gex as something they didn't want to do. Because, you know, yeah, that's a shame because Gex is awesome. I like Gex. No mention of Bubsy. Weird. No mention of Bubzy, Unfortunately, but it sounds to me like they were actually inspired by the movie Moulon, where, you know, they had the Eddie, yeah, exactly. It was like voiced by Eddie Murphy, if I recall. Yeah. And they liked that idea of having sort of a character going around with the main character, sort of telling jokes and just acting kind of goofy and communicating the humor through them.

And that's basically what Daxter became. Of course. Obviously, with the PS2, it was possible to display enough complex characters at once that they could actually pull it off smoothly. I mean, Daxter is a real source of, like, energy to this game, not just in terms of his dialogue, but the way that when you do, like, a spin attack, he's clinging to you and getting kind of flung around and then climbing back up on your shoulder and stuff.

There's a lot to it. I mean, it kind of helps as well that Jack's, you know, he's the silent protagonist in this game, apart from some grunting. So you need Daxa to tell, to be the guy who says, hey, let's go and do this thing. Because Jack's not going to say it. He's not being tortured enough. He's talking yet. Not yet.

I think that the character of Jack and Dexter is, I wouldn't say that the world, in terms of who's inhabiting it, is one of its strongest suits, because a lot of the characters you meet are essentially just, like, they'll talk at you and then they'll give you a power cell, like, once you've got enough. The quest give us, something like that. Yeah, they don't stand out to me a huge amount. I mean, the sculptor and the muse is a memorable idea, but it's not like they do much sort of with him. I think it's in the sequels when they start to really sort of settle the importance of the story, of the interaction. And it's still not perfect, but I do think it's a step up in terms of you feeling immersed. That's just, that's my opinion. I know a lot of people like this one the best, and they have every, I understand why.

I truly do. I think what Jack and Dexter excels up personally is, you know, level design, versatility, the way that you have these quite simple inputs. You've got your punch attack. You've got your spin attack and you've got your jump, but those three things combine into quite a lot of movement options. With the roll, the roll as well. The roll jumps are the best.

Yeah. The game just feels really good. Yeah. Something I used to love doing is whenever you're... This is so dumb, but whenever you're going down on an elevator, I used to like to do head slams, like, repeatedly on the way down, because you can get really high bounce off them, especially if you do an uppercut.

Because, like, if you punch and then press jump, you'll do a big spiraling uppercut that you can then kind of down with a slam, and it's just very satisfying that these very few inputs can combine into such an interesting kind of combos. Yeah, I mean, my magic moment is a friend of mine bought it a little bit before me. He showed it to me, okay, looks nice. Can you do double jump? He smiled, you can do a triple jump.

Then you did a jump, another jump, and a spin, and then, all right, I'm sold, I'm in. And the more jumps you can do the better, really. I mean, later in the later games, you get to be able to do about four or five jumps, and that's when they really go into next game. I mean, to be honest, still today, I'm a smashed jigglypuff player, so here we go. Oh, yeah, many jumps is imaginable. Yeah. Good Lord.

So when this came out, did you guys play the Powell version first then? Because I was in the U.S., so I obviously played the American version. Yes, yeah. Do you recall if it was optimized for power, if it was just a 50-hertz-only kind of thing? It was perfect. It had a 60-hertz mode, and that's all we needed. All right, that's great. I wouldn't have bought it otherwise.

I wouldn't have known. I would have been fine with it. I would have just been like, let's go, I don't care. 350, that's, man, whatever. So what I can say about this, we had a 60 hertz option in the menu. And also, one thing I noticed back in the day, it had a really good German dub,

which was a rare thing back in the day. I mean, listening to it today, of course, it's a bit, yeah, it's German anime TV quality dub from the early 2000s. But they had some good voices, and Dexter was really, really good. What do you guys think of the character designs

of Jack and Dexter in general of the sort of the world Jack Dexter Kira all these, the way they look. I mean, the main, from what I've looked into, the main inspiration was battle chases. That's Joe Maduro, I don't have to pronounce this name, Joe Maduroera's comic that they later made a game out of on Kickstarter. That was

Night War. I think that's quite fitting, actually, because there is this mix between Western sensibilities. I mean, Dexter is clearly one of these Looney-Toon style characters. It could be in an old Bucks Bunny short, which would be awesome. And Jack has this anime-ish look, and the female characters have rather horny designs, to be honest.

Yeah, the treatment of the female characters gets a lot worse than the next game, I have to say, it's really not great. But it starts out like that already, so the seats are laid. Yeah, I mean, the designs are, they are what they are. I think it's perfectly fine, but they work exceptionally well for a platform game. And by that, you know, just running around, you need the proportions of the character need to feel right for the game to feel right. And I think Jack actually nails this really well, like just to his overall, like, silhouette and the animation and makes it feel good to play. And that's kind of the key. But as you see him in cutscenes, you know, it's going to vary from person to person, but they are at least very well animated, which is, I think, the key there. Yeah, absolutely.

Jack is very bounty when you play him and I think that makes a lot of the great feeling when you play it. Lots of stretching, lots of squashing and he feels energetic. It's a lot more fluid than Crash Bandicoe ever was, I would say. It feels like a big step up from that for me personally

in terms of character movement. It's not that I don't love Crash, and I want to stroke his little head. I do, but I think Jack is a better platformer. Is that Is that a controversial thing to say? No, I don't think so. Okay, good.

Me neither. And this game did reasonably well. It was on platinum, and it sold... Do we have sales figures for this game? I did find something. I found a figure at about four million. See, that's quite a lot of games, yet. It feels like it should be more.

Well, I think, you know, it's just the bar has been raised so much in recent years, right? There was a time we're selling a million copies. was like, whoa, it was huge numbers, but now that's considered in some circles anyway, if you're Square Enix, that's considered a bomb. If you're a Western Square Nix publisher, at least. If you're part of the Western Square Nix team,

there's different. There's different levels. It underperformed. It didn't reach expectations. Was it Avengers that did really well, and they still said it was a failure? I think it was Tomb Raider. Oh, right, yeah. Yeah, the Tomb Raider game sold well, but, you know, not to their expectations, of course.

Jeez, I don't know. So, yeah, four, four, Four million isn't, you know, it's not huge by today's standards, but at the time, I think that that was a fair amount. And it was a very big game. But also, if you guys remember, the fall of 2001 and in and of itself was just one of the greatest release periods of all time, I think. I mean, that whole like six months from like summer through December. I mean, we had, you know, Jack, of course, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 and Middle Gear Solid 2, Final Fantasy 10, Klonoa 2, you know, Eco, Silent. Island Hill 2, Devil May Cry, Ace Combat 4, all this stuff happened. And the launch of the new systems, like Xbox with Halo and all this stuff. I would say, Clanoa really ate into the Jack sales. I don't know about that. Yeah, but also, one thing about this is I think that it might be the wrong game on the right platform in a way, because on PS2 was this big, expensive high-tech device. and Jack, without being in any way, derogative, feels more like a kiddie game.

And I don't think the people who splashed all that money wanted some, they think cool and grown up and maybe a bit violent. I think that's one thing. I'm not sure I agree with that, Thomas. If we're talking modern PlayStation, yes. But PlayStation 2 was still that era where Sony was creating stuff for everyone. You know, the Japan studios, it wasn't called that yet, I guess. They had so many unique creative ideas coming out of Japan and in their U.S. studios, and that stuff was selling well.

I mean, Jack, Ratchet, and even Sly, were all huge sellers. That's something that makes me sad is the fact that Sony had four brilliant platforming franchises. As you mentioned, Jack, Ratchet, Sly, and, you know, Aperscape. Apiscape, absolutely. And they're all dead except for Ratchet, which may as well be dead, because it's rubbish now. It's really Yeah I mean

Your mileage may vary about Ratchett That's that's slightly uncharity Modern Sony It's not what it wants We were eating good this year This time

This time Oh, yes, we were. But one thing I do want to talk about on a down note is actually the soundtrack. Oh, yeah. So I actually felt weirdly misled by this. When the game was first shown at E3 with a rather mind-blowing trailer for the time, they used a song that I hadn't, wasn't familiar with yet, called Ademis. by Carl Jenkins, and this was actually recorded for a Delta Airlines television commercial from 1994, right?

But I wasn't familiar with it, but it's a surprisingly good piece with, like, vocals, and it sounds awesome. And they use this for the trailer, and they timed the gameplay to the music, and I'm thinking, oh, so this is what it's going to sound like. But then the game comes out, and it's just this kind of, I hate to say it, but it's this very generic sort of like jungle drum beats. Yeah, it's that do, do, do, do, do. You know what it reminds me of? You know, when you finish

Yoshi's Island and the title screen turns dark? It's the music that plays on that title screen. It's just very repetitive and not... I mean, it's just more crash music in a way, isn't it? Yeah, and I'm sorry. The crash music was awesome. It was always so...

This is like crash music, but it never gets started. Think about, like, the music in Crash 2 when you're on the jetboard thing, and it's like, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do it's so good. It definitely, yeah, I mean, I would say that it got, it got, it's, it's worse, it's a step down. I think there should be a Bradronauts karaoke episode, where it's just people singing the music from games that they like, I'm going to pitch that, all right, so sorry, carry on. But, uh, so apparently the music was done by Josh Mansell, who has done, he did all of naughty dogs game music.

up through Jack 3 and also worked on Interstate 82, which is interesting, if you guys remember that. I don't be in the state 76. I didn't know that there was They made a sequel. Blimey. It was based in the 80s, and it was less good. But yeah, so that's, I feel that the soundtrack is the one area where it falls down. And I always kind of look at platformers. I like to use the pillars comparison, where it's like you have the gameplay feel, the

visual presentation side of things and then the music and I feel like music is critical to the absolute best platform games and it's the one area where jack which is otherwise amazing kind of falls down now I'd say jack two goes some way to making that less of an issue with its very dynamic sort of soundtrack but it's still not exactly I think three is we'll get to it but I think three is the best of the bunch in terms of music by far but yeah it's I mean should we talk about Jack 2, if we said enough about the original? Do you think? Yeah, I think Jack 1, as we've talked about, it's

a fairly basic thing. It's that N64 style platformer. Yeah. Large open world. This really showcased naughty dog, like, coming up in the world in terms of the technology, and it's sort of the first big step towards where they are today. Yeah, maybe one more thing about Jack 1 is, when you

played it again, how did you feel about the camera? I mean, I was okay with it because I don't mind. I'm used to The inverse X, whatever, or why I forget, I never remember which is which, I'm an idiot. The inverted camera, I mean, you can actually change it with a really obtuse, I think it's hold L3 and press like a triangle or something on one of the menus and it inverts it. But it doesn't tell you it's inverted it. It doesn't make a sound or anything.

