Man, I've been missing out on some fun stuff since I started devoting all my time to RPG Maker.

I have about 90 PS2 games, half of which haven't even been opened yet. I remember I bought Jak X for $20 at Best Buy a while back, like so many others in my unopened collection. I was trying to work on my RPG Maker project last night, was feeling really "bleh" about it... I've already played Star Wars Battlefront 2 to death... so I chose this one pretty much at random, tore off the shrinkwrap, and tried it out.

This is a cool game! Race, crash, and blow stuff up! What's not to like? Much like NASCAR, the crashes tend to be more exciting than the racing and shooting. I'll be racing along, and some guy bumps into me, sending me careening off a ramp at just the wrong angle, and my car slams headlong into a wall for a spectacular crash in slo-mo. I accidentally drove off the course, flying off a bridge and into a lake. It was hilarious! I think the funniest thing I did was drive off a ramp with full turbo blaring, and my car went flying into a pit of lava just next to the track. Whoops! Who put that lava there?

The game pauses the action and shows me the crashes and burnouts in spectacular slo-mo. It also does that when I make an impressive kill on another car (or when someone does that to me). We'll be racing along, then Wham!, someone hits me with a missile or machine gun fire, and my car goes flying through the air, losing wheels and body parts. Time for some payback! I get behind someone and let loose with the forward mounted machine guns. Boom! His car flips, goes flying through the air with burning tires, smacking headlong into an overpass. Like I heard the announcer say, "Whoa, that's gotta hurt!"

This game is loads of fun, much like Roadkill, another driving game with forward mounted weapons that I played a few years ago. If there are more games out there as fun as this, I might not have to come back to RPG Maker any time soon.

I have every Jak game except this one. Probably because it's like a racing game instead of adventure.

I don't have any other Jak games.

There is a story and cinematic scenes, but the meat of the game is incredibly fast racing, crashing, and blowing stuff up. I have no idea who the characters are or what their past stories were about. I've just been riding along with it.

Give me pulse pounding action, and I'm there, dude! I tend to lose interest in the Spyro-esque adventure platformers.