Continuing on with PS2 month by playing Ty the Tasmanian Tiger. It's a 3d platformer from early on in the console's life from Krome Studios (bit of a checkered history. Most people remember them from their Spyro entries, or possibly their contributions to the Star Wars and Transformers franchises) and it mimics a lot of things done in Jak & Daxter. To be fair, Jak & Daxter was pretty generic as well...it was mostly notable for its technology (which was AWESOME AS FUCK), but it was still a pretty fun platformer.

Ty deviates from Jak & Daxter in that it doesn't have a streaming world; it follows the more traditional hub-world that splits off into the individual levels that was widely popularized by Super Mario 64 (were there any 3d platformers beforehand that utilized that structure?). Additionally, you have full control of the camera, which isn't really that good of a thing considering how twitchy it is. When it's not being twitchy under manual control, it's being twitchy under automatic control. You never quite get comfortable with controlling it (or at least I haven't and I'm halfway through the game).

If you can get past the camera issues (and subsequent platforming problems caused by the camera), it's actually a decently fun title. If you like collect 'em ups, you'll probably dig it. I'm trying to 100% each of the levels, and for the most part they're pretty fun and meaty. Like Snowball 2 when he's passed out after Joffeman slips him a roofie.

Just curious. I suppose that would explain the clean screenshots.

I wish I had kept a CRT for my older consoles. Playing on an HD LCD isn't all that bad, but the otherwise nice graphics really get muddied by the upscaling.

Dolphin has been getting all of the love recently because of how much it showcases the beauty of some Gamecube and Wii games, but I've had much better results for playability and compatibility with PCSX2. The GC Ty games are pretty broken in Dolphin, for example. :(


Both emulators are under heavy active development right now with fresh builds being posted on emucr all the time. Pretty awesome stuff.

Now if only the Xbox would finally get emulated so we could all play Rallisport Challenge 2 and Metal Wolf Chaos on our PCs. :(

> Just curious. I suppose that would explain the clean screenshots.
>
> I wish I had kept a CRT for my older consoles. Playing on an HD LCD isn't all
> that bad, but the otherwise nice graphics really get muddied by the upscaling.
>

DICE needs to take a break from churning out Battlefield sequels one after another and get on producing Rallisport Challenge 3 for the 360

-nZero

> Dolphin has been getting all of the love recently because of how much it
> showcases the beauty of some Gamecube and Wii games, but I've had much better
> results for playability and compatibility with PCSX2. The GC Ty games are pretty
> broken in Dolphin, for example. :(
>
>
> Both emulators are under heavy active development right now with fresh builds
> being posted on emucr all the time. Pretty awesome stuff.

Yeah, I've played around with PCSX2. My system's a bit below spec unfortunately. I'd love to play some upscaled ICO (unlike every other PS2 game, it looks like ass on the HDTV).