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Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy Developer: Naughty Dog Based on: Every other platformer from the previous generation, except, sadly, Mario 64. |
Games are delicate things, although you might not have gotten that impression from the surly men staring out of the boxes. One small change can be the difference between a poor game and a great one. Any developer will tell you that games really start to come together at the end of the project, when all the pieces are in place and the only work left to do is polish; many games have succeeded or failed based on the milliseconds that the jump animation runs, or the placements of obstacles in a level.
Take Crash Bandicoot, for example. By the founders' own admission, Naughty Dog was conceived as a ripoff studio, content to let other companies do the R&D, leaving Naughty Dog to make pretty clones and suck up the cash of people wanting more of the same, or even people wanting kind of the same but with some of the rough edges sanded off. However, they took a bit of a shift in direction after attracting the attention of industry star Mark Cerny (he of Marble Madness and Sonic 2 fame), and started work on an original character-based platformer for the PlayStation. Naughty Dog couldn't easily reproduce Mario on the PlayStation: the original controller had no analog stick, making a decent Mario 64 clone difficult (although this didn't stop Insomniac from having a crack), and Sony wanted to differentiate themselves from the 16-bit consoles and were rejecting 2D games during the system's early days, ruling out Mario's pre-N64 adventures. Originality was required. What Cerny and Naughty Dog came up with was a small change: still kind of a 3D platformer, but on rails, moving from one end of a linear path to the other, and with a cunningly-disguised grid based design to work with the clumsy d-pad. These small changes gave the game a unique identity, and elevated it above the generic platformer it by all rights should have been. Somehow, the clone developers had an original hit on their hands.
I certainly wouldn't be flinging myself off cliffs if I lived in a world with draw distances like that.
Naughty Dog was eventually bought by Sony, and the Crash Bandicoot license sold off to its publisher, Vivendi Universal (who ran it into the ground in short order). It's with Sony that they started work on a new franchise - a 3D platformer for the analog stick equipped PlayStation 2. Naughty Dog, by this point, had earned a reputation for quality, and so they'd been able to attract impressive talent for their new franchise, Jak and Daxter. Jak and Daxter's standout feature was its seamless world - the opening areas are all along one stretch of coastline, built to ensure players can see the hub and the other levels as often as possible. This is tricky to pull off: developers can't put objects out too far from the camera, and if they try, the object starts to warp from rounding errors that start to creep in due to the way computers handle large numbers. Naughty Dog's solution was to build two sets of levels. The second set is essentially a simplifed scale model of the first, placed behind the regular level. If the game moved the smaller model at the right speed, it'd give the illusion of being joined to the regular-size level. So long as they carefully disguised the transition between the two, no-one would notice the smaller one was a fake. This technique was certainly doable - it had been used to draw the sky ever since Unreal - but it hadn't occured to many people that you could draw something other than sky. Doing it without ever throwing up a loading screen was even more impressive.
The premise of the game is reasonably straightforward: it's a Lost Technology kind of world -- an excellent excuse for having a fantasy world with big fancy machines. The game's unique in that it mostly rejects the traditional 'fire world', 'ice world' settings in favour of something a little more natural: the game mostly takes place on the coast, and the levels are both very pretty and appropriate for the places one would find driving up the coast - wide, sweeping beaches; marshlands; islands; cliffsides. Naughty Dog probably also should be given points for including a farm in the village at the start of the game - it's fairly rare to find game developers (or fantasy authors) thinking about what food their characters eat and where it'd grow. It's only towards the end of the game that we start taking a dive into video game geography - although the interstitial vehicle segments are frequent offenders of the 'it's fantasy, so we can throw in any stuff we want!' syndrome. (One is unlikely to find volcanic rifts near the beach, for instance.) All in all, though, it's a vivid setting that allows for plenty of flights of fantasy by the artists, such as the giant Precursor buildings many of the levels incorporate, and plenty of places they could have taken the series for future installments.
Is combining ancient ruins and high technology cliché? If so, Earth is just that little more awesome.
