Thanks for including me on this video! Always lovely to see more people that enjoy playing Jazz Jackrabbit 2. And it was a blast finishing the game together :D. Keep up the great work, I'm looking forward to your next video!
Nice video! Jazz 2 was one of my favorite games from my teen years. I was especially captivated by its music by Alex Brandon! I remember just pausing the game and vibing to awesome tunes like Medival Jam or Lab Rat! The Jazz2 melodic sound influenced my music style later on and making remixes of the Jazz2 OST is an awesome experience for me! 🙂
Early memories: My dad buying the game and installing in on the computer. I was completely amazed. Influence: Much later between 2007-2012 I played it a lot, online, competitively, creating levels. Made one of the most influencial online competitive capture the flag maps called Wicked Wood. It was awesome seeing the map played over a thousand times by different players. It was an overall awesome time. And uploading the content to the jazz2online database. The modding community pushed the boundaries of this great game, i'll always love the creation tools and no other game has ever come close to it for me. Most of the possibilities are fairly recent. The Future: The game still has a lot of potentional, i would love to see more content creators come to this game. In the long future I hope this game gets revived in a great way, for example by developers and modding community working together. That would create the best product with the most passion I feel like. Games like Binding of Isaac Repentance and Sonic Mania have shown it's possible. Hopefully we could get past the limitations of the engine one day and see a remastered/reworked Jazz Jackrabbit game.
I always love hearing people's memories of this game. As for new content, well yeah, there are still enough people interested in making levels within the JJ2 community.
Awesome video Alyxx! Jazz 2 is very special to me it’s the first game me and my dad played together when we got our first PC. I hope it will will still be just as special to me in another 25 years!
Loved the questions! I have so many yet few memories from this game... Like I just "know" it has meant a lot to me, but I couldn't tell people any interesting stories of how or why.
The Only Thing I would change (aside from bigger Tiles, and freeform hardware.accelerated zoom), is Physics. This is in fact a non-trivial Task. Games like Limbo use the Box-2D Engine, but it requires a Vector-based World. Jazz Jackrabbit's Style and Pacing however requires a Tile-based World, so you would either code your own physics-engine or somehow mix it, that you compute Tile-Sprite collisions with your own engine, and pass this collisions as constraint into BOX-2D. I thought a lot about how a Jazz sequel should work, and a selfmade engine would probably be the easiest. In Terms of AI, the Best would probably be a State-Machine programmed with scripts, so you can have the per-stage Custom Enemies like the firsts game, but also remain Moddable. Sprites with Open-GL are also a bit tricky, as Textures must be powers of 2. A Sprite Pipeline could first create the Graphics in a Sprite-Sheet (maybe cell-shadin in Blender ?), load the Sheet in a SPrite-Editor, that edits Hitboxes and Origins, then Compile the Sprite as small Spritesheets that can be used in Open-GL. despite this Problems Hardware-Acceleration should be on the List (in fact Jazz 2 Resurection has it), as free-form Zoom quickly done by the GPU would fix the bad-zoom Problem, that Both Games get critisism for. Of course this is moot as Epic keeps the IP in purgatory.
I know I'm in the minority with this but I'm honestly a huge fan of the Jazz Jackrabbit 3D demo, even if it is kinda scuffed. I really hope it gets finished somehow in some form.
I'll be honest and say I don't even remember if I ever played it. I know I've seen it, but not sure if I ever actually played it. From what I saw, it just seemed like they really struggled finding a way to make Jazz work in 3D, so that may be why it was shelved.
It seriously bothers me that Some companies who used to make games just happened to honor their game's 25th anniversary recently and it was glorious, meanwhile epic is busy huffing paint. I was never even an epic megagames fan, Jill was too clunky for my taste, Xargon was just playable enough for me to like but i only had the shareware so i didnt play it that much, and i also only had Jazz 2's shareware and while i enjoyed that, i have always been an Apogee and ID kid through and through and it still pisses me off how little respect E-pig has for their past. Fuck'em. For letting their own legacy rot, *and* the travesty thats the EGS. Their games deserve better treatment than the storage locker ffs.
Thanks for including me on this video! Always lovely to see more people that enjoy playing Jazz Jackrabbit 2. And it was a blast finishing the game together :D. Keep up the great work, I'm looking forward to your next video!
Thanks for participating! It was a lot of fun!
Nice video!
Jazz 2 was one of my favorite games from my teen years.
