03-27-2023, 06:26 AM
With a Particular Focus on the Western Successes for the Playstation2.
A good friend of mine recently said that if he could erase the entirety of western culture across the 90s and 2000s he would. Having just spent the last couple of weeks playing through a few of the celebrated high points of 2000s video games for the first time I better understand why. I don't just understand, I feel it in my bones.
This was an era of extraordinary potential. New media technology were finally being developed to the point of high accessibility and new possibilities were emerging all the time. Digital photography, relatively easy to use computers, the internet, electronic a/v devices in everybody's homes. Extraordinary potential.
This is a massive subject. To impose some focus and order I'm going to run a little case study here which I hope will be demonstrative. We're going to look at some American video games. Big expensive professional productions from established developers for the hot new Japanese machine. They had the money, they had the experience, everyone was lining up to spend money, this was a great time for video games.
A friend remembered this specific magazine and tracked down a scan of it to better demonstrate where gaming was at around this time. Very grateful to him. Just look at all the titles lined up on this cover. What an extraordinary time. We've got Devil May Cry, Guilty Gear, Pikmin, Smash Bros, Shenmue, sports, fighting, Star Wars, Monkey Ball, the XBOX, and...
Naughty Dog's Jak & Daxter.
The rest of this opening post will be about this particular game, with the rest on my mind to be covered in posts to come.
I came into this game with a vague notion that weird things were happening in American PS2 games, and that they were bad. I had an Xbox when these games were new. At most I saw pieces at friends' places, and the impressions I got were generally weird and not too good. I was totally enamored with Halo from the moment I was brave enough to try it. Being PC developers Bungie weren't interested in selling to children, their "video games" just blew past "children's media" conventions into pure fully formed notions of masculine cool and I loved it.
The stuff my PS2 friends had though... unwholesome. Unwholesome like tv cartoons and Robert Rodriguez movies.
You know, for the kids.
I always had a problem with this distinctly American cartoon set of sensibilities. This mad collection of grotesque visual memes and flaccid narrative tropes ridden with moralisms and strange untruths which were allowed to establish a relatively unchallenged monopoly over the limited amount of explicitly child oriented mass-reach high production value media which one society could and would produce. Only so many cartoons can be made, and all of them are somehow made by people into closeups of feet, and stories about how friendship and forgiveness is more important than holding willfully unpleasant people accountable for their behaviour.
I don't know how exactly such trends caught on, but they sure as hell weren't organic and popular, since they started to get annihilated as soon as the media landscape expanded and people had access to more options. By the 2000s this process was actually fairly underway. But unevenly and incomplete. Anime influence was everywhere, things were getting sleeker, taking themselves a bit more seriously, some concern was given to actually trying to look cool or nice now and then. But quite often the slim figures and cool stylish edges of anime instead of overriding American cartoon sensibilities, crashed into and merged incoherently with them. The resulting combinations being ugly and American in character. Anime is kind of a recessive element, easily tainted and lost.
Where I'm going here, is that I believe that Jak & Daxter is exactly such a beast.
Look at him. He has massive pointy anime elf ears
A single shoulderpad
But look at these two, and then look at him. The effect is just not cool and sleek. He has the pad, he has the ears, but he also has a rubbery grotesque Toy Story person face, retarded steampunk goggles, and Timon from The Lion King standing on his shoulder. And the hair. The overall effect is not anime, it is a cartoon with random anime touches attached. Despite Naughty Dog's apparent slight aspirations, their protagonist remains a toon.
And you know what?
Despite that, I enjoyed it.
Yes, it's a game, anything which is a game can be fun just on the level of playing. But I liked Jak & Daxter as a cartoon. I went into this thing expecting not to like it, and was very pleasantly surprised. It's actually a charming example of the power of 3D animation to be funny and entertaining to observe. The visual design sensibilities behind the characters are grotesque. As 2D art they're absolutely abhorrent. I genuinely believe that they are the product of spiritual sickness. But in motion certain pieces of this work transcend their innate ugliness and become cartoons. In particular Daxter, the Timon understudy posing above. He steals the show. Not with his speech. He's the only one who talks between the titular characters in this game, and carries most of the game's writing on his back, and it's just not that good. He has typical small neurotic nerdy asshole cartoon sidekick personality. Every line that comes out of his mouth feels like you've already heard it 50 times before. He's a stock character. But where novelty comes in is his animation.
