Jazz2Online News

JCS Awards 2025

PurpleJazz — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 20:45:00 +0000

Now’s the time to vote for your favourite levels, tilesets and authors from the last year!

Please see the JCF thread for details. Use the Google Form to cast your votes or check out the JCF thread for additional options.

Voting closes on 8th March at 23:59 GMT+1.

Happy voting!

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Jazz Jackrabbit 1 Review Copy

Violet CLM — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 19:01:00 +0000

Jazz 2 has four known betas, and the gaming world was rocked in late 2024 by the release of Arjan’s original engine that became Jazz 1, but we’ve never had an unfinished version of Jazz 1 that actually includes Jazz… until now. Version 0.9.

Ian Nemec found a floppy labeled “JAZZ JACKRABBIT Confidential copy for reviewers,” and decided to put it on archive.org. He was then very generous with his time and resources when I emailed him for help getting the files and asking his permission to release them to J2O. Here’s Ian’s story in his own words:

So I remember Jazz Jackrabbit when I got a demo disk for it on my freshly built 486 back when I was 11. I played the heck out of that demo that I think I got free from a visit to the Palo Alto Frys when visiting my uncle. I didnt get the full version until several months later and I played through it quite a few times. When growing up I didnt have consoles I got PC games and components instead, so for me it was the closest to being Sonic the Hedgehog, but with a gun.

I found this review copy while working as an IT for a newspaper group in Livingston, Montana of all places. It was among a pile of ancient photo backup floppies for whatever reason. I snagged it and grabbed a trusty USB to floppy drive and had to wrestle it off of the aging disk. I finally got a clean copy when I dusted off an old Dell XPS laptop I had laying around still running windows 7, 10 and 11 right refused to copy it in its entirety.

You can download the Reviewer Copy here and run it just like your other DOS games, e.g. by modifying an existing DOSBox shortcut, or play it online if you don’t want to look at the individual files.

I’ve also created a JCF thread for listing differences between 0.9 and 1.0. Don’t read if you don’t want to be spoiled before playing!

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New album, "Tubelectric Guitar: A Tribute to Jazz Jackrabbit 2"

Violet CLM — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 18:51:00 +0000

A new album of Jazz 2 covers has just dropped on Bandcamp, with 26 songs!

Despite the “Tubelectric Guitar” album name, other instruments include bass, keyboard, and drums. It appears to be mostly the work of JCF user OmriLahav, who has been working on these songs for over a decade.

Unlike most Jazz fan works, this is a commercial release. The credits site notes that “Materia Collective takes great care to ensure that all cover song recordings are licensed and in full compliance with applicable laws,” and a preview yesterday noted that Alexander Brandon has provided “incredible support in this process.”

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Jazz Twosday: JJ2+ v6.6

Violet CLM — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 20:25:00 +0000

Version 6.6 of JJ2+ is now available! Today’s the 6th of 2026, what better date could you ask for?

Let’s have a history lesson. Here was the player list (in CTF) in vanilla JJ2:

This was the list from most of JJ2+‘s history. It added a lot of new information, but could be hard to read, with unexplained symbols like “M” and “S” and “A” and “*”. The asterisks were even drawn inconsistently in different gamemodes. It also drew “+” next to plus players’ names, which made sense in 2008 when running plus was rare, but is just unnecessary detail in 2026.

Version 6.4 started to tackle the problem of unexplained symbols, and moved the flag icon farther left, to a position consistent across gamemodes, so that it wouldn’t be obscured by other data. However, this led to the list being even more cluttered than before, and sometimes there was a lot of horizontal space between the flag (or other such icons) and the player’s name.

Following extensive community discussion and numerous public test builds, we’re happy to release 6.6 with a focus on being easy to read. The useless “+” symbols are gone; the redundant spectator eyes/scores are gone; the unclear “M” and “A” letters are replaced with graphics and moved to the right where less time-sensitive information goes; spacing is improved everywhere; and flags (and other such icons) are drawn immediately next to player names.

Because JJ2+ used to draw “*” in different positions in different gamemodes, some players may be more comfortable seeing icons on the right side of player names instead, so 6.6 has a new alternate display mode for those players who disable the new “Icons Left of Names” option.

As mentioned, this was the result of a long, very productive discussion in our issues tracker. There are about 90 different open threads at the moment, far more than we can possibly prioritize, so always remember to reply to the threads that have ideas that you want to see added/fixed in future. That’s the only way that JJ2+ developers can know which ideas are important to the community.

You can download 6.6 in-game or in-browser.

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GOG's Ghostly Antics

Violet CLM — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 04:34:00 +0000

GOG has a new “GOG Patrons” program for people to pay them $5/month to aid in good-old-game restoration efforts. Jazz Jackrabbit 2: The Secret Files is the first game you see in the background when you open the page!

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OpenGraph embed support for J2O

Violet CLM — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 00:33:00 +0000

Jazz2Online now has some OpenGraph support for individual downloads, articles, and news posts. When you link to these pages in websites that support OpenGraph—such as Discord, Tumblr, or Facebook—you may now see a link title and description specific to that page, rather than the default J2O description. There’ll even be a thumbnail of the first screenshot if you link to a download with one or more screenshots.

ETA: Snippets now too.

Also, j2pe files (example) are now given proper file previews. Since August 2020, we’ve recommended using the file extension j2pe instead of j2e for new episode files, because vanilla JJ2 crashes if there are too many j2e files. JJ2+ treats j2pe the same as j2e, and now J2O does too.

Thanks stijn for graciously giving me edit access to J2O, allowing me to fix some little issues like these that have built up over the years! I’ll take a look at the Site and Forum Rules, Questions & Feedback forum for more ideas, and maybe post a changelog in there… not every fix is going to be a big enough deal to warrant its own news post.