I was especially captivated by its music by Alex Brandon!
I remember just pausing the game and vibing to awesome tunes like Medival Jam or Lab Rat!
The Jazz2 melodic sound influenced my music style later on and making remixes of the Jazz2 OST is an awesome experience for me! 🙂
Yeah it might be one of my favourite soundtracks ever.
Thank you for this great retrospective! I never had Jazz Jackrabbit 2, only the first game. There were some interesting details in this video!
Glad you liked it!
Awesome video, well done!!
Early memories: My dad buying the game and installing in on the computer. I was completely amazed.
Influence: Much later between 2007-2012 I played it a lot, online, competitively, creating levels. Made one of the most influencial online competitive capture the flag maps called Wicked Wood. It was awesome seeing the map played over a thousand times by different players. It was an overall awesome time. And uploading the content to the jazz2online database. The modding community pushed the boundaries of this great game, i'll always love the creation tools and no other game has ever come close to it for me. Most of the possibilities are fairly recent.
The Future: The game still has a lot of potentional, i would love to see more content creators come to this game. In the long future I hope this game gets revived in a great way, for example by developers and modding community working together. That would create the best product with the most passion I feel like. Games like Binding of Isaac Repentance and Sonic Mania have shown it's possible. Hopefully we could get past the limitations of the engine one day and see a remastered/reworked Jazz Jackrabbit game.
Thanks a lot! I was wondering when you'd see this as I had you on mind while making it! Stay Jazzy!
I always love hearing people's memories of this game. As for new content, well yeah, there are still enough people interested in making levels within the JJ2 community.
Yeah, for sure!
Awesome video Alyxx! Jazz 2 is very special to me it’s the first game me and my dad played together when we got our first PC. I hope it will will still be just as special to me in another 25 years!
Loved the questions! I have so many yet few memories from this game... Like I just "know" it has meant a lot to me, but I couldn't tell people any interesting stories of how or why.
Which is fine. Sometimes it's enough to say you love a game despite not having much connected to it.
The Only Thing I would change (aside from bigger Tiles, and freeform hardware.accelerated zoom), is Physics.
This is in fact a non-trivial Task. Games like Limbo use the Box-2D Engine, but it requires a Vector-based World. Jazz Jackrabbit's Style and Pacing however requires a Tile-based World, so you would either code your own physics-engine or somehow mix it, that you compute Tile-Sprite collisions with your own engine, and pass this collisions as constraint into BOX-2D.
I thought a lot about how a Jazz sequel should work, and a selfmade engine would probably be the easiest.
In Terms of AI, the Best would probably be a State-Machine programmed with scripts, so you can have the per-stage Custom Enemies like the firsts game, but also remain Moddable.
Sprites with Open-GL are also a bit tricky, as Textures must be powers of 2. A Sprite Pipeline could first create the Graphics in a Sprite-Sheet (maybe cell-shadin in Blender ?), load the Sheet in a SPrite-Editor, that edits Hitboxes and Origins, then Compile the Sprite as small Spritesheets that can be used in Open-GL. despite this Problems Hardware-Acceleration should be on the List (in fact Jazz 2 Resurection has it), as free-form Zoom quickly done by the GPU would fix the bad-zoom Problem, that Both Games get critisism for.
Of course this is moot as Epic keeps the IP in purgatory.
I know I'm in the minority with this but I'm honestly a huge fan of the Jazz Jackrabbit 3D demo, even if it is kinda scuffed. I really hope it gets finished somehow in some form.
I'll be honest and say I don't even remember if I ever played it. I know I've seen it, but not sure if I ever actually played it.
From what I saw, it just seemed like they really struggled finding a way to make Jazz work in 3D, so that may be why it was shelved.
Would Wayforward be too much of a choice for them to make a new Jazz game?
They'd be perfect. I love MVG and his work on Shantae and River City Girls.
It seriously bothers me that Some companies who used to make games just happened to honor their game's 25th anniversary recently and it was glorious, meanwhile epic is busy huffing paint.
I was never even an epic megagames fan, Jill was too clunky for my taste, Xargon was just playable enough for me to like but i only had the shareware so i didnt play it that much, and i also only had Jazz 2's shareware and while i enjoyed that, i have always been an Apogee and ID kid through and through and it still pisses me off how little respect E-pig has for their past.
Fuck'em. For letting their own legacy rot, *and* the travesty thats the EGS.
Their games deserve better treatment than the storage locker ffs.