Call me a retard if you want, but I absolutely adored these animations. These are where his existence as a character is justified. This is the original and admirable craftwork Naughty Dog have to offer. This game has moments of genuinely funny and striking implementation of 3D animation. We have plenty of western 3D animated movies made using technology which is technically far superior to what's on display here, but the quality of cartooning has never impressed me like this. Daxter's relatively low fidelity features comically stretch and deform into absurd expressions of pleasure and manic excitement, and he does these little dances which bring his stupid asshole sidekick personality to life in a way which none of his lines are able to. This is a vision which actually works.
Now. As for everything else in this game. Did I enjoy it? Yes. It was not toil. I enjoyed the game. Was it perfect? No. It had serious underlying problems which in this case were bearable due to the vision coming together so well around its simplicity, novelty, and funny animation.
As the magazine article above points out, the thing resembles Crash Bandicoot very strongly. And it has the same shortcomings, that it's all so VIDEO GAME. Why are there crates and barrels? Why am I collecting glowing junk? Because that's what video games are. Shigeru Miyamoto's whims might as well have been carved in stone at the beginning of time to these people. But, in this case it doesn't really matter because it's all just an enjoyable time-passing pleasant brain-buzz activity to get to more funny dancing from Daxter. And the game has the decency to not be technically demanding and mostly be set in pretty tropical locales. Blue skies, green flora, golden sand, I'm having a good time.
The amount of totemic VIDEO GAME conventions on display at once is almost a joke, but the level of craft is high, the aesthetic sensibilities are mostly bearable to good, and the cartoon vision at the core remains pleasing. Daxter's animations as he rides Jak's shoulder in all of these different situations remain funny to me. From clinging on for life at high spends to casually leaning against Jak like a post when you stop moving, it's great. The game is always a cartoon thanks to his presence. He's not just present, he's a character. And he imbues every moment of the game with character.
So what's good? It's a cartoon game that successfully achieves the appeal of cartooning in 3D. It has nice virtual spaces to look at and the way you move through them and what you do as you go is all simple and well realised enough to pass the time and serve as a frame for the cartoon.
What's not so good? Slavish devotion to video game convention, and American toon design sensibilities. What do I mean by that?
Here's your first image in the game. "Look, we made a cool handsome elf like Legend of Zelda? Isn't that a fun change for a cartoon? What do you mean something feels wrong? What could you possibly mean?"
(This is cropped from an official render)
Okay, Jak doesn't wear shoes. Not the end of the world. Let's continue.
Good God when I came across this I had to share my thoughts with some people. Which thought in particular? That this is a Nutshack character.
The log on the head, the goofy glasses, aren't you laughing? It's all for the kids. They made this so you'd laugh. Aren't you amused? Well at least we don't have to see his-
Other thought, which will become far more relevant in the sequels, how wrong the "sexy babes" look in these games. We can come back to that point when talking about worse games, when I'm in a worse mood.
So we're in a nice looking beach world, but our quest is framed by the fact we have to do jobs for retards who look like this.
"The Mayor", because our beachfront village of ten people has a corrupt retarded steampunk mayor who looks like this. Why wouldn't it? Why wouldn't he have grotesque exposed feet? Why wouldn't he be written to be as annoying and unpleasant as possible while also having complete power over you? It's for the kids. Aren't you amused? Aren't you having fun?
This game was utterly fascinating to me because so much of it was so well crafted, there was enough of a binding vision to hold the whole thing together, but at the same time as they got so much of it, they got so much of it so utterly 180 degrees WRONG in ways which were completely avoidable. Ways which Americans doing anything cartoon, illustration, or animation, or youth adjacent seemingly COULD NOT STOP DOING.
Sorry, I wanted this to be my positive post. Don't get the wrong idea, I actually greatly enjoyed Jak & Daxter: The Precursor Legacy. I wanted to be generous with my positive comments while I still see things to praise in the subject matter. There are only some visible problems now with something which otherwise fundamentally, but the situation is about to develop...
Last particular thought here. A man has been brought to my attention. Possibly the most influential cultural figure behind American aesthetic taste nobody has ever heard of. How many of you are familiar with Joe Madureira? In 1998 he started drawing a comic called Battle Chasers.
Surely none of you have seen Battle Chasers before. But how many things have you seen which look like this? The giant pauldrons, the huge gloves and boots with the folded tops, giant buckles snarling wolfman, metal steampunk hulk. He's practically got the starting cast of League of Legends laid out here, among a thousand other inexplicably popular things. All of this weird 2000s grotesque feels like it's orbiting around some kind of two digit IQ brown person collection of heroic ideals which Madureira somehow tapped directly into when he drew this.