The characters are a little bit less well drawn - Jak is your typical silent protagonist, back when silent protagonists were accepted instead of resented somewhat as they are now. His companion, Daxter, is described by the game's packaging as 'obnoxious', which is really doing a disservice to Daxter, who mocks you when you die in the process of saving him. However, Daxter provides the drive for the game's plot, as at the start of the game he falls into a poorly-signposted vat of Dark Eco, the game's MacGuffin, and the drive of the plot is to restore him back to humanoid. Of course, by the halfway point you'll likely prefer to make a fur hat out of him than bring him back to 'normal'. It doesn't help that the Green Sage, the character who tells you where to go, would be very much improved by joining Daxter in shark-infested waters: half the game's cutscenes are Daxter and the Green Sage sniping and bickering at each other like reality TV stars in a pathetic attempt to be funny. The only bright spot here is Keira -- sure, she's female in a video game and so she has boobs out to here, but out of all the characters, she's probably the most developed. She barely notices Daxter's clumsy advances as she tinkers with machines (that is, she is a female character not defined as the token girl doing the video game version of token girly things like dating guys and wearing skimpy clothing, thank god), and when she's in the cutscene the Green Sage calms down and becomes tolerable.
She must be an accident.
Meet over a dozen obnoxious characters!
For all its graphical pizazz, however, something about Jak and Daxter doesn't quite... click. While each of the level is pretty, pleasantly open, and pitched at a forgiving difficulty level, for the most part you're running around collecting doodads. Disappointingly few games copied Mario 64's explicit telegraphing of each goal, so for the most part in Jak and Daxter you're running around collecting pointless doodads looking for where the game might have hidden the Power Cells you're after. Calling them 'pointless' is not a flippant dismissal - every one can be turned in somewhere for Power Cells, and so they could easily be removed and replaced with more Power Cells in each level without losing much of the gameplay. What's worse, the compulsory driving segments takes away nearly all of the game's selling points in one fell swoop -- the game boasts remarkable draw distances, which you can't appreciate because the racing segments take place in narrow, twisty gorges, with vividly designed levels, which are totally missing during the driving segments.
Ratchet & Clank and Sly Cooper, the other platformer franchises on the Playstation 2, are inventive mashups of other genres that stay fresh due to great art direction, funny, well-acted scripts and unique gameplay. Because Jak ultimately doesn't bring anything new to the table, it's easier to compare it to Rare platformers from the N64 than its contemporaries - and raises the question of whether Naughty Dog really transcended their old rip-off roots.
It's pretty looking, but where the hell do you actually go? That windmill is, sadly, only decoration.
Case in point: the sequel to Jak and Daxter, Jak II, which traded the genuinely charming pre-technological fantasy world for a post-apocalyptic dystopia, cramming in a 'dark' storyline (very much in vogue at the time) and a truly terrible GTA clone for the hub. Many players thought the newly extreme!!!-ised storyline was responsible for making all the characters unsympathetic jerks, but in fact Naughty Dog had kept the characterisation consistent with the previous game. Nearly every main character in Jak and Daxter was extremely unpleasant to each other; the only addition to the mix was the game pointing at itself and telling you that it was being cool now. One small change, and what you get can turn out very different.
Jak I contained similar poorly-thought-out segments to Jak II's GTA hub, but they were few and far between, and it was clear the lion's share of the time had been put into the platforming that made up the bulk of the gameplay, and the driving segments had at least been built on the Crash Team Racing code. Jak II's hub world was by definition fairly central to the game, and so the lack of work put into the handling of this part of the game as opposed to the generally pretty good, if overly difficult, levels was much more noticable. Again, repeating history: Crash 3's gimmick levels were at best diversions from the main platforming, and not as challenging (biplane), interesting (racing) or enjoyable (jetski). Crash 3 mostly got a pass thanks to the variety the gimmick levels added, the Crash formula having worn a bit thin by that point -- but like Jak II, this was development time that would have been better spent making the core mechanic more interesting.
From the sounds of things, Naughty Dog's latest, Uncharted, is something of a cross of Tomb Raider and Gears of War. This is the rebooted Tomb Raider we're talking about, the one that stole its climbing mechanics from Prince of Persia -- who lifted them from Ico. It sounds like Naughty Dog's not entirely let go of its past -- but maybe putting cover into a Tomb Raider clone, one small change, is just enough.