Abahbounce
An abahbounce is a movement technique in Jak II and Jak 3 that can be used to gain much more height than conventional jumping techniques. It is performed by ground pounding into a wall surface and then jumping once Jak's ground pound animation finishes. The left analog stick will need to be in a neutral position and Jak's momentum will need to be near 0 for the bounce to occur.
Tutorial
Technical
An abahbounce is initiated by ground-pounding and colliding with only wall surfaces or slanted obstacle surfaces (effectively the same as wall). Jak should get stuck in the dive part of his animation for a moment, and can slide around if either the surface is uneven or you move the left analog stick. If you collide with any ground or halfpipe surfaces, it will turn into a normal ground pound.
For the abahbounce to work, while stuck in the dive part of the animation, you need to reduce Jak's momentum to nearly 0. On flat surfaces or when stuck in a crack this is pretty trivial, but on slanted surfaces you may need to use the left analog stick to manually reduce Jak's momentum. These are often called sliding abahbounces.
Before Jak finishes the ground pound animation and you press X, you'll need to go neutral on the left analog stick. This is only really a concern for the sliding abahbounces, and there is some timing to it (too early and you'll start sliding, too late and no abahbounce).
As Jak finishes the ground pound animation, you want to press X within a 4-frame window (at 60fps), and you should get an abahbounce. The first two of these four frames - frames 8 and 9 in the target-hit-ground state - yield a bit more height than the other two (and there isn't much difference between frames 10 and 11).
In summary there are 4 key components to the abahbounce:
- Ground pound on slippery surface
- Reduce Jak's momentum to nearly 0
- Neutral left analog stick
- Time your jump
Related to the sliding abahbounces, it's worth noting you can also do abah cancels by continuing to hold the left analog stick while in the dive animation. Jak should get a brief standpoint, from which you can do a regular jump, go first person, etc.
Discovery
This technique was discovered by the speedrunner Abahbob, though it is unknown when or how it was discovered.