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Jazz Twosday: JJ2+ v6.5

Violet CLM — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 02:18:49 +0000

Version 6.5 of JJ2+ is now available!

Today’s focus is Overtime. It could often come as a surprise whether overtime was enabled in online multiplayer, so now if you press F9 twice, there’s a new blue “OT” line among all the other advanced HUD info. If that line says “On,” you’ll know that the game will enter overtime if the time runs out and there’s a tie among winning players/teams.

Besides that, the rules have changed in Battle, Team Battle, Pestilence, and Team Battle: if there’s a tie for first place when the time runs out, and overtime is enabled, then the max score during overtime will be two points more than the highest current score. For example, if the max score is 10 but the two leading players only have 5 points when the time runs out, then the max score will be reduced to 7 (5+2) for the overtime period, and this reduced max score will be previewed in blue in the HUD.

(Overtime max score rules have not changed for other gamemodes, but we’re open to ideas.)

These visual changes only apply when both clients and servers are running the current version of JJ2+, 6.5, instead of older versions. We’ve also patched several bugs resulting from up-to-date clients joining older servers, but there are still more out there.

You can download 6.5 in-game or in-browser.

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Jazz Twosday: JJ2+ v6.4

Violet CLM — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 22:35:00 +0000

Version 6.4 of JJ2+ is now available.

6.4 is focused on helping newer players understand JJ2+‘s vast array of multiplayer gamemodes. First, instead of ambiguous * and S symbols next to players’ names, we’ve added a series of graphical icons to signify different possible player states, such as a padlock for jailed players in Jailbreak. Second, the Esc menu now includes a new “Help” option which explains the current gamemode’s rules and objectives, styled after the official JJ2 manual. Mutators may add to or even overwrite the standard Help manual screens to explain their own gameplay, so players won’t have to constantly ask each other for instructions.

In Single Player or Cooperative, the Help option instead explains normal Jazz 2 gameplay and any pickups, objects, or enemies in the current level, based on language from the JJ2 manual and from the Prima strategy guide.

Finally, we’ve implemented a temporary alternate logo in the menu system to commemorate Burger, who ported Jazz Jackrabbit 2 to Macintosh computers in 1999, who died yesterday.

You can download 6.4 in-game or in-browser.

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Rebecca "Burger Becky" Heineman dies of cancer

Violet CLM — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 02:14:53 +0000

On February 4th, 1999, Jazz Jackrabbit 2 was released as a native port to Macintosh computers. It ran with remarkable fidelity to the original version of the game, albeit with a few different cheat codes and without .j2b files. This was the work of Burger, a master game porter and developer, who continued to lead numerous important gaming projects in the decades thereafter. (And also write a webcomic.)

Burger is one theory for why we have a few files of the Jazz 2 source code, which has helped both JJ2+ developers and AngelScript coders. She kept the source to all her projects, and would occasionally leak some files to small groups of fans, like for the Myth series.

In early October this year, Becky was diagnosed with cancer. Based on reports from several of her friends on social media, after several days of intense pain and a grim conversation with her doctor, Becky passed away a few hours ago. We thank her for her service to Jazz Jackrabbit 2 and to the broader gaming community.

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Jazz Twosday: JJ2+ v6.3

Violet CLM — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 04:08:00 +0000

Version 6.3 of JJ2+ is now available!

We took a break from the near-weekly feature releases to focus on an ongoing community discussion: how players (especially clients) in multiplayer servers should react to bullets shot by other players (especially enemies). We attempted to resolve this issue back in 5.8, without success, but there’s been renewed community interest, so we’ve rewritten the code and notably broken it down into three command settings, not just one.

When a client’s rabbit comes near a bullet, there are three different things that may cause the rabbit to move away from the bullet:

If a client locally thinks that their rabbit is touched by a bullet, and that bullet was shot by an enemy, and the client is not currently blinking, the client will locally launch their rabbit into the air in recognition that they’re about to be injured. Sometimes this results in them moving out of the bullet’s trajectory, so the server does not think the rabbit is ever touched by the bullet, and therefore no damage is ever done. This behavior can be disabled by the new /bulletpush command.
When a client rabbit is injured by a bullet, the client receives two sets of instructions for how far the rabbit should move: significantly upwards, like when a server rabbit or local splitscreen rabbit is shot, or not very far upwards, similar to touching a Hurt event. Based on network timing effects, either of these two instructions may arrive first and so it is largely random which one visibly happens. When /bulletpush is disabled, the new /injuryknockback command lets servers decide which of the two instructions to prioritize.
When a seeker, RF, or TNT bullet (or some custom weapons) explodes near a player, it sends that player flying away from the center of the explosion. Based, again, on network timing effects, this may or may not override either or both of the two instructions mentioned above. Disabling the new /blastknockback command turns off this blast effect for greater consistency across all weapons. Crucially, even when the command is disabled, your own blasts still affect you, so you can still perform RF climbs, TNT jumps, and so on.

This is admittedly very complicated, and we hope the community will be able to identify a preferred solution or two that feel good to all players in all use cases, rather than rely forever on these three separate—yet somewhat related—settings. In the meantime, though, /bulletpush and /blastknockback are both enabled by default, meaning that unless a server deliberately changes either or both settings, gameplay should remain unchanged from 6.2 and earlier. This experimentation is all opt-in.

Also, the above only applies to 6.3 clients in 6.3 servers. 6.3 clients in older servers, as well as older clients in 6.3 servers, will assume the default settings, which is to say, the gameplay from 6.2 and earlier.

Anyway, we also found time in the last couple months to track down some bug reports, targeting oversights from 5.12c, 6.0, and 6.1a. More excitingly, the Race HUD is now even better than in 6.2, especially in the track preview during the pregame.

You can download 6.3 in-game or in-browser

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