Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

Oh, this is nice. Gus properly “episodified” Tomb Rabbit and gave it an Episode File (so it shows up in the episode selection menu) and an opening cinematic. The episode file is quite nice, especially the logo, though I wonder why it’s placed in-between Jazz In Time and Flashback. Starting the episode starts the opening cinematic.

While it is essentially just a level, Gus took some measures to make sure it didn’t appear as such, and I must admit that it works really well. The palette of the tileset the level uses was altered in such a way that all HUD elements (such as the score indicator) are hidden, as well as the giant beam of light that usually follows Jazz while moving. This left me puzzled for a while and I only noticed it when the level ended and the reflection of the spinning diamonds was still there. Really clever.

The cinematic itself is, while short, quite nice. It’s not perfectly centered on the screen (which I suppose it was meant to be) but does look like a short movie clip rather than some clever parallax scrolling trickery and works well enough.

The upload also includes a patched version of the tileset used for the Tomb Rabbit credits, which also removes the score indicator and the rest of the HUD. As the author notes in the readme, it has some problems though (the tileset looks worse due to the limited amount of colors available and the enemies which were originally in it aren’t visible anymore). Still, I think it’s a nice addition, and it’s of course optional.

All in all, yet another refreshing and interesting upload from Gus, and certainly worth downloading alongside the original Tomb Rabbit. Keep up the good work!