That's just, it's just, that is how you do it. It's something, R1 and L3, I think. Something like that. But it also tends to get stuck a bit in the scenery sometime. That's what I noticed. Oh, really. I mean, I'm sure that's true. I just haven't noticed it myself. I think it's just cameras are difficult, right? And back then, they hadn't really been solved. That was definitely an issue with check two for me, was the camera getting caught on all of the buildings and stuff.

I will say that it does, the camera work feels very smooth with the way it moves through the world. So even though it sometimes gets cut up, it just has this very fluid sensation as you move around. It's satisfying. And, you know, it is. it's not fully right stick yet like it does have right stick left and right but not you can't look up and down which i think is perfectly fine i suppose when you guys were playing jack and daxter back in the day were you thinking at any point man i wish i was shooting these these animals and not just hitting them with my hands no i wish i was blasted yeah well you know you got your chance just a couple of years later when jack two or if you're

a pal, Jack 2 Renegade, which is a really strange name, was released, hugely hyped in the magazines at the time. I remember magazines like PSM to really just like 10 pages. Look, you've got a gun now, it's actually good now. You can steal cars and do crime. Yeah, that was a big thing back then. And the problem is that in doing that, they kind of in arguably alienated a lot of their fan base. And I think that's kind of a testament to the game's sales, which were quite a lot lower. And the fact that whenever you mention Jack 2 online nowadays, someone spits at you.

Really just a disliked game, and I don't really get why I really truly don't understand, because I thought it was awesome. I had a fantastic time. We're all in agreement here that it's actually a very good game, and hopefully we can communicate that. Yeah. But I do actually understand why some people might not like it. Oh, absolutely, yes. But I guess the main, we should start then, right?

So this game kicked off development just after the first Jack and Daxter. And I love that they just went straight to Jack 2 instead of they dropped the and Daxter part. It's like, you know, Gears of War got there with Gears 5, but Jack's just like, now we're just going to cut it all off like right here. So it's Jack 2. That's probably why they felt the need to add the renegade on in the UK because they're just like, what's what this name?

What's a Jack? Exactly. Always a renegade. I understand now. How's my 40 pounds? Exactly. So as I mentioned briefly earlier, Grand Theft Auto 3 came out 2001, obviously a very big deal and sort of reshaped what people expected from games in general. I think it was sort of the first in the modern style open world design. And it did it pretty well because the world was still constrained enough that it didn't feel overwhelming or annoying. and, you know, it sold a lot. It immediately got a sequel with Vice City, not long after.

And it's pretty clear that Naughty Dog took inspiration from this with some of the decisions with Jack 2. We're like, well, we want to tap into that. But as I think we'll get into, it doesn't exactly copy Grand Theft Auto. It is its own unique thing. And I think it works perfectly well given that. The change in tone, I mean, I think it was mentioned. It was either mentioned before we started recording or at a beginning, but it's difficult for me to think of a series that has taken such a hard turn as this one did.

And yet I don't feel like it is too much of a step away from Jack. I think the way that they get here is quite... I don't know if logical is the right word, but they did think about it. Like it does work for the storyline the way that they get to this world, what it turns out this world actually is, the way that you'll stumble across areas from the original Jack and Dexter. Right, right.

You know, but different. It is satisfying, I think. There is a sense at times, what with the vehicle pinching and, you know, the jetboard grinding and the racing and all the sort of little mini-games that you can play,

there is a sense of the kind of later, I guess you could call it Sly Raccoon 3 kind of a slight movement away from platforming, but that would be unreasonable to say that this game doesn't have platforming, which is what a lot of people do say. Because there's clearly loads of platforming,

and it's also awesome. I'd like to ask you guys for a second when Jack Took came out, were you in any way active in the games industry or were you experiencing the game as purely from a player standpoint? Just from a player standpoint personally, although I bought so many games back then I probably was sort of part of the industry in a sense.

You kept it afloat. Yeah, essentially, through buying secondhand games from game. Buy two, get one, three, mate. Awesome. Seltian days. The thing is, for me, when Jack 2 came out, I was out of the industry for one or two years because I left that magazine to study something. And Jack 2 is a gate that brought me back into the industry because another company asked me, since I was the same place that they had the office,

if I would be willing to play Jack 2 and make a complete walkthrough of the game. I have two or three weeks to finish the whole game. Oh, my God. I said, yeah, sure. I mean, I played Jack 1. Jack 1 wasn't too hard. Sure, I can do that. Oh, my God.

And, yeah, then I started going to work on that game, and I noticed quickly this is something entirely different. And this can't be done in two or three weeks, and this can't be done in one go. So we had to split the whole thing up, and I was basically cursing my way through most of the missions at some point and hating every second on it. So it took me a while to get back to it

and play it under normal circumstances to enjoy what it really does. that's interesting you mention that because it's just I've just remembered when I first got Jack 2 when I was much younger it was off the strength of the reviews it received and the huge amount of hype that it got it was like it in 1990s really high scores and I bounced off it quite quickly because of that difficulty and because of the change and the driving and I was in a at that time I was in my burgeoning crotchety I only want to play colorful cool Nintendo like games kind of mode which I thankfully grew out of. But when I eventually repurchased Jack 2 a couple of years later, I got really sucked into it. Like, super worked for me. I bit, it got his

hooks in me hard. The fact that Jack has a voice now, thanks to being tortured with Dark Eco for two years, I think it does actually make the game better. It makes him, even though he's not the most interesting character at this point.

At least he's a character now. He doesn't need to be, right? He is the player character, and, you know, Daxter and the others bring more personality to it. And he's just kind of reacted to it and given his own thoughts. And I'm glad they got, they brought that forward because the silent protagonist thing for Jack 1, which was, you know, as they admitted, was kind of made popular by games like Half-Life. Yeah. Everybody was doing silent protagonists. But for a character action game, I don't think it's the best decision.

And I do like that they play with it, though, because, you know, obviously the tone is darker, especially. initially on. And the very first line you hear, Stuart, you can do it because you're better. So I do it again. Well, hold on. We got to set the stage. So Jack is tortured for two years, kind of like Sonic was in the much later game. And Daxter basically spends two years rescuing him.

And when he finally makes his way to Jack, right before Jack's essentially going to be killed, at least that's what it's insinuated. He's like begging him to wake up. It says, you know, say something for once in your life, and Jack sits up and... Hi, Dexter, how are you? It's good to see you. It's been a while. No, he says, I'm going to kill Praxis. Praxis is barren Praxis, by the way. We should probably explain that. It's not a Klingon Moon.

No, it's not a Klingon Moon. It's not Praxis. He is the sort of a sensible villain of the game, although he's not the final villain of the game, but that's a spoiler. So, food for thought, by the way, So, if that is Jack's first sentence, the utters, would Jack be a good compatriot to the guys from Stranger of Paradise? I'm going to kill chaos. I would like that a lot if you could play as Jack in almost... You know what, I'd like to play us Jack in any game these days at all?

Like, just put Jack in a goddamn game, please. I saw you can play Jack in a crash game. There is a mod somewhere I heard. So are you talking Jack as in J-A-K or Jack as in J-A-C-K? because they're, you know, they could do Jack and Jack. They would be awesome together, like a buddy cop game or something, you know. You were onto something here. Jack and Jack.

Yeah, they're both ignoring each other, turning up their new metal, like, louder and louder. We are going to kill Praxis and chaos. Yeah. So the thing about this period was, and I think what caused the reaction to this game and many others, was it seemed like a lot of games were taking this dark turn. Obviously, there's Prince of Persia, the warrior within, which, again, unfairly maligned. very good game and I would argue gameplay wise it's better than the first I know when I'm talking about warrior with them but I played that quite recently and I was just thinking like you know this

honestly kind of makes me think about bloodborne like I know it doesn't play like it but it has the same kind of focus on combat that I thought this is it's right to be honest they both smolder with generic rage but not just that also burnout if you remember when they did burnout revenge it was a bit later but the joke there was that burnout was now smoldering with rage because it went for the darker tones. And that was just the common thing to do. I would almost say Jack feels like a transition from N64 to Xbox in terms of style. Yep, yep.

And of course, the sort of, the air quotes, darkness does feed into the dark Jack mode that you can take on in this game, which is a kind of, you transform into like the creature from a disturbed album cover and then you can. Now, here's the thing about dark Jack and Jack too. is it's really shit. Like, it's not useful at all. The only thing it's good for is cleaning the screen with the dark bum. And I think it's quite funny that you get two jacked powers, and they're both essentially the same thing,

until you get Dark Giant, which is actually similarly useless. It's not very good. It works okay in, like, city-style environments, but as soon as you're in any of the platforming areas, you just, like, fall right off. Darkjack is good for one specific point of the game, which is escape the slums with the seal piece,

because you can do the dark one into the water, destroy the century and then just swim out casually without having to engage with any of the enemies. And that's one of the hardest missions in the game. So, yeah. I mean, speaking of difficulty, because we have talked about difficulty. I'd like to add one more thing about Jack,

which is, I think, a nice bit of characterization is if you played again recently, I mean, Jack is more angry, but usually only when interacting with the city and the people, but not with Dexter, then he's more jovial. There's more the old Jack, which is, I think, that's a nice touch.

So, yeah, agreed. Again, they know what they are doing. Yeah, that's why I think that the character is, the dismissal of this game is Edge Lordy, which is nonsense, ridiculous nonsense. There are higher stakes. The characters do die, but it's not like it's a gore fest. It's not like it's a really a cuss fest.

You know, it's just dax to being as stupid as ever getting into physical comedy, you know, getting sucked into pipes and smacked around. So, a big, Oh, it's ridiculous. I think the same misconception applies to the game design as well, where essentially the city itself acts as a giant hub world, right? So it does have vehicles you can drive, and they're these hover vehicles, and they have two heights. So you can go at the height of flying above the city or down on the streets where you can run people over and get in trouble. Yeah.

