Okay, so our favorite planeswalker *may* have turned evil, and we *may* have lost as many matches as Ajani has lost marbles, but the night is still young.

We still have a chance to pull out some victories. Maybe we’ll have some better matchups.

Decklist built by me.

Something you’ve no doubt noticed with this deck is that if we can get to 6 or more poison counters through regular gameplay, it’s quite likely that we can close the game out if we draw into enough cards and lands to play our big finishers.

Like a more traditional Infect deck, once our opponent starts to wall up, we need to rely on cards Tyrranax Rex, which can swing in for a surprise Toxic 4, or Planewide Celebration, which can proliferate four times to inflict the remaining counters, to close our match out before they can overtake us. Our other proliferate cards, if we draw enough of them, can also close the gap similarly.

No deck is perfect, and I may lose a lot with it, but it’s a deck I do enjoy piloting in Historic Brawl when the opportunity presents itself. A singleton, non-rotating format is also much more pleasant on my wild cards and wallet, allowing me to remain largely free-to-play.

And because of that, it also allows to stick with Arena long-term.

Alright. Now that I’ve recovered from the baffling title from that last trophy unlock, I think it’s time we finally claim our prize: The Precursor Stone.

Surely, nothing bad will happen.

Congrats to me on yet another notoriously difficult mission completely in one or two tries. Now, if only I could do the same with the far easier missions, like the ones coming up in the next episode.

It’s time for us to open the Tomb of Mar and take the tests of manhood. Will we show enough raw masculinity to count as true Manderville Men, or will we perish under the threat of untold horrors!?

Find out today, in Jak II!

As you can see, only a true manly man can successfully complete a game of concentration. Just ignore the fact that it took me… *looks up Jak II’s release date* …almost 20 years to discover that I was supposed to dive into the electrified water to avoid getting shocked. I’ve somehow beaten this level multiple times despite never knowing that.

We’ve gotten through some of the game’s toughest missions, so let’s take on what’s next.

Next time, we’ll be ready to wrap up Act 2. We’ll be in the last third of the game, so look forward to all of the major revelations in store for us.

In this episode, we tackle some of the most challenging and infamous missions that Jak II has to offer. Many children, playing on their PS2s in 2003, would grow frustrated at these missions.

*gulps*

Isn’t that the way of stream luck? The most difficult challenges are wrapped up in a mere few tries, and the simple tasks on our plate take forever because we miss one critical detail that would totally solve all of our problems.

It just demonstrates that the jet board is the best gameplay addition to the Jak and Daxter formula, and they should have made more use of it.

It’s been a while since we’ve found ourselves back in the Arena, because I’ve had such mixed feelings about it. When talking about how issues with the client with friends of mine, one of them mentioned Historic Brawl as a possible solution. For those familiar with Commander, Historic Brawl is basically their attempt to put 1v1 commander on the client, except that Planeswalkers are also legal commanders.

With that in mind, I could think of no one better suited to lead my deck than my favorite planeswalker: Ajani Goldmane. He’s one of the most virtuous, valiant protectors in all of the multiverse, throwing himself into the fray to keep his friends and allies safe from villains like Phyrexia.

Wait… Ajani? What’s going on? What is that black stuff coming out of your wound? Why does your ultimate give out poison counters!?

Oh…. Oh no.

Decklist built by me.

I wish I could say that this deck had a ton of clever thought and planning that went into it, but I have no interest in lying to you. Basically, I looked through every card in this format in Ajani’s colors that either had Toxic as a mechanic, allow me to Proliferate, or otherwise put poison counters directly onto my opponents, and filter out all the ones I felt didn’t make the cut, and patch it together with a few high-value cards that either destroyed key problems or drew me into the key pieces I needed to keep flying through my deck.

And yet despite this, the deck doesn’t perform terribly. I don’t know if I would call it good, but since so many other decks in the format and looking to stall until they can build up to their 7-10 drop commander, it can snipe people down before they’ve had the chance to come online if we can a good opener.

Unfortunately, as you can see in the examples on display, it also folds almost immediately to anything looking to play at a similar pace. If they can get a few early blockers up, we’re in deep trouble. Hopefully, in the next episode, we’ll get some better luck.

Now that our little stint in the forest has been taken care of, perhaps we’ll learn a bit more about how to get to the Baron’s Palace if we visit our mechanic friend at the race track.

She looks familiar, but I can’t quite put my Keira on it.

Somehow, time had dulled the sense of dread I should have been feeling at starting one of these races. I had completely forgotten how unforgiving they are, especially since even one mistake can be fatal.

It’s almost strange to think that this is the same team that worked on Crash Team Racing, one of my favorite cart racers of all time. I don’t know why they made it so that your zoomer can take damage from bumping into walls, and perform worse as a result. It’s overly punishing when it doesn’t have to be.

Thankfully, Naughty Dog addresses many of the issues with these racing segments when we move into the next game. For now, we’ll just need to bear it.

We’re at the midpoint of this campaign, which means it’s time for the difficulty to start ramping up. Let’s just hope we’re equal to what lies before us.

Ignoring the absolute bullshit that went on with my attempt to use Dark Jak, once I actually figured out the tricks behind this mission in Haven Forest and stopped making so many mistakes, it actually wasn’t so long or difficult to complete it in one go. I only wish that I didn’t have to restart from the very beginning when I died in the middle of it. If I wasn’t playing on stream, having to kill all 30 a second time after dying to the very last enemy I had to kill would be profoundly demoralizing.

Thankfully, the added pressure of doing it for an audience gave me just the kick in the pants I needed to keep going.

At last, we have our Jetboard for the rest of the game. Time to start making use of it.

It’s fun to contrast how fun the Jetboard is to pilot as compared to one of the vehicles all over the city. While it’s not fast as a car, you can actually move at a decent clip once the inertia starts to take over.

More importantly, though, the missions we go on using the Jetboard are generally just more novel and interesting than the “Drive to place and go thing” we’ve been doing a lot of this session. There are navigational challenges that require some skill in order to circumvent rather than just blindly hitting the gas pedal to go forward.

Makes one wish they gave it to us earlier.

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.