Jessica

we know it's all gone wrong over at Naughty Dog because they didn't make an Uncharted cart racer after the third game came out

this whips, gonna have to try it out

their (seemingly pretty new) launcher/updater unfortunately doesn’t work in game mode and they don’t really document what arguments it uses to launch each game but I pulled them out by looking at the process list in desktop mode and now I have a native Jak 1 in my steam deck library

it plays pretty well, the first area has basically zero performance troubles on deck, which is pretty impressive for a game optimising around completely different hardware

Misty Island starts to show where the PS2 and modern computers diverge, as it seems to introduce some stutter (I’m guessing due to use of alpha effects, which I’m led to believe we’re cheap like free on PS2 but kinda not on modern PCs). Hopefully it’s something that can be overcome with further optimisations to the decompilation project’s engine and pipeline but it’s a great start

EDIT: oh also it adds subtitles to basically every line of NPC dialog! IIRC later Jak games got steadily more consistent about this (and, you know, the fact that Jak 1 starts with a “press square to toggle subtitles” prompt means they clearly did care) but what a huge win that is on its own!