Many more posts to come. My war against the 2000s is only just beginning.
A good friend of mine recently said that if he could erase the entirety of western culture across the 90s and 2000s he would. Having just spent the last couple of weeks playing through a few of the celebrated high points of 2000s video games for the first time I better understand why. I don't just understand, I feel it in my bones.
This was an era of extraordinary potential. New media technology were finally being developed to the point of high accessibility and new possibilities were emerging all the time. Digital photography, relatively easy to use computers, the internet, electronic a/v devices in everybody's homes. Extraordinary potential.
This is a massive subject. To impose some focus and order I'm going to run a little case study here which I hope will be demonstrative. We're going to look at some American video games. Big expensive professional productions from established developers for the hot new Japanese machine. They had the money, they had the experience, everyone was lining up to spend money, this was a great time for video games.
A friend remembered this specific magazine and tracked down a scan of it to better demonstrate where gaming was at around this time. Very grateful to him. Just look at all the titles lined up on this cover. What an extraordinary time. We've got Devil May Cry, Guilty Gear, Pikmin, Smash Bros, Shenmue, sports, fighting, Star Wars, Monkey Ball, the XBOX, and...
Naughty Dog's Jak & Daxter.
The rest of this opening post will be about this particular game, with the rest on my mind to be covered in posts to come.
I came into this game with a vague notion that weird things were happening in American PS2 games, and that they were bad. I had an Xbox when these games were new. At most I saw pieces at friends' places, and the impressions I got were generally weird and not too good. I was totally enamored with Halo from the moment I was brave enough to try it. Being PC developers Bungie weren't interested in selling to children, their "video games" just blew past "children's media" conventions into pure fully formed notions of masculine cool and I loved it.
The stuff my PS2 friends had though... unwholesome. Unwholesome like tv cartoons and Robert Rodriguez movies.
You know, for the kids.
I always had a problem with this distinctly American cartoon set of sensibilities. This mad collection of grotesque visual memes and flaccid narrative tropes ridden with moralisms and strange untruths which were allowed to establish a relatively unchallenged monopoly over the limited amount of explicitly child oriented mass-reach high production value media which one society could and would produce. Only so many cartoons can be made, and all of them are somehow made by people into closeups of feet, and stories about how friendship and forgiveness is more important than holding willfully unpleasant people accountable for their behaviour.
I don't know how exactly such trends caught on, but they sure as hell weren't organic and popular, since they started to get annihilated as soon as the media landscape expanded and people had access to more options. By the 2000s this process was actually fairly underway. But unevenly and incomplete. Anime influence was everywhere, things were getting sleeker, taking themselves a bit more seriously, some concern was given to actually trying to look cool or nice now and then. But quite often the slim figures and cool stylish edges of anime instead of overriding American cartoon sensibilities, crashed into and merged incoherently with them. The resulting combinations being ugly and American in character. Anime is kind of a recessive element, easily tainted and lost.
Where I'm going here, is that I believe that Jak & Daxter is exactly such a beast.
Look at him. He has massive pointy anime elf ears
A single shoulderpad
But look at these two, and then look at him. The effect is just not cool and sleek. He has the pad, he has the ears, but he also has a rubbery grotesque Toy Story person face, retarded steampunk goggles, and Timon from The Lion King standing on his shoulder. And the hair. The overall effect is not anime, it is a cartoon with random anime touches attached. Despite Naughty Dog's apparent slight aspirations, their protagonist remains a toon.
And you know what?
Despite that, I enjoyed it.
Yes, it's a game, anything which is a game can be fun just on the level of playing. But I liked Jak & Daxter as a cartoon. I went into this thing expecting not to like it, and was very pleasantly surprised. It's actually a charming example of the power of 3D animation to be funny and entertaining to observe. The visual design sensibilities behind the characters are grotesque. As 2D art they're absolutely abhorrent. I genuinely believe that they are the product of spiritual sickness. But in motion certain pieces of this work transcend their innate ugliness and become cartoons. In particular Daxter, the Timon understudy posing above. He steals the show. Not with his speech. He's the only one who talks between the titular characters in this game, and carries most of the game's writing on his back, and it's just not that good. He has typical small neurotic nerdy asshole cartoon sidekick personality. Every line that comes out of his mouth feels like you've already heard it 50 times before. He's a stock character. But where novelty comes in is his animation.
