Jak 3 is a high-profile game released in late 2004, and therefore it is a sequel. It is OK if you are getting tired of sequels. There are a lot of them around. Many of them are follow-ups to games that weren't even all that hot the first time. Your fatigue is a sane and sensible response. If it is all getting to be too much and the flame you hold for video games is beginning to flicker, you should put this review down and go bake some cookies instead. That will make you feel better, and then you can come back to your PlayStation with fresh eyes and renewed enthusiasm.

See, Jak 3 is a really good game. It is twelve kinds of fun, wrapped up in a cheerful package with dune buggies and a talking weasel. In a vaccum, without its history and without its peers, you would think it was the greatest thing since buttered toast. But this is sequel-happy late 2004, and a year ago we all played Jak II, which offered nearly all the thrills the new one does, and today we are jaded and hungry for novelty and if we don't get some soon we will have to resort to bloodsports or cross-country skiing.

Jak 3 picks up the story where Jak II left off. We star as Jak, a space elf with pointy ears longer than his arms. Jak has been through a lot. At the beginning of Jak II, he spent two years being tortured, a process that also infected him with evil negative space energy and had the side effect of turning him into a sort of space Bruce Banner (a.k.a. The Hulk). Now when he gets upset or angry, he turns all purple and radioactive and gains the power to totally smack his enemies senseless. Also, purple lightning crackles all over the place.

The original game in the series, Jak and Daxter, was a lighthearted romp in classic "platform" style, which is to say that it featured loads of jumping and loads of smashing crates open looking for treasure, and not much in the way of intrigue or heartache. Jak II, with its torture and its dual personalities and its angry space electricity, was a radical change of pace that offered countless new ways to play and induced zero ennui.

Jak II borrowed heavily from the Grand Theft Auto series, with a sprawling city and exciting "missions" and actual car theft. It was familiar characters, older and rougher around the edges but still recognizable, in a fresh experience. It was familiar play mechanics re-worked and re-built into something with the power to surprise. It was everything a sequel ought to be.

Jak 3 is just like Jak II, except that we sometimes get to drive a dune buggy. The jumpy platforming is back, and the big guns are back, and the evil purple space electricity is back. The sprawling city is back. Stealing cars is back. There is a new city here too, and to get around in it we mostly steal giant friendly space lizards instead of cars, but the vibe remains. We have been here before, and we have done this before, and as we play we find ourselves wondering whether all the good ideas have been used up and if all that remains is to tweak them and polish them and re-sell them every year at Christmastime.

None of this will matter to you if you missed Jak and Daxter and Jak II. Approach it with fresh eyes and fresh thumbs, and the game offers countless delights. As you wander through the space desert, jumping across chasms and stealing cars and solving twitchy button-puzzles, racing dune buggies and bursting open crates, switching from one sort of play to another every few minutes, you will revel in the seamless way the thing mixes genres. You will smile. You will feel like you got your money's worth.

But no matter what your background with the series is, you will not like Daxter the talking weasel. You will search and search for a way to make him into desert roadkill. Victory will elude you.