Reply To: Thoughts

[Evil Taco]

#10176

Pretty much in agreement with pix et al.

Curiously, even though I’d describe the challenges of this game mostly being “annoyance-based” – limited viewport, fast character but you shouldn’t try to be fast, constantly fire to destroy enemies before you see them so you don’t run into them, fall into spikes/enemies -> look up/down constantly to make sure you don’t … after completing the first episode, the game started to grow on me and I persisted through the six original episodes.

This kind of gameplay sort of wastes its own potential, but it does have its own rhythm and the way it rewards patience, memorization and forethought is kind of satisfying. I didn’t find it super challenging (probably because of patience), but it was challenging enough after the first couple of episodes that I wasn’t bored by it. I think the quality of the levels didn’t drop after the SW episode which I always appreciate. There was also an impressive amount of new stuff sprinkled throughout, such as animations, new kinds of gameplay, level design ideas or new enemies.

The animation is really excellent and probably makes the controls feel much more fun than what they otherwise would be. The music is also great and I’m impressed there is so much of it.

It’s the kind of game I wouldn’t necessarily recommend, but I did find enjoyment out of it. Some of it was a bit nostalgic, but the game has its own niche, a kind of gameplay that is more rare these days as it’s judged “bad” even though it’s just different. Jazz doesn’t execute it perfectly, it especially shoots itself in the foot with the small viewport and the “go fast except don’t” aspect. The generous continues, the level design being pretty fast to go through once you know what to expect, lack of too many annoying precision jumps – these all I certainly appreciated. We’ve seen much worse.

I didn’t play this a lot back in the day, even though I had a 486SX for a long time and really shifted through a lot of shareware games! I wonder if it didn’t really run well on that PC. I don’t remember playing through the SW episode! I remember seeing the game on my friends’ 486DX machines instead. I should give it a try on the old sx some time. I played it on DOSBox Staging which has a _really_ nice, subtle VGA CRT filter.

(Curiously, Jazz Jackrabbit feels like a latter day Amiga platformer, Superfrog for example. Maybe I should try Superfrog again. I bounced (hehe) off it real quick after impulse-buying it from a GOG.com sale.)