But outside of that, all of the missions, well, most of the missions sort of take place outside in bespoke areas. And I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this, but I've always felt that the first big mission you do where you have to go take that banner down from the tower is actually a recreation of Mario 64's first mission, where you kind of go out into this area, you're running around on the ground, and then you have to make your way up a spiraling tower while essentially contending with platforming challenges. And then you reach the top and you get it. And then the twist, though, is that when you pick up the flag, the whole tower, like, crumbles beneath the... It was a supporting flag. exactly so I feel like that small mission as simple as it is is a perfect setup for what the game is all about and it is much more defined platforming segments it's less open than the first game in these mission areas and you actually get some really challenging interesting platform challenges that are just a lot of fun to play I think that first mission is actually that first area specifically not so much the mission but the area that you go in it's a tutorial that comes up multiple times in a weird way because When you first go in there, it's very clear there are areas you can't get to yet. Right.

You need the jetboard to get across the dark eco. If you head out into that dark eco, it just looks like that's the walls. That's essentially where you can't go. But you can go there. You can go around the back and you can find about six precursor orbs in a sort of secret area. And it's very rewarding because they're very rare in this game. They're very hard to find in this game. But then also you come back later and you're now able to use the Titan suit to like break down the walls

and go to other areas you weren't able to go to yet. you go there several times and every time you go there you're using some new different tool and it feels completely different it's a very cool game and of course once you get that jetboard and you learn that you can go

to these new areas you start thinking oh hang on there was some water or some dark eco in this level as well where maybe if I go there I'll find some more of these obs and you totally do very very clever well-designed game and something I want to flag up because I'll forget

if I don't. My friend Andy Hamilton who wrote in his newsletter recently that he was playing Mafia 1 and I swear this is going somewhere. The remake of Mafia. And the thing about Mafia is the city is quite empty of what you consider the modern sort of open world distractions. Yeah. And I find that's true of Haven City and Jack 2 as well.

There are some missions you can do but they don't really unlock that frequently. They're quite far, few and far between. so all that you do in the city when you are in the city is travel and a lot of people I've read online say that's a negative thing because it means it's just boring going from place to place but that's your time to learn the city that's your time to learn how to drive the friggin cars you know I mean later on there are missions in the city right

yeah there are and it and it really helps to know we are going as well so once you once you get to that It starts to really, I find it's really immersive because you start to realize that you know where you're going. You know what you're doing. You know where everything is. You know how old traffic's going to be in certain districts. So, Stu, that's an important point. And this is something that I feel has made open world games worse.

There's a certain point where developers started indicating to players exactly where to go. They would have a mini map with a line or indicators somewhere on the screen. So you never actually have to learn environments anymore. You're just following a line. But back then, even GTA was like this. You might have a mini map with like an icon to give you a general idea of where you need to go, but it never tells you explicitly how to get there. And so that involves actually learning the layout of the city and getting to know it. And your eyes are more on the world instead of just on a map.

Yeah. And I think that makes a huge difference. I think it also helps that the levels are so populated that you really do have to keep on the traffic. You can't just tune out and drive there. No, you cannot. You're always engaged. of course, is the fact that if you accidentally like cough near a Crimson Guard, they

come up, they all come after you. Yeah, that's the, so if you drive on the upper tier, you keep crashing into hovercraft, but if you go low, which is actually easier for driving, you run the risk of running into the Crimson Guard, and then they all go crazy and start chasing you. That's what I find engaging is that you're,

when you're driving, you're almost constantly switching layers without even thinking about it, because you're seeing like, oh, God, better go up, oh, you know, bike, better go down. And then there are certain areas in the slums that you can just fly over and it's all just very um i just find it all very engaging and by the end of of jack too i just thought like yeah this city's awesome i know there's not much to do in it but it's just fun just going places because i'm not i'm not fast traveling

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Available now at hyperX.com. Previously on Chat of the Wild. Did anyone kid all the bugs for Agatha? No, I meant to. And I even had a bug that I Like could have given back to her and I forgot That bug is gone from Don't go in there if you do and then not give it to her

I know She can smell it on you She knows I know you have a bug I don't know you're holding out on me I can smell it Did anyone get all the pose No

No god no Chat of the Wild Breaking down Zelda and Zelda like games One dungeon at a time Wednesdays on the HyperX Podcast Network. I think it also bears worth noting the technical prowess that Naughty Dog shows in this game. I mean, the original game was very impressive, no doubt, but Jack, too, the level of detail, the texture detail, the model detail, especially in the cutscenes, it has increased so much.

And on top of all that, they're still, it's not perfect, but they're still targeting 60 frames per second. And they've also added progressive scan support, so the actual resolution is twice as high as it was in Jack 1. And all of it is super seamless. In fact, the seamlessly even translates into the camera, like where you'll go in and out of different areas and the camera kind of swoops through very cinematically without ever losing track of the player. It's super impressive. Do you think that it's because of the game structure as well, that many of the levels are now more self-content? faint? Um, I mean, perhaps, but the city itself is, is larger and more complex visually than anything in the first game. This is the one that's most fresh, because I played through the

whole thing quite recently, beginning to end, took me about, I think, 11 hours, which is not really that bad. Um, no. And I was actually quite, even though I was playing on an emulator, yes, and the performance, the visuals were improved somewhat by the emulator. I was quite struck by, because the PS2 for me, it feels like a lifetime ago. and that's probably a horrible concept but to look back at the PS2 considering what the 3, 4 and 5 are throwing around Jack 2 running on the PS2 almost feels like a miracle

like it's insane the amount of MPCs going on the amount of stuff coming on in the city the fact that you're able to jump on and off vehicles, shoot, run on foot, jump on an hoverboard all sorts of things, very versatile and it pretty much does hit 60 a lot of the time yeah like compare that to even vice city well i mean exactly the gta games look look and run very poorly

compared to this i think yeah and i think the best comparison and why the ps2 was so impactful and that whole generation is you look at a game like jack two and then you just look back like three or four years prior at like ps1 and n64 era yeah and the leap there is so gigantic and it's beyond any sort of leap we see today with modern game systems moving between generations. Yeah, I mean, quickly going back to Jack 1 for a second. Jack 1 was for me the game that made a really good case for the PlayStation 2 for me for the first time. Because before that, yeah, these games look nice, but Dreamcast looks often nicer.

And Jack is a game. I played it for the first time. And I said to myself, all right, I think my Dreamcast could not do that probably. It's an incredibly impressive technical feat. And even now, the fact that it does what it does so smoothly is impressive to me. Like, I don't really know what else to say about Jack. I mean, we've talked about the game being harder, but I don't, when I went through it again, now, I don't consider myself to be very skilled at games.

And when I went through Jack 2 again, I was expecting to get destroyed by some of the missions that I remembered being really hard, like the one where you've got to guard the, you've got to escort the people in the sewers. I remember that being very difficult. And I remember, like, the Escape from the Slum's mission where you're going across the docks and there are constant Crimson Guards coming. That's a nightmare, or it was back in the day.

But playing it more recently, I didn't think, I mean I died quite a few times, but I never felt like, this is too hard. This isn't fair. There are very few parts where I felt like that. And I don't know if maybe it's a change in expectations

nowadays, what people expect from games difficulty, because it doesn't adapt to you. Like, I don't think that if you die enough, it gets easier. I don't think it has adapted No, and nothing they like. No, I don't think so. But I had a great time playing it, and I think the fact that it was quite challenging

was a big part of that. Like, I was really engaged. It's not a, you know, again, air quotes, it's not get good. It's just have any challenge to speak of. Because, I mean, I played Ratchet Rift Apart, and as impressive as that game was, I never felt in any way like I was in any danger of dying

almost. No. And I turned the difficulty up to the highest, and that's not, again, this is not a flex. Because I don't care if people want to play on it easy. That's totally fine. I turned the difficulty on Ratchet up to the highest, and I just felt like, well, now this is maybe

slightly less hard than Ratchet 1 was on the PS2. The things have changed big time. They definitely have. I think one reason why it might be considered difficult is that it throws so many stuff at you. And if you don't get along with some, of the elements, you have a problem. So when I played the game, there's this mission.

You remember that when you had to do a hoverboard thing with a time limit and throw some sort of grenade into some sort of other thingy? Remember that? Oh, yes. Do you mean when you're on the jetboard and you've got like two minutes to bomb out of the silos? Yeah, that's ridiculous. I did that with like one second despair. Yeah, and the thing

is, I talked to John about that yesterday. He said he played his Tony Hawk back of the day. He did his homework. I did not, I was not a Tony Hawk player so I was stumped for a couple of days and are you kidding me I want to play a Jack and I don't know if I want to play Tony Hawk I would bite fucking Tony Hawk

That makes me laugh in a way because that's that is There are what two hoverboard missions And that game and the first one is the trick mission which you can do by just spamming the old button And then the second one is that Yeah

Which is this two minute mission where you genuinely have 10 seconds of leeway may be at most It's not easy I would agree But again As somebody that was playing a lot of like boarding games

Including even weird stuff like Airblade Oh man Airblade You know like for me it's like oh yeah This is great But I guess they were also kind of Beyond tapping in the GT8 or like man Tony Hawk it's pretty popular

We should do that too The thing that fascinates me about the jetboard Is that to speed up You've got to do a full rotation trick. Yeah. Like, even Tony Hawk wasn't that tech. No, no, no.

Just press X to speed up. It doesn't play that well, I would say, in comparison, but it's a fun, it's a fun mechanic. It feels good. This is one of the things I love about this game is, if you're playing a certain mission, like the slums escape, I keep mentioning it because it's the most notorious mission of the game. And the way I eventually did that, because I kept dying, because it's a pretty

difficult mission. You have to be really good with the guns, or you have to use some kind of of trick. And what I ended up doing is I just jumped on the jetboard and I just sailed past everything because I kept my speed up and I'd hop across corners and stuff. And it was challenging as hell, but it was a valid way of doing it. So, you know, it was great. You're totally right. But we haven't actually mentioned the guns in detail yet. No, we haven't mentioned the guns. That's weird. We should have mentioned the guns. That's a very important mechanic.

