Jak of All Trades
We head to Sony HQ to get the lowdown on the Jak & Daxter Collection. Hands-on impressions incoming!
Published: January 23, 2012
Naughty Dog has been churning out the most gorgeous console games this generation with such frequency that it's almost easy to forget they were doing the exact same thing during the PlayStation 2 days. With their run on the PS one coming to a close, founders Jason Rubin and Andy Gavin turned to the PS2, going so far (in Andy's case) as building a completely new in-house coding language, GOAL (Game Oriented Assembly Lisp), to handle the heavy lifting of dealing with the PS2's then-insane hardware architecture.
The results spoke for themselves. While other developers were still wrapping their heads around Ken Kutaragi's EE design, Naughty Dog was putting that hardware to use, cranking out tons of particle effects splayed around a completely open-ended world complete with time of day cycles and the ability to traverse seamlessly between environments. As the series went on, the scale of the interconnected worlds increased, becoming something far more akin to a Grand Theft Auto than their previous railed platforming games. By the time Jak 3 three had hit, the story of an Eco-powered chosen one and his wise-cracking Ottsel buddy had grown to offer free-roaming outdoor environs as well.
Even if GOAL as the underpinning programming language had been expanded with even more Assembly-powered engine work by the time the third game rolled around, Naughty Dog's handiwork was understood best by the team, which shrank as things moved to the PlayStation 3 and the Uncharted series. Andy's crack code work was left as a remnant of the magic the studio had worked on the PS2, and the dozen-plus staffers that remained at the studio moved on to a new base engine.
The PS3 carries with it a myriad of hardware advancements over the PlayStation 2, of course, but despite all those CELL SPUs and zippy RAMBUS RAM, the system itself has a few bottlenecks that even the PS2 didn't, and a completely new architecture necessitated that PS3s with full backwards compatibility actually needed the guts of a PS2 shoved inside. Further revisions eventually stripped out some, then all the PS2 components, and with it the hope of a hardware-based backwards-compatibility solution.
All hope was not lost, however. Despite the gulf of difference in hardware architectures, some studios began work on bespoke emulators that could repurpose the old PS2 code in a way that would hum on the PS3. Developers like Bluepoint Games (God of War Collection, ICO and Shadow of the Colossus Collection and Metal Gear Solid HD Collection) and Sanzaru Games (The Sly Collection) managed to work their magic and remaster PS2 releases for the PS3, but the Jak series was going to need a little more effort.
The results spoke for themselves. While other developers were still wrapping their heads around Ken Kutaragi's EE design, Naughty Dog was putting that hardware to use, cranking out tons of particle effects splayed around a completely open-ended world complete with time of day cycles and the ability to traverse seamlessly between environments. As the series went on, the scale of the interconnected worlds increased, becoming something far more akin to a Grand Theft Auto than their previous railed platforming games. By the time Jak 3 three had hit, the story of an Eco-powered chosen one and his wise-cracking Ottsel buddy had grown to offer free-roaming outdoor environs as well.
Even if GOAL as the underpinning programming language had been expanded with even more Assembly-powered engine work by the time the third game rolled around, Naughty Dog's handiwork was understood best by the team, which shrank as things moved to the PlayStation 3 and the Uncharted series. Andy's crack code work was left as a remnant of the magic the studio had worked on the PS2, and the dozen-plus staffers that remained at the studio moved on to a new base engine.
The PS3 carries with it a myriad of hardware advancements over the PlayStation 2, of course, but despite all those CELL SPUs and zippy RAMBUS RAM, the system itself has a few bottlenecks that even the PS2 didn't, and a completely new architecture necessitated that PS3s with full backwards compatibility actually needed the guts of a PS2 shoved inside. Further revisions eventually stripped out some, then all the PS2 components, and with it the hope of a hardware-based backwards-compatibility solution.
All hope was not lost, however. Despite the gulf of difference in hardware architectures, some studios began work on bespoke emulators that could repurpose the old PS2 code in a way that would hum on the PS3. Developers like Bluepoint Games (God of War Collection, ICO and Shadow of the Colossus Collection and Metal Gear Solid HD Collection) and Sanzaru Games (The Sly Collection) managed to work their magic and remaster PS2 releases for the PS3, but the Jak series was going to need a little more effort.
