New York

I'm off to New York early this morning. My sister's graduation is this coming weekend in Connecticut, so I'm going to spend a couple days in the Big Apple beforehand with Antonio, Ahmer and Jesse. On Thursday, I'm hoping to check out ICFF and AT's chair. I may or may not be able to update until I get back next Monday. And I most probably won't be able to make any changes to we::blog until then either...

In the meantime, check out Naughty Dog's trailer for Jack and Daxter... hmmm... or not. It's 20MB for the 320x240 Quicktime video. That seems like a lot. I've got DSL and it's taking forever.

Update: Finally... that was 20MB for 35 seconds of footage?!?!?

Awful trailer

That's was pretty bad. I downloaded the 50meg one. It wasn't that it was 35 seconds that was lame, it was that it showed not one thing that would get anybody interested in the game. A few pans across blurry landscapes that look no better than Klonoa 2 or Rayman, no game play and no view of the character (except for the silhoette at the end). I'm not saying the actual game doesn't look better than those other games but from that trailer there is no way to tell.

On top of which since the views are all distant everything is LODed out and looks blocky and none of the detail shows up. Maybe that's intentional, maybe they don't want anybody to see their detail 5 months early.

And, I hope it's not going to be called Jack and Daxter. That's got to be one of the worst names ever.

Besides, "Jack" would seem like a much harder name to associate stuff with since it's already associated with "Jack" of "Jack-in-the-Box" fame, Jack Sprat, Jack and the beanstock, Jack Off etc. There is no other Sonic, or Crash and there aren't many famous Mario's that I know of but there are lots and lots of Jacks.

No... not "Jack and Daxter"

It's going to be called "Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy". Just rolls of the tongue, huh?

It's pretty lame, but it was the only name that came up that somebody didn't completly hate. The biggest vetoer being our Japanese producer (Shimizu-san for those who know him). Anyway, after some of the super sucky names that nearly stuck I'm not losing any sleep over it anymore.

Besides, you would have had a really hard time convincing me that "Zelda" was a good name.

Seriously???

Boy that name is hard to believe! If the characters are supposed to be comical then it fits better. Are they?

I think I would have enjoyed one continuous bird-cam flight through a level to get the idea of how big and immersive a single level will be.

Of course, I'm a techno geek so the thing I liked the most was Omi's cool flame with heat waves. Of course, it was in CTR too, but had a much less prominent usage in that game.

Better video

Although it's blurry there's much better footage of Jax and Daxter at gamespot