I'd like to throw out two quick things before we get to the guns, if that's okay. In a way, I think that Jack 2 is a very polished game. That reminds me a bit of another game. I know John loved it a lot. It's a monster boy on the cursed kingdom. Oh, yeah. That's also a game that was very, very polished to a degree, I think, where some of the puzzles were so polished that you also had to play pretty exact at some point

and really do what the developers polished it for. And I think Jack is in a way similar, which is not a criticism. It's just a sign that they put so much fine-tuning in it. It's an interesting point of comparison, that's another game where I played it, didn't like it, came back to it later and thought, now, this is great. Exactly. Like, it vibed, I could not get into the vibe of it.

And then I came back and I was just like, yeah, actually, no, this is good. This is real good. Actually, again, before we get to the guns, one of the big distinctions I want to make clear as well, if it's not already obvious, is that, you know, a lot of modern open world games, everything that you do in the game takes place within, like, this fixed open world environment. But what makes Jack 2 work so well is that most of the missions are specifically, crafted. So you go to a separate area and that area is planned out and designed to be specifically fun to play through rather than just like, well, we put a mission inside of an area

that you're already exploring. It's like, no, this is a crafted level. At the end, to the end of Act 1 when you're traveling to the Barron's Tower across that huge structure above Avon City. Oh, that's awesome. That's one of the coolest missions like every any performer, like it rules. It's just incredible. Everyone who's done that remembers that mission. It's like the one mission that stands out the most, I think. And it's not even that long. It's just a really well-designed, really cool level. And that leads to a point I also want to make. I think it's a pro and a con at the same time. I laughed about the first game that it was this freewheeling explore stuff, find cool stuff,

structure, which is completely gone from the second one. In favor of this more, again, Mario 64-style mission structure. You do one story mission after another, and it's all planned planned out for you, which works great in the game, but I did miss this kind of exploration factor, and oh, I just hit over, I knocked over this egg, and now I got power cell, awesome. Yeah.

So, different focus. It's probably worth mentioning it, and I know we will get to the guns. This is going to be a long episode, it's going to be good. The collecting is much less important in this game. It is still collecting, but it's quite incidental. The precursor orbs are not everywhere anymore. They are really well hidden.

You have to really dig to find them. It had a very different function now. Annoyingly, a couple of them are missable. There's one missable one in the sewers, and there's a bunch of missable ones on the final level because you can't go back there, which is quite frustrating. Although, thankfully, there is a glitch

that lets you copy them if you really would need to. But, I mean, I never got all the power of all of the precursorubs in this game because the stuff it requires of you to do that. You have to do the races with the developer times and stuff, but that's not happening. Like, I'm not doing that. We haven't mentioned the races, but it's more important that we talk about the guns, I think, because they are a major factor in this game. I've always liked the gunplay in this game.

I guess a lot of criticism for not being like Ratchet and Clank, but it's different to Ratchet and Clank. It's not supposed to be like Ratchet and Clank. I agree, yeah. And Ratchet and Clank's an awesome game. Listen to the Rattron's episode about it sometime. But with Jack, they do feel a bit more... I don't like using the word slapdash, but they are more loose. Like, the gunplay is a lot more automated.

Like, the aiming is automatic, and you have to basically be pointing in vaguely the right direction. The aiming is, it's less about aiming. It's more like just a platforming mechanic. Like, this is not a shooter. That's the difference. You don't play it like a shooter. None of the mechanics are like that. It's more just like, well, here's one more tool for your arsenal while platforming.

And it's fun to use. I mean, they keep it simple. I think there's only four guns in the game, if I recall. But they're interesting in the way that they synergized with your, because you have all of your moves from the first game as well. Yeah, yeah. But the way that the gun synergized with that, like the infamous yellow gun spin fire,

and you just shoot in all directions, like with ridiculous accuracy. If you hit an enemy with a punch and then use the shotgun, the whole windup disappears. It's like an instant follow-up. There's a lot of synergy like that. And it feels very, very cool. I love the shotgun feeling in Jack 2.

That was just fantastic. I think if you punch and then use the yellow gun, you shoot three shots in quick succession directly at the enemy as well, which is very satisfying. Absolutely. There's a lot of cool stuff like that. It's not so Jack 3 that they start building on the gunplay, but I feel like what they have here works.

I almost feel like you don't need more than that, because they're very situational. I think a lot of people who find the game nails hard don't use the guns properly. That's right. It is a core part of the mechanics. And part of this, because some of the challenges integrate guns on the enemy side as well. Like, there's even things where you're like dodging turrets and it's like raining gunfire, almost like a Don Makus shooter or something.

And you're jumping over the bullets and trying to get through there dealing with enemies. Like, it's not just Jack that has the stuff at his disposal. It's a little bit of leeway that you get because when you've played it, if you've played it recently, you may have noticed this anyway. But the Crimson Guard, when they fire at you, their first two shooting. shots will always miss. You have that much leeway and then the third one will hit you. So you have quite a lot of time to handle these guys if they're far away from you.

And the later stages do kind of make use of that because you'll get in the later stages you'll get like 60 Crimson guards like on a platform in front of you and you've just got to I mean there's one quite infamous mission where they're just constantly pouring out of a doorway until you get to it. So you've got to know

that you've got that leeway otherwise you're going to panic. You're going to have... By the way, that's really impressive. Can we just say that like The number of entities on screen at any point in this game is absurd. It's crazy. It's interesting to me that the, and we'll talk about this at the end, I think, but the ports of this game don't run as well as the PS2 want in some respects. And we will get to that, I think.

I'm not sure what else to say about two. I guess the only thing I can, because I loved going through this again. And again, I totally understand why some people would bounce off this game. Like, I don't fault them that. I do fault them when they say it's bad because they're wrong. But the thing about this game that's not so great, I think, is the side missions, because a lot of them are very unimaginative, just kind of a orb has appeared somewhere in the city and I'll go and get it. It's not that they're not fun.

It's just that there's not much to them. And the side missions that are more fun, like the ring races are very, very low in number. Yeah, yeah. The ring races are pretty good. I love the ring races. You have like three seconds. They don't, they are totally impossible. It's great.

The game does not pull any punches. It really doesn't. The thing is, though, is I do feel like the game makes a somewhat less than positive first impression. Like, I think it's good from the start, but you don't really get a full feel for what it brings to the table right off the bat. And if you're already not sold on the change in tone, I could see people being like, you know, this is not, this is not what I wanted in Jack and then not giving you a proper shot. But you really should if you've not played it because there's a great game here. I think it's, again, a bit of this typical more modern internet backlash at this point. I have to agree, to be honest, I have to agree with that.

But I think that also there's a general... Oh, God, I know how I sound when I talk about stuff like this, and I really hate sounding like it. With a video game, once it's been decided that your game sucks, that's it. Like, that's unlikely to turn around. The pattern tends to be... Game comes out. Game gets dumped on pre-release, post-release. Ball and Wonder World

and that game's crap forever and no matter what it has that game is now forever a joke game essentially and it's only relatively recently that I'm seeing some more kind of actually this is this and Sabat this is all right

I've been there since day one man since you mentioned that by the way I think this podcast is rather unique for having three people who like Bad and Wonder World oh wow yeah this is a special day Okay, guys, we are making a singularity here. That's dangerous, you know that?

Yeah, yeah. A portal's just opened up to the Wonderworld. I'm off here. Bye, everyone. Yeah, but no, Jack 2, I think, underappreciated, considering how good it is of what it does. If you don't like what it does, that's fair enough. I can see how the early mission where you're picking up product for crew

could put people off, because it is a genuinely difficult driving mission in a game that until that point has mostly still been platforming. Right, yeah. So that could bounce. I mean, I think that bounced me off at the time. But coming back to it, no. I mean, the vehicle handling is very loose, but I actually really like it.

When I figured out that switching, shifting from upper to lower level actually tightens your turning circle. It's a lot of fun to kind of almost drift around corners while going up and down. It's silly, but it is fun. I think the roughest part of the city is in the, you know, the, bazaar the market. Yeah. There's a bit where you drive up onto a little

bypass, I guess you could call it. And you can't go up and down on that bypass, so you're just a slave to where the traffic is. And there's at least two side missions where you have to use that bypass, and if the traffic's heavy, that's it, you're done. Like, you are not finishing

that mission. And that's really frustrating. So I guess I can give them, I can bump the game for that one, I can knock them for that. Otherwise, I think it's a bit of a masterpiece. I think it's really really bloody good. Yeah, I tend to agree. And, man, I'd like to ask, sorry, go ahead.

I only want to ask about the game's tone in general, because, you know, you have many people talk like this in the game. Irony or are it serious? What do you think? I think it's serious, but I don't think it matters that much. You know what I mean? I feel like the character of Torn, for example, whose entire thing is just being like,

yes, it lasts some good guys down there. You're probably going to die too. It's funny. While Daxter bounces off him, you know, and makes fun of him, because that's what Daxter is there for, to make light of everything. Like, Crew is a kind of a gross character,

and all Daxter does is make fat jokes about him the whole game, and it's a guilty laugh, you know? Yeah, just ask me your opinion about this. Yeah, I mean, I like it. I've always liked it. I've never took it too seriously. I don't think the developers took it too seriously either. Yeah. And the more serious aspects of the story, I think they balance it better in Jack 3. Because I think Jack 3 has a legit, good story. Definitely. I will criticize again in Jack 2, the characters. It's a little bit jarring in 2022 the way that

Kira and Ashling get treated, if only because they would do better now in terms of just like the contests as well. They are just like, all Daxter does whenever they're on the screen is like lech at them. Yep. And it's a little bit, it's like, I mean, that's Daxeter, that's his character, but it is a little bit

kind of like, eh, this is getting kind of lame. And they don't really follow that up in Jack 3 either. They get even more, they get kind of massively sidelined. But I guess I prefer sidelining to more Daxter hitting on people, I suppose. Yeah. But then I guess if those are the only two things that I can really point at that I don't like,

which is some of the side missions aren't great, and the treatment of the women characters is kind of of its time. You know, that's not a huge, like, that's what games, unfortunately, were like back then more than they are now. And they're still not great, obviously, but they're better than that in terms of any kind of representation. So, yeah, good game. Yeah, overall, very good game, I'd say. It took me a long time to play jack three because it was when I got back to jack two but I ended up doing jack two and three basically consecutively because I was so into the second one.

