This is off the insider boards so it will probably be posted later on tonight or earlly tommorrow
The more than I get to play Jak and Daxter, the more and more I fall in love with it. While I was a bit underwhelmed the first time I checked it out at Sony, my love for the game increased a great deal after playing it for an extended amount of time at the Sony Computer Entertainment America pre-show press conference. And after getting to see even more of the game today in a meeting with Naughty Dog\'s Andy Gavin, my respect for the game and Naughty Dog\'s development skills has grown exponentially.
The game has been designed from the ground up for the PlayStation 2 and Naughty Dog is doing a brilliant job of taking advantage of the system\'s strengths and this can be best seen in the game\'s luciously detailed and massively scaled world. The raw size of the world of Jak and Daxter is just so amazingly impressive and larger than anything that we\'ve ever seen before.
If you\'re at a high-point in one area, you can see other places that you were before at a great distance, as there\'s no load screens or seperate areas that aren\'t connected. Everything is connected to each other and there\'s never a time that you\'ll leave one area and then just magically appear in another.
Furthermore, the graphical details that are in the environments are becoming more and more noticable to me. While it just looked colorful and cartoony at first, the quality of the textures and the level of detail has become more apparent. What\'s more, there are tons of animated background elements, such as moving windmills, flying birds or butterflies, or other random moving objects.
And best of all, if there\'s something moving in one area, you can still see it from a distance if you\'re on the top of another building or mountain. For instance, there\'s this odd rotating sphere above this tower that can be seen from just about any other point in the world with a line of sight to it. There are also trees blowing in the wind and birds and other stuff that can also be viewed from anywhere.
Despite having already seen a lot of the game previously, today\'s showing allowed me to even notice a greater variety in the character animation. Not only do the clothes and hair on the characters flow smoothly as they blow in the wind, but there\'s also a ton of extra little character animations that you might not notice at first. For one, after the spin move, Daxter will sometimes grab onto Jak\'s hair to keep him from flying off. This animation is super smooth and just looks pretty damn impressive. And as said many times previously, all of the different character animations flow together perfectly with not a hint of a missing keyframe.
Moving onward, it\'s the feeling of really being in a large and fully realized world that has really grown on me the mose. And this is pushed even further along by the way that the puzzles, or tasks, have been setup. Players will either get asked to do something by one of the many townspeople, who all have voice and are ridiculously animated, or have to figure out what to do by themselves. And the tasks aren\'t just some linear puzzle that must be done in a specific order, as players can do them whenever they can get to a certain area or whenever they simply choose to try and accomplish the feat.
Likewise, many of the tasks are done in a realtime fashion where you can complete part of a task, leave the area and do parts of other tasks and come back to the first one and finish it off without. And the tasks themselves are pretty varied and will have the player do a wide variety of things, some obvious and others not so out in the open.
For one, there\'s this one particular task happens after Jak enters this area in the Misty world where the Lurkers (bad guys for those that haven\'t been following the game), are mining some Dark Eco with these flying ships (which have tons of moving parts and animated Lurkers piloting them). The player must realized that he needs to jump onto a nearby A-Grab Zoomer (one of the game\'s two main controllable vehicles) and use it to destry the different Lurker vehicles. And if you\'re halfway through and wish to stop and get back to it later, the ships that you have destroyed won\'t just magically re-appear.
There are also plenty of classic platform stuff like jumping over or ducking under bouncing logs, or jumping over moving platforms, or similar stuff that you\'d find in a game of this type. The thing that really helps Jak and Jackster stand out is that Naughty Dog has done such a wonderful job of keeping the different elements varied and feeling fresh.
We haven\'t discusse it yet and I still have to see more of the other games at the show, but if I were to choose the E3 Game of the Show right now, Jak and Daxter would definitely be one of the titles under consideration.
-- Dave Zdyrko
