Jak 3 on May 14th

I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to try a hand again at playing Mega Man X or return to Jak 3. So I decided to play Mega Man X. Huh. Big mistake.

Well, it wasn’t really a mistake. It helped me to realize how out-of-practice I became for not even touching MMX for at least two weeks. There’s a slight delay on X’s jumps because of the new TV set. Plus, I was stuck in the same frustrating area for more than a half hour. My thumb got tired from all that jumping I had X do. I knew it was too late to go forward, so I made the decision to return to that game in a few days. Ultimately I put the Jak 3 disc in the PS2 and went with that.

In a nutshell, here are the missions I did:

• Blow Open Tower Door 

• Destroy MetalHead Tower 

• Reach Catacombs via Palace Ruins 

• Break Through Ruins   (still in progress)

In the mission where Jak had to reach the catacombs, he was all the way on the other side of Haven City, so he had to use one of those hover cars. I almost forgot that this game has First-Person view for flying cars, so I tried that out as Jak made his way there. It was soooo cool, but dizzying. It was nighttime in Haven City, and since some areas were dark I kept losing control of the flying car. The picture kept moving from side to side. Ugh, that was an experience. But anyway, yeah.

In the “Blow Open Tower Door” mission, there were Dark Precursor creatures waiting for him. These are the enemies that put up shields for themselves. I kept using the Yellow Mod weapon to take them down; I even resorted to the Gyro-Blaster, which takes up so much ammo. Jak still got taken down by the bastards. It took me some time but, I remembered that I had to have Jak use the Peace Maker Mod to destroy those shielded dark creatures. The Peace Maker even broke through their shields, and the attack spreads to other nearby enemies, and if I’m lucky, I get one or two units of ammo back from them.

This is where I got stuck. I would’ve played past this mission if it wasn’t filled with so many obstacles. The “Break Through Ruins” mission features Damas as Jak’s partner for this task. He has to drive the buggy through rough terrain and break through barriers and disable force fields by crashing into their, uh, pillars of power? It’s not a very easy mission because during the whole time, something is firing hot boulders at Damas’ buggy. There is a sound I hear when it launches, and a second sound (plus a red target mark) when it is about to crash to the surface. Sometimes I get stuck, and as I’m TRYING to turn around or back up, the red target mark shines on the car and I cannot get away from it in time. Along with watching out for those things, there are the shielded dark creatures and the flying Dark Precursor creatures with wings, and they shoot at the buggy and damage it damn good. Luckily, Damas’ buggy has a small turret gun that can shoot those things and preserve the buggy for a little longer before more creatures appear.

I think I reached the last force field, but there are four pillars located in different areas, and it took much trial and error to figure out what the best order was for destroying them. At one point I got three of them and the very last one in front of the force field) was left. . I only had a sliver of the health gauge full. But a launched boulder got Jak. Godd----t.

I cheered up by watching several scenes from the Scene Player Act 2. A lot of those had Torn. Whatever happened to "Hello, Jak"? Torn just goes up to Jak and says, “Jak, I need you to go to this dangerous place and do this and that. Don’t screw this up.” He’s really a nice guy, is he?

One of my favorite scenes from Jak 3 is…hmmm, this post is getting long enough. Maybe I’ll talk about my favorite scenes from Jak 3 some other time, in the near future.