And that was Jack 3, 2004. The major change here is that it's now set in the wastelands, which is an area that is mentioned in Jack 2, outside of Haven City, supposed with this inhospitable, sort of borderlands-ish kind of location with roaming vehicle gangs and stuff. It's Mad Max. Yeah, it's Mad Max, yeah.

And I thought Jack 3 was another step towards kind of variety. There is still platform, but there's a lot more driving in this game. The driving is great, by the way. I want to say, if you can write lizard in the game, I'm down for that. Yeah, you can't write a lizard. It's one of the first things you do. It's always good. Yeah, I loved riding the lizard around Spargas, the new sort of hub town, because they've hidden precursor orbs in places that require you to do quite difficult platforming.

And that's my bread and butter. So I was just like, hell yeah, I'm bouncing this lizard off of these overhanging, like, walkways, and it was fun. The game's a little less stingy with giving you the gun mods. You get gun mods quite quickly in this. game if memory serves. You definitely get the scattergun mod very, very early on. You get

your own car quite early on, which you can then customize, add guns to, and stuff. Yeah, I love the mounted gun on top. Yeah, it's, and, you know, taking down in the early game, you have to fight wasteland metal heads, which are massive dinosaur-sized metal heads that you bring down with the

gun. It's very satisfying. So, I would say then, the big design change really is the buggy, right? Yeah. That this is built on jack two it's the same basic design principles but the wasteland has like sort of that rolling terrain deserty environments and you drive around in your buggy and yeah that plays very differently than the hover cars from jack too yes it does it's much bouncier and more fun exactly exactly you can you can flip that buggy and then just keep going it's great i i found that i accidentally

flip the buggy a lot i i actually i've always kind of wondered if between the antenna that bounces around and the way it handles that on the terrain, if they were, like, fans of Halo, you know, they enjoyed, you know what I mean? I think back then everybody was, right? Exactly, but it kind of reminds me of the Warthog a little bit, you know. No, I hadn't actually considered that, but yeah, it does feel like that, the very hilly kind of wasteland as well with, yeah, exactly. That's a good point. And the gun, the mounted gun, obviously. That's a very good point. I mean, I have less to say about Jack 3 than the others, apart from really story-wise. It's very cool that you return to Haven City, although they have actually. kind of polished Haven City up a bit and removed the market district entirely. I mean, that is stuff I just love in games. If you play

a sequel and you get back to a setting from the previous game, you recognize, and that is somehow changed and touched up. Yeah, Dead Space 2, baby. Dead Space 2. Back to the Ishimura, one of the best parts of any game ever. Awesome. Well, it does there is that part later in the game

I remember, you're like flying around in some sort of like a hover vehicle, like blasting at a huge fortress. Do you guys remember that? I do remember that, yeah. That always reminded me again, kind of, it's like, oh, this is like a rogue squadron set piece. Because it's this huge moving base thing, and you're blasting it at hot points on there. And, you know, it's, that's cool.

And there's a lot of variety like that in Jack 3 that I think just kind of expands upon what they were doing in the second game. And it all works for me, I think, pretty well. I think it's a more balanced, more polished take on Jack 2, more refined. The way that you've got so much more options with your guns, you've got more options to take on each mission. The way that the collectibles work is more fun. You get more orbs quicker, and that means you get more secrets quicker. The metal head tokens have been turned into an almost incidental thing,

which you then use to buy side missions to get more orbs, which focuses the collecting a lot more. Yeah, it's just a tremendous amount of fun. And I think that the... Oh, yeah, they've refined dark jacks, which is actually useful now. You can turn it on and off instead of just having to be forced into using it. Right. Lightjack is a thing now where you can fly,

which makes you feel very liberated, I think. Going back to Spargas with Lightjack and flying over all the building rooftops and finding a whole new vibe to the place. Very cool. Very cool. The music's better. Yeah, absolutely. The visuals are superb as well, like beautiful.

Yeah, yeah. I think this came out around the same time as ratchet up your arsenal, so the peaks of both series, more or less, at the same time, which is kind of cool. Yeah. 2004 was a big year for this stuff. So then there was only one year, between Jack 2 and 3, do you know about the development, how close they were, and how interlaping these development cycles were? I mean, given that they'd, all I can, and I don't know this for a fact, I want to get hold of the book, The Art of Nauty Dogg, but it's now absurdly expensive. Yeah.

Because I wish I bought it when it was new. But I don't know, the design bibles for Jack 1, 2, and 3 are all available online now. Oh, nice. I mean, I should have, I should have read them before this, but I simply didn't. That's the retro-nought's difference. I couldn't be bothered. No, I forgot. I just forgot that I had them.

I apologize, listeners. But I don't really know. I mean, all I can think of, really, is that the development would have been quicker if only because they had the tech already. Yeah. I don't know if Jack 2, because Jack 2 presumably is its own bespoke sort of engine. Yeah, and I'm sure that they were probably working on this before Jack 2 was complete. Yeah, yeah. A certain amount of the team is finishing Jack 2 while others are already working on the

third game and since this builds directly on what they did in the second game you know I'm sure and besides iteration times back then were generally just faster than they are now yeah of course yeah of course yeah I think I want to talk about the story in this game a little bit because I mentioned it earlier and this is going to be a huge spoiler

oh yeah I think that this game's story is awesome compared to like and I like the story in two but I think this one is the one that really delivers in terms of like it pays off the story of Marr from Jack 2 and who he is and who he was. It pays off in terms of the time travel storyline. It does some very smart things with that, I think.

It's, the reveal of the precursors is the most perfect thing I've ever seen. Like, when those precursors emerge and you see that they're, well, they're odd souls. Right. And you're like, oh my God, everything now, it's perfect. Like, A, it's a great joke. B, B, the reaction it gets from Jack is genuinely laugh out loud funny. oh my god and see

it's emotionally a perfect arc for Dexter like he got turned what it turns out he's not been downgraded air quotes he's become a precursor like he's one of these kind of god creatures who created the whole world

and he gets pants he gets a pair of pants that's his that's his arc he finally gets pants looking at Dexter's original design when he was still a humanoid

I think this is already a glow-up turning into a nozzle. Yeah, good point. Yeah, yeah. But I just think that it's the kind of thing that they must have thought of and realized. I'm not even sure they realized how perfect it was. Like, maybe for them it was just a gag, but for me, I was just like, no, this is great. I especially, I love how they come in floating on what look like the platforms from the precursor, like, ruins from the first game, even. Like, you immediately recognize, like, that kind of design.

you're just like, oh, wow, okay. And, of course, like, the villain, Viga gets turned into one, which he obviously hates, but then I think Tess, like, Jack, Daxter's kind of love interest gets turned into one as well, and then they hook up, and it's just kind of like, okay, I guess that's what's happening. And then there's the ending where Jack goes off to explore, like, the universe, but then he just turns up and you don't know whether it's time travel or if he just didn't go. Like, it's genuinely quite ambiguously done. He's just there at the end, despite having just been seen disappearing into another dimension.

It's a really cool ending. I really like it. And, of course, it's not the ending. There was a follow-up game. But, yeah, I loved Jack 3. I thought it was brilliant. Honestly, if you're not viving with Jack 2, it's almost worth skipping to 3 and see if you like that one more, because it's definitely not as difficult.

It took me a while to play 3 because I was just. jacked out after jack two. But as I mentioned, I had to play that thing for that walkthrough and it was a rather painful. So I made my peace with them. And now a word from our sponsor, BetterHelp.

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Visit betterhelp.com slash retrogaming today to get 10% off your first month. That's Better, H-E-S-E-E-A. lp.com slash retro gaming. I essentially got so into two that I went straight under three And then when I finished three I went straight into Jack X And it turned out, hey, this game's got a story too Yeah, it does

Because I assumed it was just going to be some dumbass cart game more or less But it is actually very good Are we talking about Jack X? Are we done with three? Yeah, we should probably move on to Jack X And Jack X was 2005, PS2 again. It's a, as it's called Jack X Combat Racing, it's, you know, twisted metal-ish. It doesn't have the open, like, stages of twisted metal, but it's a driving game where you can blow up. Well, it's more like Mario Kart, I suppose, with the weapons, but done in a more quasi-realistic sort of way.

It had full online play and it had split screen. Well, the main difference, so they are, Noddy Dog, I thought they were establishing a pattern here, because they Crash Team Racing. So three crash games, then a cart game based on crash, then three Jack games, then this game, and there's no uncharted cart, which really makes me sad, or last of this cart. It should be uncarted. It should be called

uncarted. Yeah, exactly. But so the fast of us, the fast of us, that's the driving one. I would suggest the cart of us, maybe. That would be. That works too. That works too. All right. The main difference for Jack X, though, that I find is that

it does actually have typical racing, but it also has those more open areas where you can have like racing around sort of an arena completing whatever goals there. Almost kind of battle modeish kind of yeah so it's it's weird like it's good but it's it has its own vibe it kind of

actually feels like they just took a lot of the ideas with vehicles from Jack 2 and 3 and spun it off into its own thing the fact that it has a full which is what probably happened yeah the fact that it has a full story mode with full acting full everything

that he's actually got stakes and directly follows on from like Jack 2 and 3, you know, specifically crew being dead. And it's based around the fact that at his like wake or his funeral or whatever at the will reading, he poisons everyone including his own daughter.

And the idea is that you have to race in order to get this underdo. It's a little bit of a stretch, but the excuse is you get one of the greatest opening cut scenes in gaming history where Daxter is in a bar getting consistently attempted to be murdered

while Jack smashes through as Queens of the Stone Ages you think I ain't worth a dollar but I feel like something like that plays and it's literally the coolest thing I've ever seen in my entire life in fact the music in this game has loads of uncredited

contributions from like Faith No More musicians and like tool it's ridiculous it's absolutely absurd because they didn't have any licensed music in the previous games and yet it works perfectly in this world I think.

Yeah, it's very silly, tongue and cheek, but also, you can tell they're having a good time trying to make this stuff. I mean, the fact that this Jack did take it a long way for me, because I didn't really do racing games back then, apart from Burnart 3, which, you know, changed everything. But Jack X, I played from beginning to end. I had a great time. I didn't get gold on every race or anything,

but I saw the story through, and I thought it was a lot of fun. I was really excited when they re-released it on PS4 because they didn't re-release it on PS3. Oh, no, that's right. And it was nice to play it again. I mean, it's got things from burnout. Like, it's got the boost mode from burnout for, like, dangerous driving for collecting boost power-ups.

