We sure showed Baron Praxis who’s boss. And it’s not him.
Hopefully, there won’t be any fallout from this.
Something we don’t give games from this era enough credit for is how they made use of their very limited resources in order to create the best games they could within reason. While Jak II certainly still holds up quite strongly in the visuals department due to its style, at the time it was quite impressive to get visuals this strong on the PlayStation 2.
While many might not remember these days because of the advent of SSDs on modern game consoles, and Blu-Ray discs capable of holding terabytes of data, back then designers were limited to what could be held on a DVD. Additionally, because we couldn’t download games directly onto HDDs or SSDs on the console, games were limited by the speed at which the disc reader was capable of loading assets into RAM.
As a result, game developers had to use a number of tricks and techniques, from hidden load screens up to and including managing where each individual asset was located on the disc itself, in order to make sure that games could load at reasonable speeds. Optimization was just as important as art and level design.
Something that games of today could stand to learn a lesson from.
Leave a Reply