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Experience Jak and Daxter™: The Lost Frontier on PS4 and PS5 enhanced with up-rendering

onQ123

Member
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Dazraell

Member
Literally the worst Jak game. Fuckin hell where’s Daxter
It's probably coming as well so it looks like it's just a matter of time. Looking at their current output, Sony seems to be re-releasing majority of the titles from PS1 / PSP libraries
 

FeralEcho

Member
Why is up-rendering such news here?

It's a psp game on PS5,literally all of them have up rendering to 4k.

Also it's the worst Jak game...
 

StueyDuck

Member
I had never played this on psp back in the day...

I am surprised by just how many modern game sensibilities (that I dislike) are tucked away in this game.

Things like a minimap just filled with icons, unnecessary upgrade or skill trees etc. As a big jak fan of all 3 games I think I'm glad I didn't play this back in the day

Basically modern AAA games are just cheap psp games with graphics 🤣
 

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
What's up-rendering?
Think about rendering the same scene from multiple points by moving the camera frustum by very very tiny increments (jittering) then combining the multiple samples (frames) into one (effectively downsampling AA).

This way you can increase the image quality of the scene, increasing the rendering resolution and downsampling, without affecting the actual rendering pipeline emulation.

HW like PS2 and PSP allowed a lot of down to the metal shenanigans, maths based on where things were located in memory and the size they took, etc… so just increasing buffers size and retro fitting AA may break games and/or make emulation tougher.

Uprendering upends the tea table so to speak, you render the same scene the same way, you just change the camera matrix a tiny bit and re-run the same rendering pipeline. You are transforming more geometry and running the pipeline multiple times which is not free, but the results are good :).
 
When I want to play Jak & Daxter I am playing the real game (the first one) using the still definitive way of playing with the PS3 remaster.

Using the PSP game as a fundation for a cheap PS4 version is insulting. Can't they properly remaster one of their last damn good and original IP?
 

ReBurn

Gold Member
I will buy a PS5 just for this! Reward them for bringing back Jack and Daxter!
You can already buy the PS4 versions of the original Jak & Daxter games and play them on your PS5. Unless they changed the gameplay this particular entry isn't worth the time and money they put into the effort to increase the resolution. It's mediocre at best.
 

Dr. Wilkinson

Gold Member
I remember I was all excited to play this game back on PS2, until I turned it on and realized it a) wasn't fun at all, and b) wasn't made by Naughty Dog.

It was horrible.
 

onQ123

Member
Why is up-rendering such news here?

It's a psp game on PS5,literally all of them have up rendering to 4k.

Also it's the worst Jak game...
Before PS4 Pro was unveiled I said it could be using Up-rendering to take the PS4 games to 4K ( this was before Checkerboard Rendering was announced as the main technique used to reach 4k) and everyone said I was making up words & so on.

Even up to a week ago I was accused of making the word up

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Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
Before PS4 Pro was unveiled I said it could be using Up-rendering to take the PS4 games to 4K ( this was before Checkerboard Rendering was announced as the main technique used to reach 4k) and everyone said I was making up words & so on.

Even up to a week ago I was accused of making the word up

gM0Riv0.png

EUczjkI.png
I do not think you need this for PS4 games BC, but if the game is not well built or built for dynamic resolution it requires just HW grunt to pull it off, not a lot of development needed except by the BC team. A patch to increase resolution by each dev is still the cheapest and most effective solution though.

Uprendering is really something for PS1/PS2/PSP titles.
 

Xyphie

Member
It's literally a PSP game running in an emulator using a higher resolution, imagine thinking "up-rendering" is some new novel idea. We've literally had this feature in emulators for 3D games since at least bleemcast on the Dreamcast which rendered PSX games in 4x higher resolution than the native hardware did.
 

ReBurn

Gold Member
Before PS4 Pro was unveiled I said it could be using Up-rendering to take the PS4 games to 4K ( this was before Checkerboard Rendering was announced as the main technique used to reach 4k) and everyone said I was making up words & so on.

Even up to a week ago I was accused of making the word up

gM0Riv0.png

EUczjkI.png
I wouldn't worry about it. All words are made up.
 

onQ123

Member
I do not think you need this for PS4 games BC, but if the game is not well built or built for dynamic resolution it requires just HW grunt to pull it off, not a lot of development needed except by the BC team. A patch to increase resolution by each dev is still the cheapest and most effective solution though.

Uprendering is really something for PS1/PS2/PSP titles.
Yes it would be more efficient to update PS4 games but doing it at the system level would reach more games .
 

UltimaKilo

Gold Member
You can already buy the PS4 versions of the original Jak & Daxter games and play them on your PS5. Unless they changed the gameplay this particular entry isn't worth the time and money they put into the effort to increase the resolution. It's mediocre at best.

This is the only thing that would have me consider purchasing a PS5 (pro). I’m tired of Sony sitting on excellent IPs. Where is Mark of Kri, SOCOM, Legend of Dragoon, etc.?
 

hinch7

Member
Jesus Christ where is Uncharted: Golden Abyss!?
The only game in the franchise I haven't played due it being on a platform I skipped. Surely they can adapt the controls and port it over without too much hassle. But nope lol, this is SIE.

Also waiting for that BB port/remaster.
 
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CamHostage

Member
Well, I'll defend this game a little bit...

Jak & Daxter: The Lost Frontier was made by High Impact Games in 2009. (This was long after Naughty Dog left the series behind; it was the same year that Uncharted 2 came out. However, Naughty Dog was involved: they apparently started this fourth Jak game internally as a second project alongside the first Uncharted, but the A/B studio structure was difficult to maintain going into the PS3 generation and they abandoned this 4th Jak; eventually High Impact took it over.) It came out on PS2 and PSP, but this emulated version is based on the PSP game. (Sony still hedges on PS2 BC for some reason, there's only like 50 PS2 games on PSN even though they've had versions of emulators going back to PS3.) High Impact made the Ratchet & Clank and Secret Agent Clank PSP games.

Lost Frontier is a canon story which continues the story of the series (but doesn't lead to a conclusion which needs to be seen to complete the saga; instead, this game has a slight cliffhanger/hint ending which probably will never be followed up on.) It introduced "Dark Daxter" gameplay where Daxter gets special abilities from Dark Eco (sort of like "Dark Jak" in 2,) there are a host of side-missions to do in addition to the main quest goals, control is tuned (sort of?) to the limitations of the PSP's single-analog control setup (lots of swing poles to connect gaps for jump-puzzles rather than standard platforming leap challenges,) and has a really cool ship combat system with an impressive-in-its-time engine allowing for a ton of ships and shots to fill the air at a time. It returns to a more colorful Jak 1 style of the world but has Jak 2 shooting, and it's less linear than the previous Daxter PSP game.

...But, I still can't recommend it, from what I remember. The jumping control was off from Jak and just never felt right to me, and the PSP camera control was frustrating. (There is apparently a "Enable Right Stick Remap" feature in the Settings which may help.) Also, the combat scenarios were frustratingly padded out rather than balanced, so those cool ship dogfight/cannon shots were cool the first 5 minutes but then would drag on and on and then repeat a little while later.

I really wanted to like this, especially since (like Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time by Sanzaru Games) this new developer taking over was probably going to be the only chance of this series continuing on. Unfortunately, it wasn't the game it needed to be, and the Jak series was no more after it.

 
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