It's got tracks from, like, the second and third game. You've got characters, like, you can unlock the ratchet by having a ratchet save on your memory card. Also, this game is huge, by the way. Yes, it is. It's really long. It's like, oh, it's a cart racer, but no, this is like a full-on, like, story-driven, like, seven, eight, nine-hour kind of game.

Yeah, and because it's late, PS2, it also links up with the PSP as well, which is nice. Oh, that's right. A very underused feature. And I want to credit real quick, because this is the chance we're going to have to do it. The PS4 port, I remember thinking, oh, that sucks, you're not going to be able to play as Dax to a Ratchet.

But no, they actually edited it and made it so that you could by having saves from, like, Ratchet remake and Uncharted and stuff. Oh, wow. The characters, they made it actually possible, which is more than Nintendo did with the GBA games on the Wii. so I'm crediting them for that, okay? They got Rayman 3. Rayman 3 on the Wii U with 20 levels you can never play ever.

It bums me out. The Zelda Game and Watch, you can never play it on the Wii U version. You can never ever play it. Yeah, that's... You can't unlock it. It's stupid. That's a surprising thing that they did there. I didn't realize that they added them in.

That's so cool. It was really cool. I remember being really happy when they started unlocking. I was like, oh, wow, there's above and beyond effort there. Now, the one thing he didn't do is put online play in, but you could use share play, at least. Still, sucks that they didn't put it in, I guess. Something else I want to note that this game has that all the prior games have that we don't see often anymore is that 3D, like, menu kind of system where the menu itself is like

built out of a contraption that sort of moves in and out and around the scene with text on it and like they went nuts in this game, especially. like when you get to the vehicle select screen and each little like meter swings out in 3D and the vehicle's all there and its little podium spinning around and it's it's cool it's it's really wild and you just don't really see it anymore lots of vehicle customization you can buy new tires new like body new chassis that kind of thing and really like deck out your vehicle and also because of the uh the way that the story mode works you will need to switch your vehicles up to do certain different game types so there is a lot to get your teeth into if you get into this game

which I did. I really liked it. Yeah. And I rate it, and I think it's underrated. And I'm genuinely pissed off that naughty dog slagged it off and The Last of Us Left Behind. Like, don't do that. Jack X is better than The Last of Us. Don't slack off Jack X.

Like, you get, there's like a trophy even that says, like, can't win them all or something like that. If you're in trap with the Jacket's mission, I'm like, what are you doing? So I think you're right that this game has a weirdly negative sort of viewpoint in the general audience where I think it came out so late in the system's life and it was kind of

cart racing was over outside of Nintendo's realm people just kind of looked at it was like really they're doing that again and ignored it. Yeah. You can't blame them to some I didn't play this until years after its release either because I also

kind of took that initial attitude. I was like I don't really want that right now but in the end I was really impressed and surprised at how fun it is. Yeah, I think it's a lovely little game, and I'm actually, you know, now that I'm thinking about it, I am still salty about The Last of Us Jive. That's not fair. I mean, Uncharted 3, for God's sake, is not as better, is worse than this game. Come on. I think it was just a case of that the time for Jack and Dexter was over at that point. Well, it shouldn't have been. It shouldn't bring it back.

Anyway, that's all of the... Oh, wait, no, it's not all the console games. There is one more, but yeah. Sort of. Yeah. Yeah, I think that brings us into the spin-off era of Jack and Dexter to some extent. He was relegated to portable systems going forward. Yeah.

And in 2006, really at Don, who are most well-known, I think, for the God of War PSP games, Chains of Olympus, goes to Sparta. Excellent games, by the way. Especially best, he goes to Sparta. It's one of the best God of War games, in my opinion. It's really good. And Daxter, released in 2006, is a prequel that takes place before Daxter rescues Jack in Jack 2, which is like this two-year period.

And apparently, he spent that time working as an exterminator for some weird little gnome fella, destroying metalhead bugs, and he's got, like, a sort of electric fly swat and a kind of bug spray that he can use the propulsion-like in Cave Story, like with the machine gun. That's always awesome. It's very cool. And I thought that this, I mean, there's not a huge amount to say about it because it's quite a simple game, but I had a lot of fun with this game. I thought it was a rather good PSP platformer. And it was nice to go back to the roots in that respect as well, you know?

I would say it's kind of a technical powerhouse, too. Yeah. In a game, this impressive-looking and large scale running on a portable system in 2006 was kind of unheard of still, right? like this was you're let me there's still no is there loading in this game

or was it a big smooth I think it's pretty if I recall it's pretty open just like the console games like I don't think the scale is as large as those

no it has some pretty big areas you go out into Haven City but it's more designed as a platforming hub because there are there are collectibles there now and you have a hover scooter

I think that's right that's generally sort of vehicle you can use but mostly it's a bit of a yeah it's a very impressive game for PSP.

The PSP in general is quite underrated. Insane still. I would say. Yeah. I mean, it was an incredible machine ultimately. Absolutely.

With games like this and the one we're going to talk about afterwards even is a very impressive portable game. But it doesn't seem to get the love that it really deserves. It's pretty much forgotten, I think. That's a real shame. Because, yeah, it's... I'm just amazed that Reddy Adon managed to essentially sort of mimic the look and feel of like it feels like a fusion between

Jack 1 and Jack 2 if you know what I mean visually but it has the same like quality of animation work and like responsiveness and I think the only real sacrifice they made for PSP is they dropped it down to 30 frames per second instead of 60 but I think that's a fair compromise for a portable game I think it's entirely acceptable I think it's a very respectable game I mean I remember it being on the release schedule for the PS2 for a long time. Oh, yeah. And it never happened, and that kind of bonds me out, because I'd like to have played this on the telly.

I suppose you can with certain peripherals. I don't know. Yeah, you can definitely do that. PSTV would be able to do that, I expect. And PSPs, starting with the PSP 2000 had component video out, right? And the PSP Go even has a dock, so it works just like the switch. So if I had a PSVita TV thingy and a hacked it,

I'd be able to play this on the telly, though. Correct. Wouldn't I? Man, I'm going to have to get me one of those. I think the price is going up. Yeah, they certainly are. But not as bad as the dog for the goal, that is insane. I'm going to have to get a PSTV before they become too expensive so I can play Dexter.

I do like this game. For me, it can't match up to two and three, because of course it can't. And it doesn't quite have the right tone for me with some of the stuff like combat bug, which is this really pointless extra rock papers as a sort of multiplayer thing that you get in there. because what it means ultimately is

when you find collectibles they're just nothing because no one's going to play combat bug with you. So it's a little bit almost feels like exploring isn't really that rewarding because you're not getting them. You get these dream sequence

which you alluded to earlier, John. Which I feel like are totally out of place in Jack and Dexter. I'm not saying they're bad but this is conquer shit. This is not Jack and Dexter to parody like Braveheart. Yeah.

And I mean, how long, and in 2006, when did the Matrix come out? 1999. Was the sequel out? Was Matrix related out? Yeah, they were all out. They came out earlier. It's just like, it's so weird. Like, they tried to mimic the, the multi-Smith fight, but it's like a QTE-style game where they kind of run at you from all the sides and you have to press the button.

Yeah, the Barley Burl. And Daxter's wearing, uh, he's got the trench coat on, the sunglasses, and he's just, it's raining, it's got reflective floors. It's just, it's a weird. It's like, what the humor of Jack and Dexter is, isn't this kind of a family guy asks, like, look, here's the thing that you remember. And I like family guy. That's just what it is, you know. Right. But, I mean, I get, for me, it feels almost like, eh, it's not great.

That's the difference between this, this is not a naughty dog game, right? Like, Reddy at Don, obviously wanted to do, they did a good job, but they wanted to do their own thing. And I guess this is something that they wanted to add in there. and unfortunately they are they're not really a thing anymore already at Don are they? They seem to be

they're doing Facebook games so they're not really in the console space anymore I don't think it's a real shame they did the Order 1886 which got a huge backlash for some reason I like that game

oh you know what they're doing it was fine yeah it's not amazing but it was beautiful and it's a fun little like cinematic kind of five hour TPS and it was fun

I thought it was good so they've actually done some good stuff since then. Specifically, they did Lone Echo and Lone Echo 2 for the Oculus Rift. Oh, that's why it's, sorry, when I looked this up and I saw they'd done Facebook and I didn't think MET. I didn't think Oculus. So, yeah, of course. So they're still doing good, good stuff. Lone Echo in particular was really creative because you used your hand, you're in space, right, in zero G and your hand, the hand controllers, you grab onto the environment and fling yourself around

through space using the momentum of zero. That's really cool. That sounds really cool. It's really fun. I don't have to pick that up from the Oculus at some point. Definitely. So, yeah. Yeah, so, Daxter, not a bad spin-off. Have we got any more to say about Daxter?

No, I mean, I think it should be really cheap now there, shouldn't it? Yes. You can still buy it from the PSP, well, not the PSP store, obviously, but you can. I'm pretty sure you can still buy it. So I say, let's talk about some more to drive the prices up now. Yeah. I mean, PSP doesn't seem to have hit. the heights that retro games seem to be hitting

these days yet. I hope not. Even a game like something like... I'm selling some PSP games at the moment to make space and stuff that I would have thought on any other system would be really expensive. Like, say, Mega Man powered up, is still only about 30, 35 quid. Yeah.

Whereas if it was a GBA or DS game, it would be through the roof. Goodness knows why. I think one of these days people are going to realize the PSP is amazing. I mean, it had two to... distinct leases of life for me, which is one, well, three, actually. One, PSP UMD games, awesome. Two, realizing it's got an online store where you can buy

frigging PS1 games on it. Yes, mate, absolutely. And then three, realizing it's so little security that you can drag and drop things on it and then just play emulators, because they've got pre-signed programs that don't even require custom firmware. That's fantastic.

Oh, ridiculous. I mean, even to this day, if someone says to me, what would you recommend for a handheld retro machine? I would probably say a secondhand PSP. Oh, the wildest thing about PSP for me as a side tangent is if you're playing PlayStation 1 games in there and you connect your PSP to a CRT TV, it actually outputs it 240P like an original PlayStation. So it's a very, like, accurate experience. That's really, really cool.