Call me a retard if you want, but I absolutely adored these animations. These are where his existence as a character is justified. This is the original and admirable craftwork Naughty Dog have to offer. This game has moments of genuinely funny and striking implementation of 3D animation. We have plenty of western 3D animated movies made using technology which is technically far superior to what's on display here, but the quality of cartooning has never impressed me like this. Daxter's relatively low fidelity features comically stretch and deform into absurd expressions of pleasure and manic excitement, and he does these little dances which bring his stupid asshole sidekick personality to life in a way which none of his lines are able to. This is a vision which actually works.
Now. As for everything else in this game. Did I enjoy it? Yes. It was not toil. I enjoyed the game. Was it perfect? No. It had serious underlying problems which in this case were bearable due to the vision coming together so well around its simplicity, novelty, and funny animation.
As the magazine article above points out, the thing resembles Crash Bandicoot very strongly. And it has the same shortcomings, that it's all so VIDEO GAME. Why are there crates and barrels? Why am I collecting glowing junk? Because that's what video games are. Shigeru Miyamoto's whims might as well have been carved in stone at the beginning of time to these people. But, in this case it doesn't really matter because it's all just an enjoyable time-passing pleasant brain-buzz activity to get to more funny dancing from Daxter. And the game has the decency to not be technically demanding and mostly be set in pretty tropical locales. Blue skies, green flora, golden sand, I'm having a good time.
The amount of totemic VIDEO GAME conventions on display at once is almost a joke, but the level of craft is high, the aesthetic sensibilities are mostly bearable to good, and the cartoon vision at the core remains pleasing. Daxter's animations as he rides Jak's shoulder in all of these different situations remain funny to me. From clinging on for life at high spends to casually leaning against Jak like a post when you stop moving, it's great. The game is always a cartoon thanks to his presence. He's not just present, he's a character. And he imbues every moment of the game with character.
So what's good? It's a cartoon game that successfully achieves the appeal of cartooning in 3D. It has nice virtual spaces to look at and the way you move through them and what you do as you go is all simple and well realised enough to pass the time and serve as a frame for the cartoon.
What's not so good? Slavish devotion to video game convention, and American toon design sensibilities. What do I mean by that?
Here's your first image in the game. "Look, we made a cool handsome elf like Legend of Zelda? Isn't that a fun change for a cartoon? What do you mean something feels wrong? What could you possibly mean?"
(This is cropped from an official render)
Okay, Jak doesn't wear shoes. Not the end of the world. Let's continue.
Good God when I came across this I had to share my thoughts with some people. Which thought in particular? That this is a Nutshack character.
The log on the head, the goofy glasses, aren't you laughing? It's all for the kids. They made this so you'd laugh. Aren't you amused? Well at least we don't have to see his-
Other thought, which will become far more relevant in the sequels, how wrong the "sexy babes" look in these games. We can come back to that point when talking about worse games, when I'm in a worse mood.
So we're in a nice looking beach world, but our quest is framed by the fact we have to do jobs for retards who look like this.
"The Mayor", because our beachfront village of ten people has a corrupt retarded steampunk mayor who looks like this. Why wouldn't it? Why wouldn't he have grotesque exposed feet? Why wouldn't he be written to be as annoying and unpleasant as possible while also having complete power over you? It's for the kids. Aren't you amused? Aren't you having fun?
This game was utterly fascinating to me because so much of it was so well crafted, there was enough of a binding vision to hold the whole thing together, but at the same time as they got so much of it, they got so much of it so utterly 180 degrees WRONG in ways which were completely avoidable. Ways which Americans doing anything cartoon, illustration, or animation, or youth adjacent seemingly COULD NOT STOP DOING.
Sorry, I wanted this to be my positive post. Don't get the wrong idea, I actually greatly enjoyed Jak & Daxter: The Precursor Legacy. I wanted to be generous with my positive comments while I still see things to praise in the subject matter. There are only some visible problems now with something which otherwise fundamentally, but the situation is about to develop...
Last particular thought here. A man has been brought to my attention. Possibly the most influential cultural figure behind American aesthetic taste nobody has ever heard of. How many of you are familiar with Joe Madureira? In 1998 he started drawing a comic called Battle Chasers.
Surely none of you have seen Battle Chasers before. But how many things have you seen which look like this? The giant pauldrons, the huge gloves and boots with the folded tops, giant buckles snarling wolfman, metal steampunk hulk. He's practically got the starting cast of League of Legends laid out here, among a thousand other inexplicably popular things. All of this weird 2000s grotesque feels like it's orbiting around some kind of two digit IQ brown person collection of heroic ideals which Madureira somehow tapped directly into when he drew this.
Many more posts to come. My war against the 2000s is only just beginning.