Yeah, PSP, lovely machine. Maybe there should be a PSP episode of Retronauts. It hasn't been one already. There has been. it was very good Ray was there he stood up for it good for him

I wasn't in that one I think I was in the Vita one that's right yeah to resign the PSP, though. No, I mean, neither. I like the Vita, but not, this PSP's better. Well, you know, I tried to play Jack and

Daxter on the Vita once, and that wasn't very fun. Yeah, you shouldn't. I got quite far into Jack 2, and I don't know how I did it because they run at 20 frames per second. At the best of times. We'll get to those other versions of these games,

but there is one more game besides Daxter, isn't there? There is a 2009 released on PSP and PS2, one of the latest PS2 games with those orange boxes, baby. And it's a game that was, It's a game called Jack and Daxter the Lost Frontier, and Daxter's back in the title. And this was a game that was started at Nauty Dog, and Neil Druckman is the credited writer for this game, even, which is wild to think about, yeah.

I mean, you know, it's the best things I've ever written to this day, probably. Then high-impact games took over because Nauty Dog realized that Uncharted, like, what was the first one called again? On chart, Drake's Fortune. That was such a huge technical upgrade in terms of what they were doing that I just think they realized they didn't have the manpower to do a PSP game as well. Yeah. And high-impact games, I guess, were chosen because they had worked on Ratchet and Clang size matters for the PSP. Which is good. Which is really good, really surprisingly good for what it is, yeah.

In Japan, it's called a Ratchet and Clank 5. Oh, that's awesome. And also Ratchet's got massive eyebrows. Yes, he does. Like Oasis style, Liam Gallagher eyebrows, or whatever. Oh, yeah. Legendary. Now, Ratchet and Clank Size Matters is another great PSP game, as far as I'm concerned.

I mean, it is understandably, in terms of scope, it's a little bit down. But it's got everything you'd want from a Ratchet game, leveling up your weapons, you know, proper aiming controls. Very, very fun game. I had a great time playing that. They also did Secret Agent Clank after that. Yeah, it wasn't as well liked, but I didn't actually put a lot of time into that one. I thought, hmm,

a stealth ratchet game, I think I'm going to go ahead and give that the old body swerve. And please guys, don't forget about DreamWorks Superstar Carts with Z in the end. Oh,

yeah, I would never, I would never forget about DreamWorks superstar cards. Thank you. A classic DreamWorks characters like Shrek

and Shrek 2. Yeah, unfortunately, things did not go well for high-impact games and they, their legacy kind of ended on a

negative note. Yeah, that's a shame Because I can only imagine that this game can't Last Frontier can't have helped with that Because in doing my research for this episode I decided to go and see what the Jack community thinks about the Lost Frontier And oh dear Oh, they do not regard this game

And in a way I find that a bit sad Because I don't think it's terrible at all I think it's okay I think it would be better if it wasn't a Jack game maybe yeah because it kind of does undermine the end of jack three by having them just being like yeah we're just here now and none of that really matters so it somehow it feels less authentic to the originals than daxter did well the characters look the characters look weird they look different and almost like they've tried to make them more realistic weird characters and the the game is this very narrow foe v so like it feels like your view of the world is constricted somehow and it doesn't yeah there's something strange about playing it that never really sat well with me. It's not right. That's the problem. All the same moves are there, but they don't feel the same.

With Daxter, while you don't have the same kind of moves, everything I did, I felt like, yeah, that's Dach and Daxton feel. Like, with this, it's more like, you know, little things. Like when you do the punch attack, you're not really sliding into it. It's almost just a straight punch that you then stop. So it doesn't feel very fluid. It doesn't feel very smooth. You've lost that dynamic feeling from the second one especially. Yeah, and the level design is much more standard and linear than it was in the previous games.

And again, I truly don't hate this game. I think it's okay. I think it's fine. There are some silly things like Dark Daxter, which is just stupid. Yeah, that's true. Like, flying a plane while Daxter is minding the guns and there's so much, like, recoil where he's flying in the air while holding on the controls, that's funny. That's Daxter. right daxter transforming into like dark daxter is just like that's not in character

like actually you you mentioned the flying through the air thing and that's kind of the big new thing in this game is they have these flight missions right and yeah and they weren't horrible no they're okay but the the weird thing there is you can launch daxter out onto an enemy plane and he like dives under the wing and you have to do like a mini game of kind of like breaking apart the engine it's like that it's like nightmare at 40,000 feet or whatever it's called like You've got gremlin someone else's playing. It's great.

Yeah, it's a really cool idea, I think. I think it's neat, and I wish it had the fidelity to pull off what they clearly wanted to do. And I mean, you know, when your game changes hands, like, during development, and then you haven't got much time to finish it,

that's what's going to happen, unfortunately. Yeah. Your idea is going to get scaled back. And the real bummer about the Lost Frontier, despite issues that it has, is that this was the end. This was the last Jack and Daxter game. Like, they turned up in some other stuff, but this was the last full-tilt starring game for them.

And, you know, every other Sony mascot got another game after this. They'd thieves in time, you know, for Sly. And Ratchets still go in. And I think they were still making AperScape games at this point, or at least putting those characters in games. Yeah. And just the time it came out, it was 2009, right? So the PSP was almost dead at that point, I'd say. Yeah.

And PS2, you know, this was like nine years after the launch of PS2. Yeah, but the PS2 would keep going for a little while after this, wouldn't it? Like, they, that thing kept on going. Yeah, I mean, a bit of, a bit of license games, a few parts and stuff like that, but the big times, I think Persona 4 was the last big PS2 game, right? It's also worth keeping in mind, like, this game came out almost a month after Uncharted 2 from Naughty Dog itself. so it just kind of feels like it was just not the right game for that era and yeah i i feel like this could have worked better if it had been saved up for the vita you know what i mean revive it when the vita was because i'm sure the vita was at least in development at this point

and they they should have known like okay maybe we should actually try to do bring jack back for the vita imagine if they had like a launch game or near launch based on jack and dack how much more of an impact that could have made. You know, they were, they were prototyping a Jack four, weren't there? There's concept art out there of a more realistic looking hideous Jack and Daxter designs. And I mean, I would have, obviously, I would have liked to have seen that. But, I mean, they had to make heartrending tales about the human condition, didn't they?

So, yeah. I mean, to be fair, if that's, if that's what they wanted to do, then I can't really, you know. No, no. I can't say, hey, Nautid Dog, make the same game over and over again. That would be pretty... They are doing that. This is the third time they're making The Last of Us, isn't it? Oh, dear.

Oh, dear. No, I'm not going to lament The Last of Us. I like to slag The Last of Us off on Twitter because it's funny. And I think The Last of Us is fine. I think it's a pretty good game. I don't. That's a shame. I like it.

I think it's amazing. I would give it like an 8, and I enjoy playing it. I thought it was quite good. I thought the second one was all right as well. I would much rather play Jack. I'd rather have a new Jack, but that's just me being a bit of a lot of it, you know. I would like to see him come back in the same sense

that Ratchet kept going, doing essentially the same thing. I think maybe the problem is that just Jack and Dexter is maybe too much of an early 2,000 things in the end. Yeah, maybe. In terms of tone, in terms of design and storytelling. But, I mean, so was Ratchet at the time, I'd say, and they've managed to at least keep the character feeling somewhat fresh. But of course also you could say that the story of Jack and

Dexter is told now. Yeah, exactly agreed. Oh yeah, that's true. That's absolutely true. They had an ending and a good ending to boot. And I think that's something I respect. I mean, think about the people who always claim, yes, I want fantasy stuff five. No, you don't. Story is over.

To a point, I agree with that. To a selfish illogical point, I want more Jack. And, you know, nothing make me happy if at the end of The Last of Us remake, they somehow announce a new Jack game. They're not going to, but that would be nice. Maybe they make a prequel, who knows.

To the credit of Nauty Dog and Sony, they have kept the Jack Cains more accessible than they have the Sly games or the Ratchet Games. True. Sly is much more dead than Jack and Dexter. You can jump on... Oh, you don't know, that movie's coming. Sly Raccoon, the movie is coming, okay? You can hop into the PS4 today,

and you can buy all of the... Jack games, apart from the PSP ones. You can buy Jack 1, 2, 3, and X right now. And you know what? They're not great versions, but they're okay. Well, what about PlayStation Move Heroes? Would you consider that a Jack game? And as much as I consider everybody's goal for Jack game, because Jack is playable.

Yeah, yeah. No, it doesn't count. That's not very easy to access these days. I bought PlayStation Move Heroes the other day because I've got Move controllers from my PSVR. And I didn't, I have not, I'm yet to play it because I'm kind of almost scared to play it, because I think it's going to be a load of old shite, but, uh, John, do you have a copy? I just want to see, uh, Jack again, you know?

The funny thing about that is they kind of like stylize all the characters so they seem to be in the same world together. Oh, dear. And you see them all kind of, you know, unified in terms of the visual design. And it's very weird. Like you've got, uh, what's the name? It was like Murphy in the wheelchair from the slide. Bentley, Bentley, Bentley, yeah.

Murphy's the Frog from Raymond. Oh, yeah. The enemies and PlayStation Roof Heroes look like the annoying thing, the frog, Crazy Frog. Oh, thanks for bringing up the annoying thing now, wonderful. Our common friend will be proud of us. Indeed. Even Crazy Frog has more games than Jack has.

It's not fair. Crazy Frog in a lot of games. Crazy Frog Racing and Crazy Frog Racing to Grazy Frog Combat Racing. but a quick question you guys still about Lost Frontier because there is a PSP and there's a PS2 version which one should you get

if you are interested I'd say PSP personally PSP for sure because for PSP it's still a barely impressive little game and it kind of fits well on there you can tell it was made for PSP whereas on PS2 it feels

kind of like an afterthought and like some of the other PSP ports to PS2 it looks a bit dodgy it's all like it's the same situation with like when they brought Motorstorm Arctic Edge to the PS2 like the PS2 version of that looks and runs

worse than the PSP game. They brought size matters over as well, didn't they? I think that's right. And I think Secret Agent Clank even got a PS2 port. Yeah, I think you're right. Yeah, I just noticed because you mentioned that you can get the PSP game for maybe 10 euros when you pay

about three times as much for the PS2 game. Yeah, but you got to watch out for that it's the greatest hits equivalent of PSP game. Oh yeah, that's a lot of them. With that awful. There's greatest hits and there is some. There's orange dots everywhere and you can barely, it's, oh, I hate that. Yeah, it's gross.

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If you're cool enough. Join us and listen to less than 2000, because that's all we talk about. Adam and Chad live less than 2000. Now part of the HyperX. Podcast Network. We should talk maybe about, we should look into wrapping up, but I think we should talk about the Jack and Dexter PS3 HD collection briefly.

Yeah, and the PC version of Jack and Dexter. Oh, yeah, and that. Oh, that's your thing, yeah. Yeah. Now, the PS3 collection was one, two, and three, and they ran, I want to say, 720P at pretty much locked 60. Is that fair to say? Mostly 60. I don't think Jack 2 and 3 were perfect, though.

And they had stereoscopic 3D as well back when that was a thing. Yeah, that was there. The thing about this collection I've always felt is that it's good, but it always surprised me that some of the visual effects from PS2 were not properly translated to the system. So you actually see things missing. Like, if I recall the, all the precursor architecture in Jack 1 has this sort of metallic sheen to it. And that's missing on PS3. And I don't know why. Like, it's just gone.

There are some glitches as well. Like, there's an infamous punching glitch where every, like, eight punches you do, you will fly in just completely wrong direction. Oh, yeah. Which can seriously get you killed big time. But it seems to be a bit of a luck of the drawer whether or not it affects you too egregiously. Also, it just doesn't. doesn't feel as responsive control-wise.

Yeah, it's a bit laggy. Especially if you play the originals on a CRT, it's like instant response. It feels amazing. Whereas on PS3, the games just feel heavier. Now, they released that compilation on the Vita as well,

and we talked about it briefly. That was 2013. Now, I played quite a lot of Jack 2 on that port, and I got quite far into it. I did the Slums Mission even on it. And I would like, I am not a negative man,

but I would like to say that this should not have been released it is barely playable like it's completely unacceptable as a port I mean even if it did run well you would still have to use the back touch to go up and down levels

when you were flying you would still have to use the back touch to get on the hoverboard the jet board and what really gets me about it is the sly and ratchet compilations to the Vita are fine

I mean they're 30 at best but this was garbage compared to those. They completely botched it. Yeah. It's actually the same with the God of War games. They did a God of War collection on... Oh, that was very bad.

Yes, I remember that. So both of these, for whatever reason, they barely run. And I'm not sure how they're coded or... I think what happened, actually, is that the Vita games are ports of the PS3 versions of these games. So they're basically ports of a port,

which is not necessarily optimal. I think they would have had to have rebuilt these very specifically for Vita. And I believe if they had done that, they probably could have been excellent ports. They just didn't go through it. And instead, we got these half-baked attempts that, as you say, they're terrible, not playable. They are, by some distance, the worst way to play these games. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, just total garbage.

So when these came out, had Sony already given up on the Vita at that point, or was it just? I don't see you ask, I think. I wouldn't say entirely, like, there was still stuff coming out. that was good. But this just... Whoever handled this port, they did a very, very bad job. And it should have been cancelled.

I think it was Mass Media or Moss Media or something. The same people who did the PS3 one. Wow. I can't remember who made it. It's something like M.M. Some don't know what it was. Not Media Molecule.

That was the Little Big Planet people. But, uh, what, yeah, I've read, I remember there was a Reddit, like, Ask Me thingy with a Sony employee that was saying, basically as soon as the Vita got cracked, they internally just went, I'll screw this. Yeah, maybe so. Which was believable because of what happened with the PSP,

because that was one of the most pirated systems ever, I believe. It certainly was. Yeah. Well, sadly for them, joyously for me, because I can play Mega Drive games on it. But, yeah, it is a shame. But as we said, you can now play the PS4 versions, which I believe are emulations of the original PS2 games with upscaling.

Now, on a PS4, They weren't very good. On a PS5, they are quite a lot better, but still not perfect by any means. Yeah, none of these work that well. Like, you can tell it's kind of this somewhat janky emulation that it's playable enough, but it's not where it should be, and it doesn't really feel that authentic as a result. And now the best way to play the original Jack and Dexter would be this decompiled PC port that you've alluded to where I've. I have not tried this yet, so I could not find a place to download it, but I would look into it.

This is simply absurd. So similar to Mario 64, this has been the full decompilation project and now has a native PC version. Jack 2 and 3 are coming, by the way, apparently. Oh, great. Maybe even out by the time you hear this. So the thing about this PC version, or this PC version, is that it actually has a lot of modern features, like ultra-wide screen support, supports super high resolutions, a lot of visual upgrades as a result. and it's just, it's so amazing to see this running at like 4K, ultra-wide, without any issues at all. That is actually really cool sounding, yeah.

This is, I would argue, the best way to play Jack and Daxter right now, just because it's the original game with... I'd say so. The Jack and Daxter on emulators on PCSX2, which is the one I'm going to try you, so I'm going to be talking about, I'm sure there are the PS2 emulators that I'm not familiar with. it's notoriously quite a weird game to emulate because it has quite a lot of difficult, complex graphical things going on. So it can be quite dodgy and glitchy

and the water looks very poor no matter what you do, essentially. Yeah. But this version, I believe, would be fine if it's been rendered full PC. This looks correct. It is perfectly replicated. I mean, there may be some bugs somewhere,

somewhere that I haven't seen, but it's a very, very good version of the game. But as for the sequels, two and three, I've been playing them on the emulator, and I think they've been fine, like, pretty much 60, as long as I've got other stuff close, so that the CPU is getting full attention. It's kind of weird. Later games tend to work better on PCSX2 than some of the earlier stuff. I wonder if that's because they got the hang of the architecture, and they were doing it more efficient, like, I don't know how it works. I could imagine. Like Ridge Racer 5, one of my favorite games in there.

It's still, you can't emulate it properly in PCSX2 unless you use the software rendered mode, in which case, like, why even bother? It just doesn't work properly. It's completely busted. I want to throw out right now, if in the past you've used PCSX2 to emulate and been unimpressed, that thing's come leaps and bounds recently. It is good. We're talking, like, they've adopted the kind of duct station style UI. Yeah. And now everything is per...

You can have per game settings, and it will automatically apply fixes and stuff like that, and it's just a absolute joy to use now. So get out there, kids, and get emulating, but don't forget to delete those rums within 24 hours, so it's illegal. And, yeah, I think that's Jack and Dexter. I'm broadly speaking.

That's all of the Jack and Dexter games. I guess the question to ask would be, what are you guys... you guys' favorite games in the series. That's a tough one. Looking back at them, I kind of feel like probably

Jack 3 is my favorite just because it's the most polished and you know, but that's the thing though, is they all have their own it's the first three are the ones I like the best, and I like each of them for different reasons.

But Jack 2 and 3, I think, probably play the best overall. Jack 1 is a much more N-64-era-style game, which I also appreciate, but I think the others have more refined level design and some really interesting scenarios, even with, you know, the occasional flaw here and there. Okay, so I have to say I'm all about Jack 1, to be honest, because it's what John said. It's an N-64-style game, but on a hardware that it can handle this style of game properly.

Yeah, for sure. This is something I quite like. It feels breezy. It feels fast. It just has this huge joy of exploration without being bogged down by a weird frame rate and by cramped levels and it's just this mixture

we have the green grass, we have the blue skies, I like that. That's just a wonderful feel-good game when I played for the first time and it just felt like I'm on this huge, huge adventure playground

and can just go anywhere, search anywhere and have lots of fun. Yeah, I still find it quite invigorating to play that game because it's just how it feels, how smooth it all feels, is very, very enjoyable. As for me, I find it very difficult to choose between two and three, because while three is pretty much definitely more polished and better,

two is the one that really got its hooks in me. It has, I think, the most memorable set pieces, so I've got to give it to Jack 2, I think. That's totally fair. It's the one I've played the most, and so maybe that's why. And I'm playing through Jack 3 again at the moment, and when I finish it, maybe I'll change their mind,

and in which case we'll have to do a follow-up, two-and-hour podcast. Isn't that nice? Everybody had a different favourite, perfect. Yeah, exactly. It's perfect. It's come together very nicely. Now, I'm going to do my usual slightly awkward wrap-up now. I'm not very good at ending these podcasts because I just don't want them to end, you know. But I think, Thomas, where can people on the internet find you and things that you do and such?

So if you're looking for me, for whatever reason, you could, of course, check on Twitter where I'm posting my weird opinion and stuff on at Bimbo Fortuna that's B-I-M-B-O-O-Fortuna Bimbo not Brimbleau that's a different thing and if you speak

German and live in Germany you can buy the issues of M-Games Germany's oldest surviving games magazine where I also usually fill between 10 and 20 pages each month because I have too much time

on my hands Wow, that's a good one and you can find me at Dark OneX on Twitter or over on the digital Foundry channel slash website at YouTube.com slash digital foundry or Eurogamer.net slash digital foundry

so yeah. That was very professional. Wonderful. And you all know me. You can find me here or you can find me on Twitter at Stubacabra being a rotter. And if you have enjoyed this podcast and you would like to support Retronauts, you can do so for a mere

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This morning, I listened to one. Oh, Diamond will thank you for that. And I want to say, well, at the time of recording, this may no longer be true when you hear this, but there is one of the tiers where you can set the topic of a Retronauts episode which per six-month subbed is now available.

So get in there, and you can force us to talk about your favorite, terrible game that sucks. We have to do it. We're legally obligated. So, yeah, thanks very much for listening. Thank you very much for joining me. May I add a final opinion quickly? Oh, yes, absolutely. One final opinion.

So one thing I would say, this episode right now, was maybe the best British-German corporation since the Otifans games on 16-bit days. So that's something. And stay tuned for the Otefants episode of Retron Oswald. We will talk about the master system version of Otefants. Excellent. That's the only one that I played. It's the only good one. It's all the best one.

Yeah. And I'd like to leave you all with a final opinion, too. I don't think that the Lord of the Rings is that good of a book. Sorry, I just don't think it's that well-written. All right, cheers. Thanks, everyone. Take care. Bye.

Bye-bye. Oh, oh. Oh. You know,